Beautiful Dream
Beautiful Dream
[Megan with disheveled hair stretches her arms. A sunburst indicating sleepiness is above her head.] YAWN Megan: I just woke up
[Megan continues speaking from off panel, to Cueball who's sitting at a table with a laptop and cup. He's leaned his elbow on the chair, turning to face Megan.] Megan: from the most beautiful dream. Cueball: Which was?
Megan: All the girls who read and follow The Rules and all the guys who swear by the techniques in The Game paired off with each other and left the rest of us alone forever. Cueball: Mmmmmm...

In this comic, Megan has just woken from a dream in which the girls who follow The Rules and the guys who play The Game have paired off and left everyone else alone.
"The Rules" refers to a book entitled "The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right" which the authors describe as a self-help book for women seeking a man to marry. It's often decried for being formulaic and for reducing the women who follow it and the men they seek to outdated stereotypes about gender roles. The rules themselves amount to a complicated game of "hard to get", which is not exactly a new strategy, nor is it always the best approach to take.
"The Game" refers to a series of books entitled "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists", which is a purported exposé on the pickup artist community (which is not similar to a pick-up basketball game, see 1178: Pickup Artists ), and its follow-up "Rules of the Game", which describes the techniques used. Pickup artistry involves the use of psychological and emotional tricks intended to coerce women into casual sex. Practitioners of pickup are considered by many to be manipulative and creepy for reducing women to little more than objects for conquest.
It's clear that Megan has a low opinion of those who put stock in these works. The idea of removing the Rules Girls and the Game Players from social interaction by pair bonding them to each other is one that appeals to her. Cueball's response seems to indicate that he agrees with her.
The title text takes a surrealist step with Cueball 's response to Megan . The Giving Tree is a children's book by Shel Silverstein about the relationship between a tree and a young boy who grows to be an old man. The Metamorphosis is a work of fiction by Franz Kafka in which a travelling salesman wakes up after having strange dreams to find that he has been turned into a nondescript giant bug. The implication is that it would be extremely bizarre to have a dream in which all those people who had experiences regarding these books paired off, due to them being entirely unrelated.
[Megan with disheveled hair stretches her arms. A sunburst indicating sleepiness is above her head.] YAWN Megan: I just woke up
[Megan continues speaking from off panel, to Cueball who's sitting at a table with a laptop and cup. He's leaned his elbow on the chair, turning to face Megan.] Megan: from the most beautiful dream. Cueball: Which was?
Megan: All the girls who read and follow The Rules and all the guys who swear by the techniques in The Game paired off with each other and left the rest of us alone forever. Cueball: Mmmmmm...
