A lot of odd dreams last night including one in which I came across a quote carved into the sidewalk in, I believe, London. A public art kind of thing. My dream self had heard the quote before, and I'd attributed it to Bill Bryson, the author of “A Walk in the Woods,” but on the sidewalk it was attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien? Really? I thought. Tolkien? 

It was a quote about a medieval period in England in which the rulers were hoping to better educate the public (so right away you know it's a dream), but they couldn't figure out how. The peasants and farmers weren't interested. But it was a somewhat prosperous period, or maybe there were fewer wars or a greater sense of rule of law, because the sheep farms began to grow. The farmers began to get more and more sheep. And as they accrued more and more sheep to their respective farms, they needed to be able to count them all, to keep tracked of what they owned. And that's when they became interested in education—or at least math.

The quote went something like:

They tried to teach them about sheep but they learned arithmetic. 

That quote doesn't quite go with the story above, and in my dream I may have been turning it over to try to make it better. Yes, editing even in my dreams. When I woke up I checked to see if there was such a quote about sheep and arithmetic but couldn't find anything.