I have many memories of my dreams.

Dreams —
the mysterious realm everyone visits while asleep.

For me, dreams are as vivid and clear as reality.
When I awaken, I don't simply think, "It was just a dream."
Instead, I feel disoriented, as if I’ve been transported elsewhere.

There are friends I left behind in dreams,
times when I ran desperately from threatening beings,
or moments when I awoke from deep suffering in chaotic worlds.

Every detail — the space, the colors, the scents, the emotions, and even the sensations of the body —
feels no different from waking life.

Only much later did I realize
these dreams sometimes revealed and allowed me to experience fragments of the future.

What about your dreams?
Do they ever feel as vivid and real?
Have you, perhaps, returned to the same dream
to continue its story as though it naturally unfolds night after night?

In this space,
I will often share such stories from my dreams.

These dreams have deeply shaped my inner world
and are intimately connected to my meditative journey.

From time to time,
I will bring these stories here to share with you.

My earliest dream memories date back to when I was three or four years old in Korean age—
which would be only a few months old by Western standards.
Since I clearly remember events from before and after my younger sister was born (we are three years apart),
these early impressions were not vague baby sensations but something more conscious.

I would awaken at dawn—
that thin edge of time when night hasn't fully left, but morning is arriving.
I often found myself lying between my parents’ legs,
alone and wide awake while the world was still asleep.

And that was when the visitors would appear.

They were not human.
Their eyes were unsettling, their energy dark, and they always seemed to be searching for me, calling for me.
At the time, I had no concept of “ghosts,”
but I knew with certainty: these were not people.

They weren't occasional visitors, either.
As I grew older, they continued to show up—
in dreams and in waking life—always searching.
Their presence was silent yet insistent.

But parallel to them, I also encountered beings of light.
And yet, they were not purely bright.
These presences appeared not in darkness, but under blazing sunlight,
especially during times when my senses were most heightened.

They didn’t speak in words.
But their intent was unmistakable.
Not through eyes, but through presence.
Not through voice, but through energy.
I came to intuitively understand
that there exists a **third language**—
a form of communication beyond human speech.

I was a quiet child.
I didn’t enjoy running or playing with others.
I preferred dolls, books, and drawing—solitary forms of interaction.

Then one day, the space around me began to speak.

It had no form.
But the entire room—or a particular spot within it—
would gaze at me with something like a smile.
They watched with joy.
And I tried to ignore them, fearing I might be going mad.
I moved from room to room, shook my head, tried to center myself—
but wherever I went, they were already there.

Even outside, they followed.
On my way to school, running errands, in narrow alleys—
they appeared as layers of space within space,
observing me with silent attention.
Sometimes, I whispered, “Who are you? Why are you watching me?”
And they responded with wider, warmer smiles.

Eventually, objects joined in.
But the strongest signal came from the sun.
It radiated a single message—
**“Come.”**
Not a whisper, but a deluge.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes urgent.
I felt instinctively:
**“This sun will wait for me to the end.”**

Then, I would scold myself—
“Pull it together. You imagined it. Forget it.”
I tried to stabilize my mind.

But nighttime brought the dark ones again.
Sleep paralysis. Endless journeys through bleak landscapes.
And if I fell asleep again—then came the white hole.

(I’ll write about the white hole in the next part.)

This is how I lived—
ten dreams a night,
moving between realities,
between day and night,
between presence and illusion.

To speak of my childhood is to speak of dreams.
Among them, one stands out with overwhelming intensity: the White Hole.

Most fear darkness. But for me, the most terrifying thing was brightness.
The White Hole was the brightest, most beautiful space—
and yet, it pulled me into the deepest, most silent terror I have ever known.

It always began the same way:
a completely white screen, like a blank canvas.
Then, the white world would start to move—
a massive spiral forming, and I would be at its outermost edge, slowly pulled into rotation.

I would wake in panic, unsure of what was real.
My head spun with dizziness, the border between reality and dream melting away.
Unlike other nightmares—of monsters, war, separation—
this one was silent, yet unspeakably vast in its fear.

It returned again and again.
Even without falling asleep, with my eyes merely closed—
or sometimes even open—just *thinking* of the White Hole
could pull me in.

In those dreams, I was no longer a Korean girl.
I became a white-skinned, short-haired Caucasian child.
Still me—but somehow altered.

And then came the women.
Five to seven white-clad, expressionless "goddesses"
with long white hair and no human quality.
They weren’t spirits or people.
They weren’t male or female.
They were function.
They didn’t touch me.
They only raised their hands, and some unseen force
drew me further and deeper into the spiral.

The deeper I went, the faster I spun.
My mind blurred. I never saw the end.
But I always knew—
if I crossed that threshold,
I would never see my family again.

Each time, I escaped.
And there was only one way: mental force.
I had to fully realize I was dreaming,
and then explode my will outward—
not just mentally, but physically, with every fiber of my being.
It felt like my body shattered,
just to wake myself up.

Sometimes, I wanted to surrender.
Sometimes, I was curious what lay beyond.
But I never crossed.
I always chose to return.

These dreams happened multiple times a day.
Even thinking about them drained me.
By the time I was fourteen,
I began to fantasize about ending my life to escape them.
And then, I told my mother everything.

She didn’t panic.
She smiled and said:
“That’s fascinating. From now on, keep a dream journal.
Let’s talk to a psychiatrist someday, just to explore it.”

That changed everything.

When I made the decision to observe the dream—
to stay with it instead of fighting it—
something shifted.
The fear lost its grip.
The dream still returned, but less often, and with less weight.
Until I became an adult and learned meditation,
it would visit from time to time,
but never again with such control.

The white world. The spiral.
The white girl. The faceless goddesses. The unknowable end.

I never crossed it.

And because I didn’t,
I can speak now.

Next, I will share the dreams that followed—
those in which I healed myself through journeys between the real and the unreal.

This story shares how I’ve healed and transformed myself by crossing the boundaries between reality and non-reality through dreams.

My dreams weren’t like ordinary ones. The boundary between waking and dreaming was nearly nonexistent. Waking up felt more like shifting between dimensions than simply regaining consciousness.

Because the emotions, colors, sounds, and even bodily sensations in my dreams were so vivid, each dream—its events and encounters—left a deep imprint on my waking life. The emotional and even physical effects lingered long after I opened my eyes.

When I was about nine years old, I began to have recurring dreams about war. In South Korea, schools often screened anti-communist films for children at that time. The violent scenes from those films penetrated deep into my awareness, far more than they did for my classmates. That night, I had a war nightmare.

In the dream, our family was attacked. I hid inside my mother’s wardrobe, powerless, watching my family fall victim to violence—especially my little sister. The guilt I felt afterward was crushing. The next night, the same dream returned, exactly as before. Again, I did nothing.

So I prayed—to dream it again.

And on the third night, the dream came once more. This time, I broke out of the wardrobe and pleaded with the soldiers: “Please save my sister. Take me instead.”
In that dream, I died violently. The pain was so vivid that I felt it in my body even after waking.
But my guilt was gone. It had been resolved.

That experience taught me several things:

- Dreams are conscious spaces one can re-enter.
- The scenario within a dream can be changed.
- Changing a dream can change the emotional structure of waking life.

After that, I began to address aspects of myself that had troubled me: my inability to say “no,” my discomfort with expressing anger, my fear of confrontation.

In dreams, I started to experiment with being more assertive.
When a similar situation appeared again, I acted differently—and that shift carried over into my waking self.
Whether it was emotional boundaries in relationships, my relationship to instinct and desire, or learning to forgive myself, I used dreams as an environment where inner transformation preceded outward change.

Of course, I haven’t shared every dream here. Some are too personal or too surreal.
But what I want to convey is this:

**Reality, dreams, imagination, and dimensions we have yet to reach—they are all connected, and constantly influencing each other.**

And within that flow, I learned how to change myself.

Ten years old, third grade in elementary school.
I still remember the classroom, the desk, and the faces of my friends.
Even then, I was constantly asking inward questions.

“Why does war happen?”
“Why does money hurt the people I love?”
“What happens after death?”
“Why is the sky above and the ground below?”

Chasing these unanswerable questions gave me pain—not a physical headache,
but a kind of pressure that came when **consciousness surpassed its own capacity**.

One day, exhausted from thinking, I rested my head on my desk.
And I entered a space—
a **visualized realm of consciousness** I had never known before.

My head became an old attic, and my eyes were the windows.
It looked like an old European house:
dusty furniture, a piano, a small wardrobe, all covered in white cloths.
The floor was wooden. Time itself felt suspended in that air.

I opened the window. Light poured in.
I started cleaning: dusting, wiping, opening space.
This was not mere imagination—
it was a **ritual of emotional purification**.

The sunlight, the cleaned room, and the fluttering white sheets—
they were all metaphors for **restoring inner order**.

And then, I realized:
**My emotions could be managed,
and the key was not outside me—but already within.**

This wasn’t a philosophical idea.
It was an experiential understanding—
**a self-repair mechanism born of necessity.**

Later, I tried to return to that state, but it rarely worked.
I learned why:
my **expectation of the outcome became noise**
that blocked the door to the internal space.

That realization taught me to stop clinging to the same method.
Instead, I explored new ones—
which opened the door to diverse **consciousness training**.

What I saw in that attic wasn’t just my mind,
but the very **structure of the psyche**—
and the possibility of engaging with it on my own terms.

Ten years old.
A small, pale child with a lowered head.
One who met the world not through words, but through **images**.
Not with answers, but with **spaces**.

That child still lives in me—
quietly, in the deepest room,
still opening the window, slowly.