From Judy, Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, 1871.

Dreams are particles, not waves.  We first noticed this passage thanks to the row of asterisks, and (according to the principles we followed in our book Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation), we were able to decode the asterisks as dream sparks.  From "The Missing Ring" in The Guernsey Magazine, 1875.

A whole constellation of asterisks from "The Land of the Whopper" by Elizabeth Frazer, in The Saturday Evening Post, 1920.

Either the typesetter forgot to remove the dots when putting in the row of asterisks, or it was supposed to be this way.  Either way, our eyes see the dust motes, the acacia blossoms, the glimmers of twilight, the successive bits of time while one waits.  From "The Girl With the Fan" by Sterling Heilig, in Pearson's, 1909.

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.

Here's a precursor to the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," which features the euphemism "master of my domain."  The text reads, "As he lay down in his bed he exclaimed, under his breath, 'Master of the Situation!'"  From Once a Week, 1870.

I dreamed I read chapter 22.  (From Judy, Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, 1877.)

Our Favorite Asterisk of All Time?

Check out the very special asterisk in this little verse from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle, 1887.  It stands for the word gloom (in all fairness, how much clarity can we expect of gloominess?) even as it concentrates what little light there is into a gleam in a house cat's eye.  Is the asterisk here a genuine example of visual poetry, or did the typesetter run out of space and improvise grandly?  We don't care, as the result stands.  (Note that we hunted down what would appear to be the web's only other gloomy asterisk, if only to give the cat's other eye a twinkle.)

"Asterisks, too, serve to refresh the reader's eye and mind."
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus