One summer in 1996, I'm pretty sure, my family went to a dinosaur exhibit at Hogle Zoo. There were lots of displays of animatronic dinosaurs in a large tent area.
A few months later, after I was in school, I had a dream that I was at a display of dinosaurs--only they were real dinosaurs. One of them was called a dogfish dinosaur. The "dog" in its name came from the fact that it was brown and had floppy ears. I'm not sure where the "fish" came from, but it was probably related to catfish. This dinosaur was very tall, but it was kind of more like a giraffe--a long neck but not a long body. Its head was a typical dinosaur head, except for the floppy ears.
A few days later, in school, we were learning about compound words, where two words combine to make one word. The examples they showed us were houseboat (which I had never heard of before) and catfish.
For our assignment, we had to come up with four compound words and draw them. I couldn't think of them. I put down houseboat and catfish. Then I put down dog-fish-dinosaur (that was how I hyphenated it then, but now I would do it as dogfish dinosaur, which means that dogfish would be a compound but dinosaur wouldn't be part of it). When Miss Slater saw my paper, she asked me what a dog-fish-dinosaur was. I told her I had a dream about it--and she made me erase it because it wasn't real. I was really disappointed, because I couldn't think of anything else. And it was a compound word, even if it didn't exist.
On my mission, in Ritzville, WA, we would pass a street called Dogwood. That reminded me of the dogfish dinosaur, so when I told one of my companions about it, he said that my teacher should have accepted dog-fish-dinosaur--because even if it didn't exist, it showed that I understood what a compound word was.
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