#anger-inducing

Had a dream that felt much more dreamlike than usual. I was in a public restroom, and I was cornered by a seven-foot-tall man that looked a bit like Steve from Smash Mouth. He was very aggressive, threatening to beat me up, but despite his size I wasn’t even the least bit afraid. Even when he started attacking me, it felt more like when an elementary schooler is mad at you and just ineffectually slapping at you. I barely felt his punches, and when he picked me up and threw me to the ground, the tiles cracked but I wasn’t hurt at all.

I kept trying to ignore him and just leave, but he kept attacking me each time I got up. I knew if I really turned on him, he definitely wouldn’t be shrugging off my hits like I could his, so I was trying my hardest to keep calm. After the third time I got up and he hit me again, though, I finally snapped and turned on him with my fist raised, fully intending to put him out of commission. Immediately, I woke up, and sat there for a while feeling angry and vaguely dissatisfied.

Had an absolutely infuriating dream. In it, merfolk were real. They were much more streamlined than typical artistic depictions, with fish-like scales covering all of their skin, webbed hands, fin-like ears, and a tail that looked like a natural extension of their body. Their existence was well-known to the public, but they were still extremely rare and about to go extinct. It was thought that their natural habitat had been disrupted enough that there might not be any wild ones left. Merfolk lived for a very long time and reproduced very rarely, but there were enough merfolk in captivity to save their species with some help from conservation efforts. The infuriating part was, all the existing merfolk were owned as private property by rich people who wanted them as a status symbol to show off their great wealth. They were kept in huge tanks on display to be gawked at. Capturing or buying merfolk had been illegal for years, but because of their longevity, all the currently existing merfolk had been captured before those laws were written and thus it wasn’t technically illegal and the conservationists couldn’t get to them to rescue them. So, due to the greed of the rich, the merfolk were dying out, and there was nothing I could do about it despite the obvious solution right in front of us. I ended the dream pressing my hand against the glass of a wood-framed aquarium wall the size of a room, looking at the mermaid in the tank pressing her webbed hand against the other side of the glass, and feeling like I needed to scream at the injustice of it.