Words and pictures of Amelie Wikstrom ©2019

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I had the strangest dream this afternoon nap. I was living in this enormous apartment. So many rooms I can't even remember them. I had only the vaguest map of the place in my head, despite having lived there a while. (Maybe a year or so, I think that's how long it's been since I last dreamed of this place.) (I have a whole series of recurring dreams.) Somehow I got to live here, and my biggest problems was remembering what rooms my stuff were in, coming up with things to do with each room and keeping them clean. Three TV rooms, three bathrooms, two kitchens. I was just going around looking at all my apartment. Found a three-story dishwasher with fancy wood panels I'd never used. It felt sort of comforting, I guess, not being broke. I had the vague idea of using all this space to help people. Hiding refugees somehow seemed like a more obvious idea than roommates. Though then I got distracted by exploring the neighborhood. I had not done that since I just moved in (in the last dream) and back then I didn't get very far because I was scared of getting lost. So I set out wandering the stairs. The house was a labyrinth of sameness, four corridors forming a cross, with maybe ten apartment doors in each arm, and a narrow spiral stairway at the end of each. Ten floors and no elevator, yet a nice new look. There was a system of fountains supplying fresh rain water to every floor. On the top floor was a very hard to describe, pretty surrealistic arboretum with a catwalk connecting the building to another three identical buildings, though the connections was closed for the winter for some absurd reason. Maybe whoever made the rules didn't know the thing was completely sealed off from the elements. It was a lovely place anyway. But lonely. I resolved on the way down to start knocking on neighbor's doors and tell them "I know this is an awkward thing to just come out and say, but I've lived here a year and I'd like to get to know you and I can't think of any better way to frame that". Then I was distracted again by realizing I had forgotten to put on a shirt and from there realizing I was dreaming. I immediately set out to make myself a more comfortable body, though I had trouble visualizing it. I think the part of my brain that imagines things is preoccupied when I'm dreaming. But it still felt like I was failing to trans properly, and I woke up from disappointment. But anyway, now I know what the house the girls live in looks like internally. So I think this joke about escalatingly ridiculous masturbation fantasies may have never actually been done before. Probably could have cut panel 4 and divided all the things happening in panel 1 in two panels for clarity, now that I think about it. But that would require redrawing more than half the page, so I'd rather just tell you: In panel 1, Ako leaps up at the sound of the phone and sends Mara flying, and Mara takes this in stride and also figures out there's going to be a competition to get to the bathroom and wash off the moving grit and decides to get in front of the line. In case that wasn't clear.