Last night I dreamed that I attended an event where someone was selling tickets for a charity raffle before the event got underway. Each ticket was 25 dollars. I opened my wallet to see if I had that amount and discovered that I had a lot of small bills, some in odd denominations that don’t exist in real life. It all seemed perfectly normal, though. I was looking at a 12-dollar bill and a 15-dollar bill, while trying to work out how to put one of them together with smaller bills to add up to the correct amount.

Before I went to sleep I’d been thinking about how much our perspective on life changes as the years go by and we gain more insight. I suppose the dream must have been a variation on that theme, illustrating how many different things can add up to a prosperous life—even things that might never have existed in the past, but now are simply part of what we see every day.

While I don’t expect that the U.S. Treasury will literally start printing 12-dollar bills any time soon, I do believe that the future will hold many new and interesting discoveries, and that sometimes it will be a challenge to sort out how best to put them together!