Take a sunny day for river rafting. It's new every time. In a landscape of dreams it's compelling and probably as sane as Alice's Restaurant. An interstellar trip is unnecessary, though not everyone agrees.

Sanity? Usually it's down to reasonableness, not having conversations with invisible people, such official definitions, but practically it means whether we pretty much think alike. Maybe on a busy raft with preparations, checking paddles and life vests, and no one has checked the current, ventured a toe. But first it's time for a beer. The drought is making everything dry. And those people yelling on the bank, are they just chicken? But here they come. It can't be. They're walking on water? A miracle!

From time to time it gets redefined.

Trees think?

They do send roots in search of water. Birds know where to fly. And bumblebees. It's nothing spooky. Pumpkins grow a sense of humor with the best of us. Searching for gas until Fusion Power comes on line.

Someone is objecting in the back of the raft. What about X-rays? Dark matter, telepathy, precognition?

Bear with us. Those people on the bank? It was no miracle.

Pumpkin time. Think of it as trolls and tribbles, magic mushrooms squashed flat in an electron microscope. Imagine infinity, if possible, the scientific dreadnaught that meta-levels reason. It's nowhere to be found. The great pumpkin is not darkened by matter of any kind. Unscientifically speaking, it's dark matter up the yin/yang.

Now we're moving. Water is the most precious thing, right?

Is that sanity or what?