He ought to buy her a new dress. She would never accept it, of course, but maybe if her current garments were accidentally burned. . . . . . But how could he manage to burn her dress? She'd have to not be wearing it, and that posed a certain challenge in and of itself.
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.