(Strip Number 7179, Original Publication Date, 24 March 1985)
Panel 1: It's late at night and a sleeping Elly is having a dream of some sort.
Panel 2: Since she's smiling, she must be dreaming of a world where she didn't find a bespectacled jackass who spent Senior Year trolling for a pliable idiot looking for her MRS sleeping in 'her' chair at U of T's library.
Panel 3: Given that the panel has mutated into a thought-bubble and that Elly dresses as if she's on the cover of the sort of bodice ripper that she recommended to Val Stone as being THE literary genre, her dream is one of escape to a more romantic world. We find her at a harbor of days gone by begging a handsome man named Conrad not to go to what I can only assume is the Forbidden Zone Mike would later use as the setting for Blood Cargo. (Speaking of 'forbidden', yes, Conrad looks like Phil and no, Elly doesn't understand the problem.)
Panel 4: When he beseeches her to come with, she turns dramatically and says that she cannot.
Panel 5: He has his chance to overact when his ship casts off and he oversells having to set sail.
Panel 6: We set up the gloomy-ass punch line by his kissing her before he sails off to certain death....or certain absence letting the heart go wander, whichever is worse for Elly.
Panel 7: We switch back to reality when Elly is woken by something seemingly kissing her hand for realsies.
Panel 8: To her obvious dismay, it's Ol'Farl licking her hand.
Panel 9: To her even greater dismay, it's John sawing wood next to her instead of Conrad The Fantasy Projection Sea Captain Of Pure Awesomeness.
Panel 10: Elly then sighs and thought-bubbles that such are the dreams of the everyday housewife.
Summary: To quote the late, great Monarch Henchman 24: "WOW! THAT SUCKED!!!" This is because even her dreams have been co-opted by the depressing reality in which she finds herself and, in a horrible twist that we all saw coming, ends up learning to love. Heh. Lynn should have named this strip of hers "Becoming The Mask: The Comic Strip."