Sometimes I have such strange dreams. I awoke from one, just now.
In the dream, I was reading a children's story. I suppose, given what I've been doing for a living, that that's not so unexpected. But in the dream, the children's story was in a weird mixture of Korean and English (real children's stories tend not to look like that), and had been written by my former LBridge colleague, Jinhee. And it turned out that she'd incorporated me as a character into her story. The story was about a group of Korean kids who go around solving little mysteries and problems in their community, which was a vast, densely populated suburb much like Ilsan. It basically was Ilsan, but was never named as such.
One such mystery they solve is the "mystery of the missing soju" – yes, that's funny. And not that unrealistic, maybe? Hah. They find out that at their school's hoesik (staff get-together dinner) the night before, a bunch of soju had disappeared, and they go about solving where it went. It turned out the vice principal drank it. All with very cute illustrations, and a nice moral at the ending, about maybe one shouldn't drink so much soju at hoesik events.
So strange, to be reading such a vivid and peculiar yet utterly apropos story, in a dream. I've often had "textual" dreams of this sort, but few quite like this.
And the next part of the story has the kids running into their "crazy English teacher Jared" while riding a bus to the mall. In the dream, I feel this mixed feeling of humility and pride at being included in the story by my friend Jinhee. The kids convince the story character, Jared, that he needs to help them solve a mystery involving a missing puppy. For some strange reason, to solve this mystery, the kids have to put together and then perform a drama production for a group of high-powered American business executives – hence the need for their crazy English teacher's help.
So I help them write and perform the drama. We put together a plot that involves a group of inept superheroes (a little bit a la The Incredibles?) who are being asked to work as office temps in a big company, and the superheroes end up saving the day by finding a missing puppy.
Seriously. My dream was becoming an intertextual labyrinth of Cervantine proportions. I'm having a dream in which I'm a character in a story in which that character (who is me) is writing a drama and helping some kids find a missing puppy, and in the drama-in-the-story-in-the-dream, there are some superheroes that are helping to find a missing puppy. Got it?
The drama goes as planned, and induces the American business executive who apparently stole the puppy to come clean and return it to the crying little girl. It's a scooby doo ending. Added twist of irony: the nefarious business executive in the story is a splitting image of my erstwhile nemesis from Aramark Corporation, CIO Bob McCormick. I find myself wondering, in the dream: "How did my friend Jinhee know that that's what evil American business executives looked like?"
But then I notice there's a typo in the story I'm reading: the word "clearly" is written as "claxli" – this is an "impossible" typo… at the least, it's a highly improbable one. What I mean by this, is that in the dream, I'm suddenly struck by the fact that "claxli" is not the sort of typo that happens in the "real world." And somehow this jarring fact causes me to become aware that I'm dreaming. And in the dream, now aware that I'm dreaming, I look up to see my friend Jinhee trying to present me with a copy of the story book she'd written, and I think to myself, I should tell her about the typo, but then I think, "oh, it's just a dream, so it doesn't really matter that much."
So I just thank her for the story, and for including me in it, and then we walk into a hoesik where some kids are doing a performance of the drama from the story for their school administration and staff (including the vice principal of the missing soju). And I think to myself, in the dream, "pues, de veras, la vida es sueño" (a reference to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous Spanish Golden Age drama, "Life Is a Dream"), and then I wake up.
It's six AM on the dot, although I'd turned off my alarm, and it hadn't gone off. The window is open, the rain has stopped, and there's an almost-coolness in the air, that seems alien and unnatural after so many months of humid, sweltering heat. It makes me think of Minnesota.
My stomach was feeling very upset yesterday (possibly, in part, stress-induced, from the difficult emotional week I'd endured last week), and it is still feeling unsettled. I'm feeling a bit under the weather, definitely. But what interesting dreams I sometimes have, when sick.