There's a kind of pillow covered in small, reversible sequins, which makes a pretty good analog for the situation inside the computer. If you pet one of these pillows, your hand's motion flips the sequins to show one color or the other, creating patterns. Petting all over the pillow in a single direction restores the pillow to a single color, erasing the pattern. But the pattern didn't really "go anywhere" in the sense that a physical object would -- it was just an arrangement of sequins.
