Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 16, 2021

For once, reality doesn’t bite.

And this too, of course, will turn out to be part of Mike’s daydream…

Sometimes my life feels like fiction written by drunken misanthrope

Is the very slight difference in their nose shapes the only indication that they are not related?

When Supertramp wrote “Dreamer” they had Mike in mind .

I miss my early 70s bellbottom jeans. And chuka boots.

I remember back in the Silver Age when DC Comics used to run what they called “imaginary stories” to explore ideas that they wouldn’t have to shoehorn into canon. Someone in the letters column thought the idea was hilarious, as if a guy who could fly and wore his underwear on the outside was somehow not imaginary.

TGTBT. To good to be true.

Now I need to find the date the second Bob Newhart show ended, the one where the final scene is him waking up in his bed with his “wife” from the first series and finding the whole second one of running an inn in Vermont was a dream.

HOORAY!

I studied hypnotherapy for a year. One of the precepts is that it is never too late to have a happy childhood. It’s all in how you recall it. Memory is very malleable.

This is getting into “Inception” territory. But more cheerful.

It must run in the family. Didn’t Alex meet Leo through a similar fictional contrivance? I know it was commented on in the strip at the time.

Oh, that tricky fourth wall.

I don’t remember what happened next. Did Mike then get the real visit from Bernie, and start the process of relocating himself and Alex? Or did he discover that he had magically been moved to Washington state while he was dreaming?

It’s Trudeau’s day dream.

Me next.

Thank goodness for programming errors.

Very clever. I’ll give this one to Trudeau. He occasionally has good work when he’s not being political – which is most of the time.

His dream did not include the best part -Kim.

Still, one step closer to finding Kim

IMHO recognizing that they’re in a comic strip diminishes whatever sense of “seriousness” the characters, plots, et cetera are able to convey to begin with, so I’m glad that Trudeau rarely takes that approach in the dailies.