“It’s just a dream”

“It’s just a dream” is a phrase In-hye uses to comfort her son and then, insistently, to steady herself. Its meaning changes as Yeong-hye’s crisis forces In-hye to confront what she once dismissed as a dream, what she failed to prevent, and the possibility that waking life cannot be reduced to either denial or surrender.

Reassurance to Ji-woo

After Ji-woo wakes upset by a dream about a white bird, In-hye tells him it must have been a mother bird and points out that she herself has not turned into one. She assures him, “You see, it was just a dream.” The phrase initially offers a familiar distinction between an unsettling image and ordinary reality, and she uses it to comfort a child who is crying simply because he feels sad.

The Phrase Reconsidered

In the ambulance, In-hye questions whether her reassurance was true. The morning of the dream, she had turned back from the mountain and retraced her steps down, wearing her faded purple T-shirt. The dream and that return now seem connected, though she cannot establish exactly how. She repeats “It’s just a dream” aloud, vehemently, whenever she recalls Ji-woo’s face, as if speaking the words could settle what remains uncertain.

In-hye’s Guilt and Recognition

The phrase also sits against In-hye’s accumulating doubts about her part in the family’s history. She asks herself whether she could have stopped their father’s violence toward Yeong-hye, intervened before Yeong-hye hurt herself, or prevented the later events involving Mr. Cheong. In-hye recognizes that Yeong-hye had been the only one of the siblings subjected to their father’s beatings. Looking back on her own role as the self-sacrificing eldest daughter, she sees it not simply as maturity but as a means of survival. The dream refrain cannot undo that recognition or make the past safely unreal.

A More Complex Meaning

Near the end, In-hye turns from self-reassurance to Yeong-hye. In the ambulance, she says that perhaps all of this is a kind of dream, then admits that she too has dreams and could let herself dissolve into them. But she adds that the dream cannot be all there is: people have to wake at some point. The expression therefore ends not as a confident dismissal of what has happened, but as an unresolved appeal to remain connected to life beyond the dream. As the ambulance leaves Mount Ch’ukseong, In-hye watches the trees and looks for an answer; the phrase has become a question of how to wake, not proof that the crisis was unreal.