Four years have passed, but I cannot forget that dream. A dream within a dream. It was so intense that for almost three days I remembered it and lived soaked in its happiness. It was not a dream about love or private happiness. It was a dream about the world itself. My life could have changed from that dream as its starting point. But after the dream, my life simply continued as it had. Could my life truly have changed?
I was walking down a road. I was relaxed, and although I remembered my work and the company I went to, I felt as if I were back in college, walking beside a road where cars passed. It was a street I had never seen before, but it seemed like somewhere in Seoul. Hidden by roadside trees, buildings lined the street, and wherever there was not a large building, there was some kind of shop. There were chain restaurants and cafes. I could not see convenience stores or snack shops on that road. To compare it with something, perhaps it helps to say that later, when I walked from Nambu Bus Terminal Station to see a performance at the Seoul Arts Center, I thought that street resembled the one from the dream.
I walked a long time along that road. Sunlight poured down, but perhaps it was late autumn. I was wearing a long-sleeved top, yet because of the sunlight I thought it felt warm. I did not know how far I had to go, but I was walking toward a destination I knew. The me of that place knew the destination. The me looking outward from inside that me did not. There were clearly two selves, but at the time I could not distinguish them: the self who was aware like this, and the self actually living in that world.
At some point I arrived at a building. It was not flashy. It seemed like a cultural center, a small university facility, or an old public building. Inside were corridors, stairs, and rooms, all of them ordinary, but the ordinary feeling itself was strange. It was not a place I had seen, yet it felt as if I had arrived where I was supposed to arrive.
There was a tree. I call it the tree of wisdom, but that was not a name I saw written anywhere. It was simply what the tree became in my memory after waking. The tree was not merely planted there. It was as if the structure of that place, the air, the corridors, the people, and my own walking had all gathered around it. It did not speak, but it gave the feeling that something could be known there. Not information. Not a solution. A way for the world to be understood.
The happiness of the dream came from that. It was not the happiness of gaining something. It was the happiness of feeling that the world was not broken. The world in the dream had its own order, and I was inside that order. I did not have to explain myself. I did not have to prove why I was there. I only had to walk, arrive, and see.
After waking, I tried to hold the dream. Dreams disappear if one grips them too hard, but they also disappear if one does not record them. So I wrote what I could. I removed the foggy background, changed the dream into ordinary language, and tried to preserve the core. Perhaps that process already damaged it. Perhaps the dream was never meant to be preserved in sentences. But if I had not written it, only the vague feeling would have remained, and even that would have faded.
The dream did not tell me what to do with my life. It did not give me a command, a prophecy, or a mission. Yet for a while it made me feel that life might have a deeper structure than the one I see during ordinary days. It made me feel that beyond the visible road, beyond the buildings, beyond the routine of going to work and coming home, there might be another layer in which things are connected.
Still, my life did not visibly change. I went to work, ate, slept, read, wrote, and forgot many things. That is why the dream remains both precious and frustrating. If a dream can give such happiness, why can it not also change the life that receives it? Or perhaps it did change something, only not in a way I could measure. Perhaps the tree of wisdom was not a tree that grants answers, but a tree that leaves behind the memory that answers are not the only important things.
Even now, when I think of that dream, I feel the sunlight on the road and the strangeness of arriving at a place I knew without knowing. I do not know whether the dream belonged to me, or whether I merely entered it. I do not know whether dreams have hidden meaning or whether meaning is something we attach afterward. But I know this: if I had tried to invent such a scene while awake, I probably could not have done it even in decades. The dream made something that did not seem to come from me, and placed me inside it.
So I keep it like a rare stone. Not because I understand it, but because I cannot throw it away.
Original Korean article: 지혜의 나무