I've been having the greatest, most vivid, wonderfully fucked-up dreams since I started Effexor over the summer. Last week I dreamt about pirates in an underwater jousting match with the 12-year-old wizard daughter of posh British tourists (no, her name wasn't Hermione) who'd broken away from a cruise where all the passengers had jumped into lifeboats and started racing each other on the ocean. The 12-year-old won, obv. -- both the racing and the jousting. It's lonely at the top.

And last night I dreamt about a teenage girl who'd gotten abducted in a Brooklyn department store and held in a stock room with other abductees. With a little ingenuity she escaped, and once she got outdoors, realized she could fly. She wasn't the only human traffic in the sky; there were undercover air cops trying to apprehend her.

One finally did, and they decided they would head towards Queens and visit the girl's parents. She was nervous about going home to her folks (and didn't especially want to). Instead, they landed in the next neighborhood over from her home: wealthy, tree-lined, manicured, etc. It was 1980 though. When she landed. So the stores all had that "1960s-but-still-sparkling-and-pristine main street of a wealthy Jewish Queens suburb" look.

After all that flying, the girl had forgotten how to walk, how to stand. She was having trouble balancing. Some girls on the street made fun of her. She played dumb (deaf, actually) and wrote "I can't hear you" on a wall with a piece of chalk. They didn't believe her, so she corrected herself and said out loud that she was a teacher of the deaf and related to her students so much that sometimes she felt like she was one of them. That was a lie too obviously; the girls knew it. They invited her back to their house to meet their deaf cousins and interpret some sign language.

Well, whoopsie, this girl doesn't know any sign language; what now? She waited patiently as the two cousins signed for her (it took a few minutes), and then an idea hit her: She coughed to see what the cousins would do. They both stopped, reflexively, like most people do when they hear loud coughing, and with that, their concentration was broken. Ha ha, hahahahaha.

Then they (the cousins and the two girls from the street) abducted her -- took her to the attic and hid her near a tiny window. It was fine with her, since she didn't want to go home and she didn't want anyone in the area to recognize her.

A short while later, her new housemates came upstairs with a few six-packs of cold beer, and sincerely apologized. The girl explained her own situation, and they all had a good laugh and became best friends.

The end.