I entirely agree with the idea that dreams are another world. I do not know what kind of world it is, but if one gathers its fragments, it is easy to see that it differs from the place we call reality. The situations that change according to one’s state of perception also mean that in dreams, perception may change at any time, but it may also have been wrong. Like a child, one judges from only a part, and when one realizes that judgment was wrong, the situation itself changes. I might be studying in a classroom, and though the atmosphere seems peaceful, if I think that something frightening is happening behind it, a monster may soon race across the schoolyard and smash through the entrance door. The way for me to escape is to go out through the window and move aside to a place that cannot be seen through the window, or to close both the front and back doors and stand tightly behind a door where I cannot be seen. Going out through the window is more dangerous because I can be seen from outside. In the space called a dream, any anxiety can easily become reality.
Even after closing the classroom door and standing there, I must not relax. If my eyes meet the monster’s through the hallway window, it will be serious. I know that if someone hurriedly opens the door and comes in and the monster follows, its eyes will meet mine. Therefore, once the door is closed, it must be locked properly. But if I remain tense and someone comes in through the door on the other side, I also have to consider opening my door and leaving when the monster enters. If both doors are locked, it will look strange if someone outside tries to open both of them, and since I have thought that I will look strange, that strangeness becomes true, and the classroom I am in will be suspected immediately. Usually, I leave the back door used by the children unlocked, lock the front door, and stand beside it. I have had that dream twice, and both times I woke after hiding that way.
But frightening dreams are only the representative example of the world inside my head. When it truly feels like another world, my judgment has no effect at all. There were times when I learned something new, and even times when I went on field trips. Sometimes I remember because the information was strange, but sometimes what was an obvious everyday matter inside the dream turns out, after waking, not to be ordinary at all. Memory remains well only when one receives a shock inside the dream, so no matter how strange it seems now, if I accepted it as ordinary in the dream, it disappears quickly unless I write it down after waking. It is like how the things one experiences as a child are hard to remember even by the age of ten.
There are cases where the laws of nature differ from those of this world, and there are cases where science and technology are far too advanced. I once saw a machine that increased mass by rotating a lump of metal. The gravity increased in that way was used to lift an airplane. Such things are not things I could invent. If I had wandered through YouTube or the internet, taken an idea, and had such a dream, then that too would mean my brain operates in some elaborate way. But that is not the case. I am the type whose eyes easily turn toward strange things, but I do not apply them to unrelated matters like that. So the most plausible theory is that perhaps I actually saw them in another world.
These thoughts lie underneath me when I write. The mystery of dreams, or the point of contact with another world. And because dreams are not something I dream by my own will, but something that is dreamed on its own, writing, where I imagine and write with myself as the axis, is another exciting thing altogether. Even if something strange appears, that strange thing is not the center. It merely serves as a crossbeam cutting across the middle while another story flows on. Therefore, I do not need to know its principle either. I only need to describe it as I saw it, as if I had seen it in a dream. Literally, it is a dream dreamed in daylight. It is not that I decorate another world through writing, but that I describe another world through writing.
Korean original: 꿈의 세계