〈Parallel Universes〉

26. “Dinosaur Parents”

I am a self-employed psychotherapist, and I often encounter all kinds of bizarre psychological patients. One day, an elementary school teacher came to see me with dark circles under her eyes. Her chief complaint was that she repeatedly had the same nightmare. Every time she woke up in terror, she found it almost impossible to fall asleep again. As a result, she had been suffering from chronic sleep deprivation, and both her mental and physical condition had been steadily deteriorating.

After listening to her description, my initial assessment was that her sleep disorder was caused by an anxiety disorder. I asked her a series of questions about her personal life and work, and I quickly identified the source of her anxiety. It turned out that a dinosaur mother had always been prejudiced against her and repeatedly picked on minor faults in her teaching. The dinosaur mom’s child was extremely naughty and mischievous, and usually bossed his classmates around and frequently played tricks on his teacher. What the mother was really plotting, however, was how to get this old-maid-level homeroom teacher removed from her position so that she could be replaced by a younger female teacher who was more pleasing to her eye.

I comforted her and told her that I would help her find a way to relieve her mental stress. After the female teacher accepted my hypnosis, I immediately took the props out of my equipment case and said to her, “I’m going to enter your dream and hunt down that dinosaur mother with you.” I then put on Iron Man’s armor, strapped a case of “armor weapons” onto my back, and stepped into her dream.

I witnessed the scene with my own eyes. Several velociraptors were chasing the poor female protagonist. She was barely clothed and looked utterly disheveled as she desperately ran toward a large tree and frantically climbed up its trunk. The velociraptors circled the tree, roaring, jumping, and making a racket. She kept climbing higher and higher until she was about twenty meters above the ground.

I pulled a powerful longbow and a barrel of explosive arrows from the case on my back, jumped onto a pile of large rocks, and fired downward from a commanding position. One arrow after another went “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” toward the velociraptors. The moment an arrow struck one of them, it exploded, sending blood and flesh flying in every direction. Two of the smaller ones sensed that things were going badly and turned to run, but my explosive arrows still caught up with them, blowing them apart into two showers of flesh. I figured that these velociraptors must have been the naughty troublemakers in her class.

The female protagonist, still shaken by the terrifying ordeal, slowly slid down from the tree. Her face had gone completely pale with fear, and she was so frightened that she even forgot to say “Thank you.” I walked up to her, took Superwoman’s armor and a stretchy bodysuit out of my equipment case, and instructed her, “Put these on. I’ll take you to find the female Tyrannosaurus that has been hunting you.”

“You’ve never seen that female Tyrannosaurus. She’s really terrifying. My tribe has been attacked by her again and again, and she has eaten my people one after another. I strongly suspect that she has evolved human intelligence,” the female protagonist said, choking back sobs and trembling as she spoke.

“Don’t be afraid. I’ll take you to find her. This time, you’re going to play the hunter.” I motioned for her to put on the close-fitting gear. “Where does this bad creature usually appear?”

“She’ll probably be in the valley over there behind those hills at this time. There are many herbivorous dinosaurs there.” The female protagonist freed one hand and pointed toward a line of low hills ahead on the right.

After the female protagonist had put on all the close-fitting gear, I handed her a laser gun and taught her how to disengage the safety and use the infrared sight.

“Tonight, we’ll sneak into the valley and let you personally tear that female Tyrannosaurus into pieces.” I patted her shoulder confidently and continued, “Right now, you are Superwoman. You possess superpowers that you can easily control with your mind. Along the way, you can easily hunt down any dinosaur that harbors hostility toward you.”

I took her with me on a flying motorcycle and crossed the hills. At dusk, we quietly approached the entrance to the valley. To boost the female protagonist’s confidence, I told her to use the laser gun to slice across one wing of a pterosaur circling at low altitude. She followed my instructions. A laser beam swept across one of the pterosaur’s wings, and the wing was immediately sliced off. The pterosaur then lost its balance and plunged to the ground. After witnessing the power of the laser gun, a smile finally blossomed across the female protagonist’s face.

I led the female protagonist into the valley, with me in front and her bringing up the rear. We passed many herbivorous dinosaurs sleeping in their dreams and also encountered a group of velociraptors fighting over a carcass. We quietly avoided them so they would not come after us and cause trouble. Later, we found a very large and deep cave. At the entrance, I discovered Tyrannosaurus footprints and droppings.

“The enemy is hidden in the darkness while we are exposed in the open.” I concluded that the creature must be hiding deep inside the cave, fast asleep. So I immediately decided to hunt a small herbivorous dinosaur first, cut it into several large chunks of meat, and bury remote-controlled grenades deep inside the pieces. Once the creature woke up the next morning and swallowed the chunks of meat, I would detonate the grenades one by one and put on a spectacular “Tyrannosaurus Mambo Dance.” Once the plan was settled, the two of us went hunting for a herbivorous dinosaur. After considerable effort, we cut it into several chunks of meat and dragged them back to the cave entrance. Once everything was set up, we climbed onto a small platform above the cave, found a place to sleep, and waited to watch the “Tyrannosaurus Mambo Show” the following morning.

What happened next was quite spectacular. The starving female Tyrannosaurus stood at the cave entrance, facing the chunks of carcass scattered across the ground. First, she cautiously sniffed them all over. After confirming that the meat was fresh and had no strange odor, she began to feast. After swallowing the last piece of meat and letting out a series of satisfied belches, I began to “torture” her. One after another, I slowly pressed the detonation buttons on the grenades. The female Tyrannosaurus began spinning around in place and dancing the mambo. Streams of blood sprayed from her belly, and she spun and spun like a rotating fountain. After about fifteen minutes, she collapsed helplessly onto the ground, with only her eyes still able to move. At that point, I called to the female protagonist, “Let’s go down into the cave and let you take revenge with your own hands.”

Of course, the ending was that the female protagonist used the laser gun to tear the female Tyrannosaurus into pieces. She cried and laughed at the same time, and I knew that her psychological stress had been completely relieved. Only then did I quietly leave, step out of her dream, and wake her up.

A few days later, a woman in her thirties who was still youthful and attractive came to see me with her son. Both mother and son had the same dark circles under their eyes. After listening to the mother describe her symptoms, my initial assessment was that her sleep disorder was caused by panic disorder. I asked her a series of questions about her personal life and work, and I quickly identified the source of her anxiety.

“My son and I have no idea what’s going on lately. Every night, we have the same nightmare. My son dreams that he and a group of classmates are shot by some kind of arrows, and then their entire bodies explode. My son says those arrows look a lot like the explosive arrows Rambo uses in the sequel to First Blood. As for me, after eating several pieces of Australian diced steak, I get severe stomach pain, and then streams of blood burst out of my belly…”

It turned out that this mother and son were the very dinosaur mother and her mama’s boy who had been making trouble for the female teacher all along.

I hypnotized the mother and then told her a fantasy story called “The Female Tyrannosaurus Does the Mambo.” At the end, I sternly reminded her that she must take her son to apologize to his homeroom teacher because she did not understand the importance of respecting teachers and honoring the teaching profession, and she had angered the champion of justice…

A few days later, the female teacher called me and said that the dinosaur parent had brought her son into the classroom, voluntarily confessed her wrongdoing to her, and treated the entire class to buckets of gummy candy.