"Dinosaur Parent" /   Chen Qingyang

I am a psychotherapist running my own private practice, and I frequently encounter all kinds of bizarre psychological patients. One day, an elementary school female teacher came to see me with heavy dark circles under her eyes. Her chief complaint was that she kept having the same nightmare over and over again. Every time she awoke in terror, she could no longer fall asleep, which had resulted in chronic sleep deprivation and a steady decline in both her mental and physical condition.

After listening to her description, my preliminary diagnosis was that she was suffering from **sleep disturbance** caused by **an anxiety disorder**. I questioned her one by one about her daily life and working conditions, and I quickly found the source of her anxiety. It turned out that there was a **mother dinosaur** who had always held a prejudice against her, constantly nitpicking every tiny flaw in her teaching. The dinosaur mother's child was extremely naughty and mischievous, often leading classmates in teasing and harassing the teacher. What the mother was really plotting, however, was how to force this middle-aged homeroom teacher out of her position so that a younger and more attractive female teacher could replace her.

I comforted her by telling her that I would help her find a way to relieve her psychological stress. After the teacher accepted my hypnosis, I immediately took out all the props from my prop box and told her, "I'm going to enter your dream and help you hunt down that mother dinosaur." I then put on Iron Man's armor, slung a box of "armored weapons" over my back, and stepped into her dream.

I witnessed the scene with my own eyes. Several velociraptors were chasing the unfortunate heroine. Her clothes were in tatters, and she looked utterly miserable. She desperately ran toward a giant tree and climbed the trunk with all her strength. The velociraptors circled the trunk, roaring, jumping, and screaming. She climbed higher and higher until she was more than twenty meters above the ground.

I took a powerful longbow and a quiver full of explosive arrows from the box on my back, jumped onto a pile of huge rocks, and fired downward from my elevated position. One arrow after another—**whoosh! whoosh! whoosh!**—shot toward the velociraptors. Every velociraptor struck by an arrow immediately exploded into scattered flesh and blood. Two of the smaller ones sensed that something was terribly wrong and turned to flee, but my explosive arrows still caught up with them, blowing them apart into two blossoms of flying flesh. I guessed that these velociraptors represented the mischievous troublemakers in her class. Having narrowly escaped death, the heroine slowly slid down from the tree. Her face was drained of all color from fright, and she was so shocked that she even forgot to say, "Thank you." I walked over to her, took a Superwoman suit of armor and a stretch bodysuit out of my prop box, and instructed her, "Put these on. I'll take you to find the mother Tyrannosaurus that has been hunting you."

"You've never seen that mother Tyrannosaurus. She's truly terrifying. She has attacked my tribe again and again, devouring one tribesperson after another. I seriously suspect that she has evolved to possess human intelligence," the heroine said while trembling and choking back tears.

"Don't be afraid. I'll take you to find her. This time, **you** will play the role of the hunter." I motioned for her to put on the close-fitting gear. "Where does this villain usually appear?"

"At this time of day, she's usually somewhere in the valley behind those hills. There are many herbivorous dinosaurs there." The heroine freed one hand and pointed toward a row of low hills ahead on the right.

After the heroine had put on all her equipment, I handed her a laser gun and taught her how to disengage the safety and use the infrared scope.

"Tonight, we'll sneak into the valley and let **you** personally chop that mother Tyrannosaurus into pieces." I confidently patted her on the shoulder before continuing, "From this moment on, you are Wonder Woman. You possess superpowers that can be controlled effortlessly with your mind. Along the way, you can easily hunt down any dinosaur that harbors hostile intentions toward you."

I led her as we rode a flying motorcycle over the hills and quietly approached the entrance to the valley at dusk. To build up the heroine's confidence, I asked her to aim at a pterosaur circling low overhead and sweep one of its wings with the laser gun. Following my instructions, she fired. A beam of laser sliced across one wing of the pterosaur, instantly severing it. The creature immediately lost its balance and plummeted from the sky. After witnessing the tremendous power of the laser gun, a genuine smile finally blossomed across the heroine's face.

I led the heroine into the valley, with me in front and her following behind. We passed many sleeping herbivorous dinosaurs and also encountered a pack of velociraptors fighting over a carcass. We quietly avoided them to prevent them from becoming entangled with us. Eventually, we discovered a huge and very deep cave. At its entrance, I found Tyrannosaurus footprints and droppings.

"The enemy is hidden while we are exposed." I concluded that the creature must be sleeping soundly deep inside the cave. So I immediately decided that we would first hunt a small herbivorous dinosaur, cut it into several large chunks of meat, and bury remote-controlled grenades deep inside each piece. When that creature woke the following morning and swallowed those chunks of meat, we would detonate the grenades one by one and stage a performance called **"The Tyrannosaurus Dancing the Mambo."** Once the plan had been settled, the two of us hunted down a herbivorous dinosaur together and spent quite some time cutting it into several large pieces before dragging them back to the cave entrance. After everything had been arranged, we climbed onto a small platform above the cave, found a place to sleep, and waited until the following morning to watch **"The Tyrannosaurus Mambo Show."**

What happened next was spectacular. The starving mother Tyrannosaurus emerged from the cave and, upon seeing the chunks of meat scattered across the ground, first cautiously sniffed each one. After confirming that the meat was fresh and carried no suspicious odor, she began feasting ravenously. Only after she had swallowed the final piece of meat and let out a long series of satisfied belches did I begin to "torture" her. Calmly and deliberately, I pressed the grenade detonator one trigger after another. The mother Tyrannosaurus immediately began spinning in circles as though dancing the mambo. Streams of blood burst from her belly while she whirled around like a rotating fountain. About fifteen minutes later, she collapsed limply onto the ground, with only her eyeballs still able to move. At that moment, I called to the heroine, "Let's go down into the cave. It's time for you to take your revenge with your own hands."

The ending, of course, was that the mother Tyrannosaurus was chopped into pieces by the heroine with the laser gun. She burst into simultaneous laughter and tears. I knew that the psychological burden weighing upon her had finally been completely lifted. Only then did I quietly leave, step out of her dream, and wake her up.

A few days later, an attractive woman in her early thirties came to see me with her son. Both mother and son had heavy dark circles under their eyes. After listening to the mother's description of their symptoms, my preliminary diagnosis was **sleep disturbance** caused by **panic disorder**. I questioned her one by one about her daily life and work, and I quickly found the source of her anxiety.

"I don't know what's been happening lately, but my son and I have been having the same nightmare every single night. My son dreams that he and a group of classmates are struck by some kind of arrows, and then their entire bodies explode. He says the arrows look just like the explosive arrows Rambo used in the sequel to *First Blood*. As for me, after eating several pieces of Australian diced steak, I suddenly suffer excruciating stomach pain, followed by streams of blood bursting out of my abdomen..."

It turned out that this mother and son were the very **mother dinosaur** and **spoiled mama's boy** who had been making life miserable for that female teacher all along.

I hypnotized the mother and then told her a fantasy story called **"The Mother Tyrannosaurus Dancing the Mambo."** At the end of the story, I instructed her that she must take her son to apologize to his homeroom teacher, because she had failed to understand the importance of **respecting one's teachers and honoring the Way**, and had consequently angered the champion of justice....

A few days later, the female teacher called me and told me that the dinosaur parent had brought her son into the classroom to sincerely apologize to her in person, and had even treated the entire class to buckets of **Kuai Kuai gummy candy**.