[dream] A Little Wish - January, 2004 and July, 2005

The first part of what I'm writing here wasn't really a dream, but the final of the trilogy of "visions" I experienced. In my first vision, I saw myself walking down the aisle five weeks before I got married, every detail an eerie carbon copy of the actual event. The second vision was of my divorce--a day before the wedding. Here's the third vision, hopefully the last one I will ever experience. At the time, I was having a severe on-going back problem and had to lie down frequently throughout the day. This vision came one of those days, while I was lying down in the mid-afternoon, neither quite asleep nor fully awake.

* * * * *

I seem a bit older. Perhaps in mid-thirties. My hair, long and straight, is in an up-do. It seems to be summer time, and I have on a black short sleeve shirt. And I am about seven months pregnant with a baby boy.

A little girl is next to me. She is wearing a short sleeve dress, and she has a bob-cut hair with bangs. The skin on her chubby cheeks seem extraordinarily fair against her jet black hair. She looks up at me, and, tugging at my shirt, asks,

"Mommy, mommy, where do babies come from?"

I chuckle a little, then I start to reply,

"Well, Sowon, the babies....."

* * * * *

It was the moment I called out her name that I came to my consciousness. I had never heard that name before, and my then husband and I had already picked out names for future possible additions to the family. My mind could not possibly make up a name like that--it had to be a vision. Sowon, meaning "a little wish" in Korean, was a unique name, but I felt a certain sense of familiarity. I was starting to anticipate the realization of this vision.

Later that same year, I called my marriage quits. I had a dog, Suni, at the time, and kept her for a while, until I realized that I could barely care for myself, let alone a dog. It was hard to let her go, but I found her a great home in June of 2005. A dream about Sowon came a month later.

* * * * *

I'm taking a nap in the master bedroom of the house I grew up in Korea. The sound of Suni's footsteps--her nails clicking against the wooden floors of the living room--awakens me. She's approaching the bedroom door, knowing that I am in there.

She whines outside the door for a bit as I keep quiet. Then, as can only be possible in a dream, she slides in through the gap under the door. She is ecstatic to see me. I am, too, but the prospect of having to return Suni to her current owner weighs down on me, just as I felt when I gave her up in the first place.

I take her out to the living room. The house is almost exactly the same as I remember it, except for a few minor things, notably a kitchen to the left of the master bedroom. In the kitchen is my ex on his cell phone, as he always was while we were married. In the dream we are still married, though obviously not happily. I briefly give him a look of disgust and contempt, then turn my eyes to Suni.

In place of Suni, though, I find Sowon sitting, looking exactly the same as in the vision I had. And seeing her, I burst into tears.

"I'm so sorry. Sowon, mommy's so sorry....."

I am choking on tears and can't continue. So she gets up, walks over to me, and gives me a hug.

"Mommy, it's okay," she says.

* * * * *

When I woke up after this dream, I sensed that the third vision will never realize. In the dream when I apologized to her, I was apologizing for not granting her life in this world. But I feel as though she had existed. Perhaps her soul, too delicate for earthly life, could only exist through my mind until the tumults of my psyche perished her.

Suni, May, 2005