Note: You don't quite realize how full of strange little sayings our everyday speech is until someone very very young or very very foreign interrupts you in mid-sentence, or perhaps a few moments into your monologue, to clarify what sleeping dogs have to do with lying or what eyes have to do with catching a thing.
When the wool was, for the very first time, pulled over someone's eyes, I imagine it must've been winter. I'm envisioning a stocking cap, two friends, maybe siblings, a hill and a fast sled. The duo might've been piled, one on top of the other, and the upper one, as a joke, pulled the stocking cap over the eyes of the one beneath, the one steering the conveyance, as it sped between trees toward the bottom of a snow blanketed hill. I can't decide if the wearer of the cap yelled, "don't pull the wool over my eyes!" or if it makes more sense that one of their mothers spontaneously barked it out as she looked on from a safe distance, quickly assessing that the small gesture, innocent enough in almost any other context, was not exactly conducive to best sledding practices. This same matronly figure, after having convinced said sledders of the dangers of hat misplacement, might later have seen the benefits of recycling her extemporaneous phrase and consequently applied it to other potential tragedies in the making.
And now, in looking this little ditty over, I don't think I've hit the nail on the head with this short exposition on idiom because I seem to have run out of time. Or maybe, is it possible that I have succeeded and am completely pulling the wool over your eyes with my literary prowess?
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