Three stops before yours, a telepathic flare-up comes on fast, like a stream-of-consciousness flash flood you can’t escape in this train car. Immediately you regret skipping your usual afternoon coffee. Without it, everything on everyone’s mind comes rushing into yours, the inner lives of other passengers now impinging on your own, making your consciousness a mess of their thoughts—mental images in rapid succession like a montage by an auteur gone mad during post-production, this deluge accompanied by emotions surging and throbbing through the chatter of overlapping quotidian monologues.