Convolutions

I had this amazing dream last night. I dreamt I was in class of some sort (totally far removed from my real world...and they say dreams are just consolidated memories!) and the teacher/professeur was Christiane--my lovely French superviser from the clinic. She had just finished up class and upon departing, uttered, "Okay, well, I guess you're all fired home--metaphorically speaking!" As she was leaving, we all sort of looked at one another dumfounded, and I exclaimed, "That doesn't make any sense. 'Fired home?'" Another student (a friend by the name of Max from high school) said, "Well, she just never makes any sense." He didn't realize she had forgotten something from the classroom and was coming back at that very moment, so she overheard him. We all sort of downplayed Max's comment and just admitted we were confused by her little expression. So she explained that back in her village, whenever an employer wanted to fire an employee, it was required that he/she go to that persons house to do it, and this fact lead to the expression "fired home" which basically just means "you're dismissed." Okay, so my dreams are not terribly exciting, but what I found so cool about it (as Ozzie pointed out) was that my own brain manufactured something it (my brain) did not understand and then explained it to itself! Isn't that weird? How could I not have understood what "fired home" meant or at least heard it as a familiar phrase when my own brain had just manufactured it? And then--to repeat myself--my brain decided to clear up the misunderstanding that it had just created by creating an entire context for the expression that it did not understand. Those are some levels of metacognition, and I feel I had nothing to do with it. I was just an outside (yet inside) observer to the intricate (and bizarre) workings of my own brain.