Poets often referred to the two gates leading from this dominion of dreams. The gates were made from the protection, the ferocity, of animals. One gate—ivory ( / alphas), one gate—horn ( / keras). The dreams themselves were divided; truth through the horn half-door, false dreams passed by the ivory gate. The natural world enclosed, protected, and opened out to give the dreams freedom. Ever inside the gated domain stood an elm tree that served as a kind of coatrack for the winged dreams made by the Oneiroi. These dreams hung there with their secrets.

As we task our memory-organ to re-member our life in Korea, we breed dream after dream. False dreams? Truthful dreams? Hanging? Phantom shaped? They drop like ripe fruit, then disappear before hitting the ground, preventing bruising, rotting. Dreams are ephemera and have no body to violate, no flesh to decay. They can remain fresh as the wind, recycled like hot rising vapor from the ocean, into the frozen clouds, and eventually back into the crashing black water, the source of all dreams, the living body of our planet.

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A few years ago, we had our first dream set in Korea in which everyone, including us, was speaking Korean. A grandmother and a hut and a doorway figured prominently. There might have been a fire. There might have been daylight. It was brief but vivid.

We woke up changed, an altered person. Transformed.

In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find that he has become a monstrous vermin (Ungeziefer: an unclean beast not fit for sacrifice). Readers are not privy to the transformation itself, nor to any rational explanation for the radical change. It can be read as, among many other things, a metaphor for the arbitrariness of punishment in an indifferent, hostile universe. Though there is a hospital right across the street from his room, no attempt is made to either bring Gregor there or fetch a doctor from it. It looms, inaccessible.

Another meaning of the transformation, which is not mutually exclusive with other readings, is that Gregor has become, in body, that which he was “in soul,” something akin to a beetle, a mindless drudge carrying food from world to nest, over and over again. Gregor, a traveling salesman, brings money home to his family, again and again. The Samsa family lives in a society that is primarily an impersonal bourgeois economy, a culture that values commerce over every other human activity.