I had a dream last night that I was a school teacher. I walked into another teacher’s classroom and on the chalkboard someone had written lines, over and over, like when you get in trouble as a child. I could not read what the lines said. As I was looking at the chalkboard lines, trying to make out what it said, a bombastic little girl bounded in and erased a section across the middle of the words and quickly drew a huge stylized horse and then ran out of the room. I stood there staring at the image and the text and thought “Oh my god, this is perfect.”

This drawing is not perfect like the girl’s drawing, but it is enough to hold the dream in place. Since I couldn’t read the text in the dream, the text in my drawing says “I will not think of a horse” after that thing about how if someone says: Do not imagine a horse, in order for your brain to not imagine a horse it first has to imagine a horse… which makes the whole thing impossible. I think it is a well-known psychological exercise. I just tried to find evidence of it online, but couldn’t, maybe I dreamed that too. I’ve used it in text/image classes for years, and will continue to do so.