Eat me!

One of my [ten thousands] favourite pieces in Alice in Wonderland:

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

It is an outstanding illustration of two things:

1) How our mind can be confused with a sequence of unusual events. Having eaten the cake the day before, Alice would have never expected it to have something to do with her size.

2) How our mind can be constrained by our past experience. Alice expected the cake to make her smaller or bigger, but never expected it to cast her to a bird or a fish (or to force rain to fall from the sky), just because of her prior experience with a bottle.