K-Dramas And Dream Interpretations

What do you dream about? What do your dreams tell you about yourself?

Mine are always an adventure. Usually, I’m fighting and kicking all sorts of ass. Sometimes my dreams work through what’s going on in my life, in the waking hours.

I have the unhealthy tendency to become obsessed with TV shows. The most dangerous? K-dramas. Korean shows. What makes them so dangerous for me? Length, for one. A single season tends to have 24-26 episodes, and each episode is over an hour long. Without commercials. For another, they are guaranteed to rip out my heart. And they don’t always put it back.

The current infatuation: Faith. I finished it last night (and yes, I marathoned my way through). My rib cage was jumping from my heart trying to pound its way out. It’s amazing. Seriously.

I am continuously in awe of this sort of storytelling. They tell the story they have to tell. None of this canceling halfway through. No extra seasons because of good ratings. The anthropologist in me desperately wants to study the culture of South Korean storytelling.

And of course, anything that hooks its claws into me that deeply is going to appear in my dreams. This show just did it a little sooner than most, and in an unusual way.

Since I was a kid, I would dream myself into dangerous situations, fear hiding behind a smart mouth and vague sense of bravado (a trait shared by just about all my main characters). The heroine of the series is a lot like that, but the other night that type never showed. Instead, I dreamed myself captain of a small, elite fighting force who did whatever she had to in order to protect all those she needed to protect. That’s the role of the male lead in the show.

It strikes me as strange and unusual not because of the gender roles (my subconscious doesn’t care about those), but because of its departure from past dream-me character types. Minus the ass-kicking. That’s dream-standard.

My dreams almost always tell me something about myself. Still having trouble figuring out this one, though…

Also? Historical K-dramas have the best costumes.