A Penny for Your Thoughts

      "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. …
      Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."      -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bits and bytes of information bombard every one of us every day. Each single seed can also be deposited in the minds of millions of other people. Everyone’s thinking is influenced by what is seen, felt, read and observed. We process most information on a subconscious level. It becomes a Dagwood sandwich, wrapped and stowed for later consumption.

In sleep, some of those random thoughts gel into dreams; recent impressions form the scenarios. If aware of it, we can even smell and feel in our dream state which always startles me when I experience it. The devil of it is that when the curtain comes up in the morning, another good dream is obliterated. Poof!

Its impression, most likely, remains in our subconscious. Hence, the reoccurring dream. All these thoughts swirl, lay claim to lockers in our storehouse of a mind. The combination is lost, found, lost again. The bits gather with other bits, form communities of thought.

There is a lot of simmering going on under the surface. And simmering is also going on in the minds of others, too. Even those we have never met may have the same thoughts we do. It explains the scientists on two different continents coming up with the same premise or similar research results. Happens all the time.

"Gee, I thought of that years ago,” a young man laments when he reads of a new discovery. “If only I had acted on it, I would be the one in the newspapers. I would be the one who made millions.”

“He stole my idea.” Ah, no. No, he didn’t. He just was more intrigued than you were about the idea batting around in his head and did something about it. A missed opportunity for one, growth and satisfaction for another.

A penny for your thoughts?