A curiosity

A dream about paying a bill last night. It seems that I had bought an expensive meal - a small number of thousands of pounds - for business purposes and was set to buy another, but I was worried that I was going to break my credit card limit. I needed to make a payment before paying for the second meal.

This seemed to involve all kinds of fiddly paperwork, involving very small writing in ledgers. Or perhaps a worksheet on a computer. Lots of blots and crossings out. Would this invalidate the payment? And making this payment in had got muddled up with all kinds of trivial payments out. I was getting quite anxious about the whole business.

Then as I woke up, the debt morphed into a fancy pen on a fancy desk, the sort of thing that some senior officers used to sport in the days some people actually used fountain pens in the regular way of business. Stationers still sold them, and the ink to go with them. And some of said officers used to fuss about getting exactly the right sort of ink. The image above does not include a fountain pen, but it does give the general idea. And as dreams go, it was a very clear, if fleeting, image.

But the present point is that the debt had morphed into the pen. The pen was the debt. Somehow the bit of the more or less conscious brain which labels the things being imaged had got its wired crossed, and a label - perhaps in the form of a word - had got attached to a more or less inappropriate object. Maybe the idea was that I had become a senior officer and was going to use the fancy pen to write the cheque or whatever it was that was needed to clear the credit card debt.

I have noticed this sort of thing before, but this was a particularly clear example.