I am struck by how we as humans will tend to make up stories about anything we see that’s the slightest bit unusual (at least I do).
While riding my bike one afternoon, for example, I saw a woman walking by the side of the road. Several hundred feet behind her was what looked like a moving truck. My mind instantly made a connection between the two sights: Something had fallen off the truck, and the woman was walking along the side of the road to find it. Or perhaps she was planning to stop at one of the houses along the road to ask directions. The two things probably weren’t connected at all, but my brain wanted to create a story.
That’s a pretty boring, mundane example. The classic has to be one about the dog, Muffie, I had as a pre-teen. The wirehaired fox terrier often ran away from home, and trying to chase her only made her run faster; she was nearly impossible to catch unless you opened a car door. (She loved going for rides in the car and would readily jump into a car when invited.)
Once she ran away to the vicinity of my Uncle John’s house, which was halfway across town. Someone knew whose dog Muffie was and alerted us. My sister Robin happened to need to borrow a saw from Uncle John anyway, so she made the trek to fetch both Muffie and the saw. As Robin returned home with Muffie under one arm and the saw in her other hand, a small child put together a gruesome story:
“Please don’t saw the little doggie in half,” the child pleaded.