Long-term ex-readers of ours will recall that we love interpreting rows of section-break dots and asterisks as illustrations for the text above or below them.  (In fact, we published an entire book of such interpretations, Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation).  But here's an example of the very opposite.  The narrator experiences a roadside accident and sees fifty million stars, then notes that the row of asterisks does not represent said stars but rather a period of unconsicousness.  From Pearson's, 1904.