Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, now sixty years old, who was a young woman of twenty-two when we were born, was very recently elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first woman to hold this office. She, being the daughter of a dictator, among other things, is a figure of controversy. Underneath (or merely behind) the machinery of politics, we wonder what dreams her mother, Young-soo, had while she was pregnant with Geun-hye. What maternal stamps and stains marked her, competed or melded with Chunghee’s heritable contributions? Could they have predicted that the mother, the First Lady of a despot, would give way, in this manner, to the daughter?

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Traditional beliefs regarding fetal life:

Koreans count the gestation period as the first year in a child’s life.

It is believed that the mother’s thoughts, behaviors, and feelings during the pregnancy will have a formative influence on the well-being of the fetus, so the prenatal period is called the education period for the unborn child.

A dream may predict the kind of person the unborn child will be.

Someone very close to the child to be born—the mother, grandfather, or other close relative—is likely to have such a significant premonition-like dream.4

Hyun Sook Han, Understanding My Child’s Korean Origins (Minneapolis Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, 1983).

During the second six or seven months of our life outside the womb, in our post-fetal life, we surely dreamed. We also experienced three families, three mothers during that time. A foster family cared for us until we were adopted by an American couple, to which we were delivered at the age of thirteen months, or, about one year in American-time, while, in Korean-time, we were over two years old.

Now we ourselves are a mother, with a daughter and a son. We remember well their slow fetal metamorphoses. Our sleep was highly interrupted by various expected discomforts.

Did we loan them our sleep? What dreams did we give them?

Many fetal dreams never make it outside the womb. The making of a human—our large brains, those frontal lobes, that capacity for memory, planning, and cruelty—is energy-intensive and complicated. Many things can go awry.

Apparently, many embryos “know” there is something wrong with them and thus efficiently self-destruct, making way for the next embryo that may have a better chance at survival outside the womb’s plush red palace.

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In Greek mythology, the god of dreams, Morpheus, was winged and could assume any form. His domain, the land of dreams, was near the underworld, home to Night and her children. Dreams departed Morpheus’s realm through two gates.