I dreamed I was reading a science-fiction story. It was apparently in the form of a patent application, or a news story about a new patent, from somewhere around the turn of the previous century. The narrator was complaining about how stove pipes leak smoke, and extolling the virtues of his new type of pipe. Then came a picture (in the story I was reading) which showed sections of his pipes : They were toilet-paper rolls. And I realised that the narrator had found these modern objects (transported back from our time somehow) but had totally failed to understand what they were for. One of his friends, though, had "begged the loan of one of my pipe sections, saying that it would be sovereign for 'application to the lower part of the back,' in the parlance of the area." I don't remember the exact words (if there were any) but I do recall that the narrator poked fun at this use, and gave it a very short life-time, in the usual way of Victorian writers with a new idea.
The dream then segued into killing an enormous cockroach in the bathroom of my parents' house back in Norway, and not cleaning up the corpse. I woke up knowing my mother would be most annoyed.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)