I haven't had a "nuclear war" dream since about 1984. I had a few vivid ones, back then. This dream I just awoke from was both vivid and weirdly cinematic, although also seemingly satirical, toward the end.
I was on a bus, going toward Hongnong along the expressway. It wasn't the commuting bus, it was a charter bus – I had been on some work-related excursion with my fellow teachers. It was dark, and the flash of the explosion was obvious. It was like the sun was rising, to the west, out of the Yellow Sea. I had no doubt, immediately, about what I was witnessing, although a lot of the other teachers on the bus, whether through ignorance or denial, had no idea – until cell phones started ringing, and text messages exchanged, and internets surfed via smart phones.
Then the reaction was disbelief, awe, shock. Yet we continued to drive the rest of the way to Hongnong. It seemed logical, partly – the town is nestled behind the mountain, protected from the nuclear plant which had been the obvious target of the blast. And then the chaos, as the real sun dawned, Korean Army units moving in, people evacuating.
The focus of the dream seemed to lie in the Kafkaesque confusion of what to do, where to go, who to meet with. I was told that I had to go to my apartment (in the dream, my apartment was in Hongnong, not Yeonggwang) and that I was allowed to get one suitcase. When I got there, I couldn't decide how to pack, and was thinking that it would have been so much easier to just tell me I could take only what I had on me.
Ambulances and then Army trucks were zooming around, delivering serverly wounded from behind the mountain. There was some hotel on the top of the mountain that isn't there in real life, and it'd been right in front of the blast wave from the explosion. The building had crumbled and fallen down the hillside. Oh, ghastly.
Mr Choi came into my apartment, and he was trying to read my books that I was debating packing. And meanwhile, I was overhearing conversations, learning about where the bomb came from. The bomb had come from Argentina. Not even North Korea.
Argentina nuked South Korea? Well, no. It turned out that it was a disgruntled former English teacher. Hah. That's where the dream suddenly seemed satirical. But the backstory was complex. He was from a very wealthy family, and he'd spent his family fortune to acquire a bomb in Argentina using Russian and Argentine materials over a period of years, which he then delivered to Gamami (on the west side of the hill in Hongnong, next to the power plant) in a shipping container, where it successfully detonated. His name was Edwards – a name that will live in infamy, according to some stentorian announcement on CNN. Someone in my dream said to me, sardonically, "maybe not a good time to be an English teacher in Korea, now."
And then I woke up.
