I've always explained it to people like this: Imagine a big cabinet, like a bunch of safe-deposit boxes in a bank. Each box has an unique number written on it, and the boxes are simply numbered 0 to 99. Now when you open a box, you find a piece of paper in it with a number between 0 to 99. It tells you which box to open next - so it points to another box. That's a pointer.
Seems to work pretty well, at least for conveying the basic idea of pointers and dereferencing.
Seems to work pretty well, at least for conveying the basic idea of pointers and dereferencing.