Dream: Waking Up Is Hard to Do

Anyone well-versed in children's fairy tales knows that getting your wildest wish granted is ultimately a nasty curse in disguise. For Jo-sin (Hwang Nam), the dream is leaving the religious brotherhood and spending the rest of his life with the beautiful Dal-lye (Choi Eun-hie). But living a commonplace existence with his ideal woman isn't the fantasy that he'd imagined. And it's not this his newlywed bride is a shrew or stupid or narcissistic. Despite his eventual physical abuse of her, she's a loyal companion, as pretty as ever, and as deeply in love with him as he is with her. He hasn't chosen his lovely soulmate unwisely. The problem is, basically, life.

In Shin Sang-ok's Dream, leaving the monkhood is going to mean being on the lam, murdering a rapist, then murdering an envious former holy man, too. Admittedly, Jo-sin gets a gloriously thick head of hair in his post-priesthood existence but otherwise, his day-to-day outside the temple is far from the ideal he desperately craved. Perhaps, his wish wasn't specific enough. Maybe he should've insisted that Dal-lye's fiancé would've stopped loving her. Maybe he could've have stipulated that his romance would last into eternity. He did not. So his bliss is temporary. And temporary bliss leads to temporary pain. What's to learn from this sad turn of events? Maybe that enlightened Buddhists must relinquish their attachments to earthly pleasures and earthly gains. That's the kind of epiphany that rarely lasts the time it takes to count the 108 wooden beads on your Buddhist bracelet. Or to put it in Karmic terms, better luck next time.