I believe there is something in the world of dreams. Digging into what it is would be a field of inquiry, but I am not particularly interested in that. I do not believe that getting too close to the dream world is dangerous, or that if one thinks one does not want to wake from a dream, one will never wake. If not wanting to wake could actually prevent waking, then the problem would not be dreams but the brain losing its link with the body, perhaps something that would have to be connected even to paralysis. Then one would have no choice but to wait for scientific knowledge itself to develop and be shared.
That does not mean I avoid interest for that reason. It is more like an assumption made at the level of interest, not something I take seriously. I half believe and half doubt claims that what one sees in dreams must be truth, or that dreams outside daily life touch the mysteries of the universe or what some call the collective unconscious of humanity. I cannot confidently deny any such opinion, but I also cannot choose one.
Still, one thing is clear. Dreams seem to have the ability to produce things that would take me decades to think up if I sat still and tried, things that seem entirely unrelated to me. So sometimes something appears in a dream that is too exquisite to dismiss as mere imagination and too plausible to condemn as nonsense. Not all dreams are like that; many simply reflect daily life. But when I occasionally have a dream that feels as if it is not my own, I treat it like a rare stone that needs to be polished. This metaphor too is something I once borrowed from a dream. In that dream, people rounded and polished the dreams they had and stored them. For me, polishing and storing a dream means removing the cloudy background and recording it in everyday language. Only then can I read it later and remember. In fact, once I go through that process and write it down, I do not forget the dream.
But it is not as if I never wake unpleasantly from dreams. Today too I had a dream I absolutely did not want to record. The background was unusual, but it was not detailed enough to make me seriously decide whether to write about it. While idling, I had time to organize what I think about dreams.
When I was in college, I once had a part-time job handing out samples on the street for a cosmetics brand. That kind of job may not exist now, but it was not simply handing out samples. Because it was half refusal and half sales ability, my performance was zero, and after two days or so on the street I received not a single won. The task was to hold a sample out in front of someone as if giving it to them, then when they tried to take it, say, “If you answer a survey, we will give you a gift.” In reality, it was an exchange of a survey form for a sample. And the core of the survey was name and phone number. They took personal information in return for one sample. Unless someone came up voluntarily and said, “I will fill that out, please give me a sample,” I could not help thinking it was theft, so I could not complete even one. Sure enough, if someone did that now, the person in charge would probably be called by prosecutors immediately.
In any case, I learned then that lying in front of people or handing things to unspecified crowds did not suit me. Since it was during vacation, there was no great loss, and it was on the streets of Jongno and Myeongdong, so I did not hate it for wasting time. It was fun to watch people, and I came to know myself a little better. But seeing it positively is different from saying it was a good experience or that I could do it again.
Today I dreamed I was handing out flyers in Myeongdong to people walking busily toward the Line 4 subway. Unlike reality, at least I was not asking for personal information. The flyer was not for a cosmetics company. In the dream, I had read an article saying a certain company was struggling, thought, “This industry must grow,” and went to ask what I could do to help. What they asked was for me to hand out flyers that had already been printed. Since I had gone there myself, it was not merely a matter of not being paid; I felt real pressure.
What the company had developed was a general-purpose circuit for robots. More than twenty years ago, when one could do most things with a chip called the 8051 using assembly, C, or C++, they were trying to make and sell what would now resemble a Raspberry Pi board. It had input and output terminals on a small circuit, and without soldering, like a breadboard, one could assemble cables and control motors. For programming, one did not need to put a machine in place, compile a file, and burn it onto a chip. One could simply move the file through the computer’s USB port, and the circuit would handle the rest. At the time, chip burners were naturally used for chip control and could be found around the department. If such an idea had actually existed, it might have been a hit. Or perhaps it did exist but was treated as a toy because people then thought of robots that way, and people may have said there was no reason for it to be expensive just because it skipped the chip-burning process.
Even in the dream, the company was struggling. The president said, “Ordinary robot kits sell better. A USB port makes it easier to use, but the program still has to be written in the same way. People seem to think that if the chip-burning step is removed, it is no longer serious, just a toy exercise.” If even in the dream I thought that, reality must have been harsher. I do not know what connection brought me to the office; the beginning of the dream is forgotten. But the emotionally charged part that made me remember was the scene where I actually went out with the flyers and handed them out.
In three hours, the number of flyers I properly handed out was only about five. Strictly speaking, I did hand them all out, but people who took them opened their hands and dropped them in a visible place. Seeing the flyers I had handed out scattered on the ground around me, I could no longer keep doing it, so I moved to another exit and tried again. When I went down the stairs inside the subway exit and handed them out there, someone quickly came out and told me to leave. So I went back out and repeated the same thing. I eventually handed them all out, but by then the ground near Myeongdong Station was covered with pictures of that company’s robots. Only about five people took a flyer, glanced at it, and put it in a pocket. I do not know whether they threw it away somewhere else. Even in the dream, I felt the same helplessness I had felt during the cosmetics survey job.
After handing them all out, I returned to the company and said, “I did hand out all the papers, but I could not stop people from throwing them away in front of me, so I am sorry I do not think I was of any help.” The president said not to worry because internet advertising was being done to some extent now that the internet was becoming active, but since I had gone there knowing things were difficult, I felt deeply sorry. Waking with such a bad feeling brought back old memories, and my mood was already low as I woke.
What would have happened if someone had run such a business at that time? Technology is still difficult in Korea. It is not easy. But even if one jumps in early after seeing possibility, people’s response is another problem entirely, separate from the difficulty of the technology business itself.
It had been a long time since I had a depressing dream. Sometimes I have exciting dreams, sometimes funny dreams that make me think I must write them down even while half asleep, and sometimes frightening dreams. But I do not think I had a depressing dream for more than ten years. It was depressing, and too full of things to think about to simply say, “No, it was only a dream.” It was that kind of morning.
Original Korean article: 로봇 만들기 회로 키트