It's as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around.
When storing Renaissance oil paintings, museums conform to standards that call for careful control of the surrounding temperature and humidity, with variations confined within narrow margins.
But when it wants to blend in with its environment to hide from its enemies, it can take on the color of its immediate surroundings: the ocean floor, a rock, a piece of coral, whatever.
The theory of personal intelligence explains how people define and apply traits to those around them, how they evaluate their coworkers' plans, and their reputations.
At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter's eye for transcribing the life around him especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines.