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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Last night, the memory of a real thing kept recurring in my dreams as a symbol.
The object? A tin holding various wooden game pieces. The pieces were for a two-sided wooden game board, a large square board with rounded corners. It belonged to my grandfather (Grandpa) but we kept it at our house. On one side was a game called crokinole, which is like miniature curling; on the other side was a checkerboard and maybe some other games (tic-tac-toe? backgammon? I never learned how to play backgammon). In the old tin, there were crokinole pieces (rounded puck shapes, like miniature curling stones) and black and red disks for checkers. There were other game pieces that didn't seem to belong to these games, but were sometimes enlisted to replace missing checkers; I remember a white cylinder with three ridges in it - it seemed a notable shape - and a few marbles of different styles (cat's eye, glittery, opaque).
This odds and ends tin was fascinating and beautiful to me, and I don't know what happened to it. Probably we gave it away with the game board, or one of my uncles got it. Possibly it's still in my parents' organized-but-dusty basement with the craft supplies. I haven't thought to look for it in a long time.
Anyway, in one part of the dream, I was using the extra/unidentified game pieces to make up new games. This was an expression of the moral: "Usually follow the rules, but not always."
In other parts, the tin became a symbol of diversity and acceptance of incomplete sets (possible applications: refugees and math), then of a phrase like "Necessity is the mother of creativity."
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