word play

Last night I dreamed I was in a classroom, sitting at a wooden desk in the front row, toward the right hand side of the room. There were a few other people in the class, seated at the back on the same side of the room. We asked the teacher to teach us something of words. He wrote the word SPICE in capital letters with white chalk on the blackboard at the front of the room. He wrote it in such a way as to disguise the word: the letters undulated and there were other added lines around each letter, like the patterns of bark. The idea was to recognise the word, to read it though it was camouflaged by pattern. He then drew a picture of a head that had a few sets of eyes and had what looked like three hives growing from the face. Insects (bees or wasps) buzzed around the head. It was a pun on the word HIVES, which he wrote in capitals next to the drawing; the person had hives.

[There would have been nothing remarkable in this, but today I was looking at Qweekend, the colour magazine included with The Courier Mail, and there was a cartoon by Storti depicting just that: a man at a doctor’s surgery with a hive for a head and some bees flying around his head/hive. The doctor said, “The bees are nothing to worry about. They’re just one of the symptoms that tell me you’ve got hives.” Why why why? Is it just coincidence or a dream of significance; and if significant – how?]