He emerged from the bathroom and began to dress for work.
She sat up in bed. “I dreamt …”
He: “Wait …”
She: “No try wait! I dreamt that I went out to tend the garden and I found a kitten. I picked it up, and there was another one! And another! I started looking around, and there were dozens of them! I was trying to gather them all up when you came out of the house.”
He: “Uh huh. And what did I do?”
She: “You yelled at me. You said, “NO CATS!”
He crossed to the closet and grabbed a shirt. “Well, yeah. We signed this piece of paper that says we can have kitties, or we can have closets. The authorities haven’t exactly been kind to the homeless around here lately. Your choice …”
She: “You yelled at me! And that’s when all the cats turned into puppies! PUPPIES! What were you thinking?!”
He shrugged into his shirt and stood regarding her silently while buttoning up. Finally he asked: “Puppies? Are you sure you don’t mean poppies? How many of those magic pain pills did you take last night?”
She: “None. I took ordinary, generic, over-the-counter ibuprofen.”
He looked at her skeptically.
She: “Hey. The doc gave me 40 heavy-hitter pills two months ago and I still have 34 left. Besides, I’ve been having dreams like this for years!“
He looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded his head. “Good point, and plenty of evidence for it. Apparently, the initialization pathway for the induction of your hallucinations is endogenous.”
A few beats of silence, as he loaded his trouser pockets, Hawaiian style.
She: “Did you just use big words to call me crazy?”
He tried really hard not to smirk. “Possessing a large vocabulary does have its advantages, on occasion.” He turned on his heel and sauntered from the room.
She said: you stole my story!
You did steal her story!