One day I plan to publish a book titled 10 Years of Failing to Lucid Dream. It will have to be published in 2020, because I started it in 2010.

I have always been fascinated with dreams. Perhaps it’s because of stories I read that put such stock in dreams or because I had such vivid dreams myself. Maybe it’s just because Korean culture has a whole system of beliefs rooted in the power of dreams. In any case, I researched for months looking for a way that would allow me to lucid dream. I wanted to be able to control the (dream) world around me and perhaps bring the characters in my stories to life and converse with them.

One of the most effective methods is, apparently, keeping a dream diary. Apparently it allows people to begin to recognize patterns in their dreams and recognize when they are dreaming. In my case, all it did was reveal to me that my dreams have no patterns and that I am often not even ‘myself’ in dreams. In fact, all that has happened since I started a dream diary is that my dreams have become even more complex, more vivid, and more cinematic… which is great and all, but I still have no control over it, ahaha.

There are a few specific dream examples that come to mind, but I plan to save those for the book. For now, I suppose I’ll just post a shorter one from each year. Sorry, they’re not my best and most interesting, but those are several pages long, and I don’t think any of you have time for those quite yet, ahaha. Fair warning, some of these are violent and could be considered horrific by some, but here are six entries that are only a paragraph or two long:

Sunday, August 29, 2010
I dreamed that I was in a cage – a prison of some sorts – with several other people. I believe they were women, but I am not sure. There was a group of psychopaths with strange, supernatural powers. They could cause people to thrash around and make their limbs fall apart in a bloody and agonizing manner. For some reason, they offered us a competition in which only one of us would come out alive, which was really quite rude, but they gave us a list of options, so I suppose that was alright. The only two options off the list I can recall was something called ‘chas’ – which none of us recognized, we suspected someone mispelled it – and a simple foot race. Although we chose the foot race, we ended up in a coliseum battle to the death with maces instead.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011
I dreamed that I was with a companion of mine who was not anyone I recognized from my real life. He was a dignified man dressed in the manner of a Victorian era gentleman, and he wore a top hat as well. I cannot recall his face. We are in a meadow and the sun is high and there was a cool breeze that was light on the skin. I found a four leaf clover, and I showed it to the man with mild excitement, but he was apathetic. He found another one with ease, showed it to me, and then tore it apart. He burned the shredded leaves, saying that such a thing is nothing special. He called it a “false four-leaf”, and he explained that those artificially created ones were actually bad luck, commenting how it’s a sad world where falsities are impossible to tell apart from truths.

Friday, December 14, 2012
I was a man who had wandered for a long time. I walked through gentle snowfall in a city unfamiliar to me, yet there was another man – with long black hair, tied back loosely – who seemed familiar with me. I did not recognize him, and there was more to this part, but I cannot recall. What I do remember, however, is that this man who seemed to know me insisted on getting me to try his homemade alcohol, disbelieving when I denied its deliciousness. There was one particularly pretty brew – pink with flower petals scattered into the drink. I was hesitant, but at his calm insistence, I took a sip. It was tasteless at first, and when I told him such, he told me to try more. I did, and then it was almost pleasantly sweet. I drank more, and it suddenly tasted terrible. As my mother woke me up to reality, I told him, “I’m sorry, it tastes like Benadryl.”

Monday, September 21, 2013
I was a swordsman with a habit of flirting with female bartenders. Apparently I was usually successful and had collecting a lot of numbers in my time. Unfortunately, I was also of the forgetful sort, and always genuinely forgot to input the numbers into my phone and constantly lost the slips of paper I had them written down. In this dream, the bartender I was speaking to was a cheerful and insistent young woman with reddish hair and dark skin. Suddenly, her phone started vibrating and the security camera caught sight of someone in a mascot suit. I was on edge because apparently me and my partner were on a mission of sorts and everyone was out to get us. Ultimately after a dramatic moment  of me forgetting to take off my parka in my haste to get to the door, the guy turns out to be aforementioned partner who drew his own katana in alarm. He looked preposterous, in battle stance while wearing a mascot suit, and I told him so. “Why are you wearing a Paler Bear suit??? Why the hell did you call before walking in like some bad mov-” “I WAS TRYING TO BE POLITE!”

Tuesday, November 11, 2014
I was one of a group of children with elemental powers, all conveniently color-coded through their clothes. They were supposed to live in this enclosed educational facility, and there was a script all of us was following. Someone was going to scale the wall and try and escape, but we had all been tricked. The instant we tried to put the plan into motion, the government or the authority figures, whoever they were, stretched the walls until they were so high that we couldn’t even see the sky. This wasn’t how the script went, so we were like, “But… No one could climb that! That’s cheating!” but of course, they didn’t care.

The thing ended up turning into some kind of lesson on rebellion because the teacher gave us masks and told us that if we wanted to fight against the guards, we should only do so while wearing masks and that while we were in their presence as ourselves, we should be meek and compliant no matter what they do, which was a tall order since they did a lot and we were at oldest 16 years old and at youngest like 8. A lot of the younger children came to me for consolation. There were following mini-events that I can’t recall, but there was something involving a mop and a bucket, and then something about a large festival where the conductor (a friend of mine) kept messing up because another friend in the front row kept distracting him.

Monday, April 6, 2015
Something about a girl I was trying to help. She wanted to see her lover up in a tower. What she didn’t realize, however, was that she wasn’t actually a real girl but part of a merry-go-round, and her lover in the ‘tower’ – the centerpiece of the fair attraction – was actually a mannequin. When I point this out with hints to her, such as how the swans seemingly leading up to him were fake, she grew violent – terrifyingly so. She wasn’t afraid to try and impale people, and once the merry-go-round started, there was no stopping it. This guy I knew in the dream had to come help me subdue and destroy her.

Monday, February 15, 2016
I was a man who had survived the apocalypse. I recall a messy head of black hair and an old trench coat. I had wandered into a convenience store to take anything that could seem useful, but it turned out to be part of an old, abandoned adoption center. The managing lady introduced me to some of the children, somewhat fearfully because I was apparently an intimidating figure, but one of the older children in the group took initiative. He clearly had the manager’s favor, and for good reason. His name was Emilio, and he was eleven years old. He was trilingual (Englsh, French, and Spanish) and mature, like an older brother to all the other children, and his favorite food was bulgogi, a Korean dish. I had been planning to move on to a different city afterwards, but I found myself wanting to be friends with Emilio.