The bible of my childhood was the World Book Encyclopedia, 1976 edition. I read almost every entry in its 22 volumes. I was informed about the horrible things that happened in the past and all the wonderful things that would happen in the future. I returned again and again to the encyclopedia's space section, which was vivid and convincing. Accompanying its words were images of commercial rockets, moon bases, and space suburbs drawn by the great Donald E. Davis. What I saw and read was exactly how I thought I would spend much of my adulthood: walking on the moon, breaking in space, doing it on Mars.

But when I arrived in the future (about 15 years ago), I found myself not only on Earth but sobered by the fact that my life would end where it began—in the biosphere of this planet. Then one day in this Earth-imprisoned future, I walked into an exhibit at King Street Station. It's called Giant Steps: Artist Residency on the Moon. It has 50 proposals for lunar artwork. And one of these proposals, #48 by Brandon Aleson and Reilly Donovan, involves placing a complex of pyramids on the surface on the moon. To make this happen, the artists would require a rocket with a 60 kg cargo of 3-D printers and solar power panels. And what would the final work look like?

I placed one of Proposal #48's two wire-suspended Oculus Gear VR headsets over my eyes and found myself in the very place I thought I would be at this moment of my adulthood: I was in a space suit flying over the moon, flying away from the pyramids, flying toward an orbiting spaceship, and looking up at the huge Earth in the moon's sky.

Now, why bring all of this up? Because I have become addicted to this virtual moon world. I could spend hours in it—hours drifting about, hours looking this way and that. The images of Proposal #48 are growing in my mind and have even entered my dreams. And is this addiction to a virtual reality not exactly what happens near the end of Wim Wenders's 1991 sci-fi masterpiece Until the End of the World?

Indeed, the VR headsets in Giant Steps look exactly like the device that the father, Henry Farber (Max von Sydow), of the film's hero, Trevor McPhee (William Hurt), developed initially to record images for his blind wife, Edith (Jeanne Moreau).

This device is at the center of the film, which begins as a global espionage thriller that costars the moody, world-weary, and dreamy Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin, who also starred in Wenders's most famous movie, Wings of Desire). But the second part of Until the End takes place mostly in the Australian desert and concerns the transformation of this device, essentially a camera for the blind, into a dream recorder. It turns out that this second use has a dark side. People become addicted to watching their dreams. They become glued to their screens. In a famous scene, Claire, who can't get enough of her dreams, freaks out when the batteries for her viewer die. Any second-decade 21st-century person who has lost or been without their smartphone for even part of a day understands her suffering.

Until the End, which is set less than 10 years ahead of its time, which is now the past, got a lot of things right about the future. It has the internet, search engines, mini-cameras, and iPad-looking devices blended with a world that, as a whole, doesn't really look that different from the year the film was made (1991) or from much of the second half of the 20th century. Rooms in Until the End are often dingy, lots of cars are old, trains are still slow, late, and bumpy, and clothes look like they have been in and out of fashion several times.

In the encyclopedia of my childhood, everything was to change in the future. The space age would transform and improve transportation, housing, food, and clothes. But here in the actual future—meaning, the now I'm trapped in—I find I'm dressed much the same as the male characters in Until the End (regular button-up shirts, baggy pants, overcoats), I live in a city that looks like the cities the characters visit, and, like Claire, I'm becoming more and more addicted to the dreams in a VR device, while my promised career as a space explorer is now hanging in King Street Station.