He’s never actually met a talking dog

So, I've concluded a round of fairly thorough testing and concluded my son is basically entirely immune to simile, metaphor, metonymy, allegory etc.

This development follows an unsolicited palm reading given for my son, after I accidentally posted the below photocopy of his hand publicly in a Facebook gallery. The following day (a week ago), I got a message, which I almost trashed, from a woman in Spring Hill who regretted to tell me that my son suffered a tragic lack of imagination, but would marry into a good station and prosper, unsettlingly settled.

Suspended disbelief for a moment—long enough to conduct some rudimentary tests on the basis of a no-harm intervention—and uncovered some astonishing literality to his view of the world.

Showed him ink blots and he saw ink blots. Asked about shapes suggested by the clouds, he saw clouds. Failed to understand a spade as an enormous spoon or a spoon as a miniature spade. Later determined he's pretty much contained in a visible world full of magical events since he can't trace an idea or a causal chain through the short cuts of abstracted planes.

Perhaps the most unsettling discovery is his take on anthropomorphism. He's always been bombarded by stories with talking animals, and now has the most arcane temporal and geographical categories that explain how he's never actually met a talking dog.

We've now got to decide whether the palm-reading was a feat of genius cold reading, or if we can bank on the prophecy. I presume that the palmistry stuff is essentially unfalsifiable. It's hard to know what to say to him anymore.

I guess if he's going to marry into a 'satisfying' life, then his fate will do. It's mostly the cruel fates that need to be contested.