I think I have a bit of flu.
I woke up this morning with a fragment of a dream stuck to the inside of my brain. Utterly realistic dream.
I was sitting at work, at my desk, overhearing my boss talking on the phone with one of a student’s parents. I was understanding it – not dream understanding, but actually capturing the words of the conversation. A first grade (elementary) student, Jaehyeon, was leaving the hagwon.
When Curt hung up the phone, with his dramatic sigh as he often does when he has failed to convince a parent who is set on leaving to stay, I said to him, “Jaehyeon is leaving.” Statement, not question.
“네” [ne], he agreed. In English, he added, “But she said he liked your class. So why is he leaving.”
In the dream, I felt very sad, that Jaehyeon was leaving. He’s by far my favorite first-grader, has a very active imagination and linguistic creativity. He makes random funny noises when he doesn’t understand something.
I woke up with this floating in my brain, thinking it was a memory of being at work. But no, I’d remember for sure if Jaehyeon were, in fact, leaving. But then I had another thought: I’d dreamed in Korean. Not completely, but somewhat. What’s distinctive is that it was understood dream Korean, that was real Korean. Not the dream-Korean I struggle with so often, where it’s gobbledygook that I can’t make any sense out of, and that I doubt is real Korean. And that is a milestone, maybe. Or a rarity, in any event, above and beyond the banality of the dream fragment.
