Caveat: Fragment

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, in  "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 stuggle 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.

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