Dreams and the boundary between dream and reality

Dreams and the boundary between dream and reality is a recurring structure of uncertainty in The Vegetarian, where visions are not sealed off from waking life but press into bodies, family memories, and decisions. Yeong-hye’s dream of becoming plantlike supplies images and language through which she understands her refusal of ordinary food; In-hye’s memories and Ji-woo’s dream complicate any confident distinction between vision and fact. The closing ambulance journey leaves the question open: In-hye urges her sister toward waking, while the world outside appears charged with the same imagery that has unsettled them both.

Yeong-hye’s Dreams and Bodily Transformation

The dream motif enters through a recollection of Yeong-hye speaking in the half-state between sleep and wakefulness. Her voice moves from warmth and apparent innocence toward something In-hye cannot make out. In-hye wakes frightened, then sees blood running from her own eye in the mirror; when she raises a hand to wipe it away, the reflected figure does not move. The scene joins a dreamlike disturbance to a concrete waking perception, without establishing whether the reflection is a vision, a misperception, or something else.

Later, Yeong-hye recounts a dream in which she stands on her head, with leaves growing from her body and roots from her hands as she digs into the earth. She connects the dream to her desire for flowers to bloom from her body. These are not presented merely as images remembered at a distance: she points toward the window and says that the trees stand upside down, then declares that she needs water rather than food. The dream’s vegetal logic becomes a way of describing her present condition and her rejection of eating, while the account offers no external confirmation that the world has literally changed.

In-hye remembers another moment when Yeong-hye lay in a hospital ward with a drip inserted into her hand. Yeong-hye asks for water, then asks whether her sister has spoken with the doctor. The medical setting places her dream-linked language beside the ordinary circumstances of treatment and care. In-hye’s questions about what Yeong-hye had been doing in the woods, and her plea that she eat something, show the practical stakes of the divide: what Yeong-hye experiences as a different relation to nourishment is also a condition that alarms those trying to keep her alive.

Dreams Across Family Memory

The novel gives dream imagery to more than Yeong-hye. In-hye recalls that, as a child, she and her sister became lost on a mountain. Nine-year-old Yeong-hye suggested that they should not go back, a statement In-hye did not understand at the time. Years later, In-hye remembers that episode while considering Yeong-hye’s question about whether dying is such a bad thing. The childhood memory does not explain the later crisis, but it makes the sisters’ present separation echo an earlier moment of being lost together, when one sister could not yet comprehend what the other was saying.

A separate recollection centers on Ji-woo’s childhood account of a white bird. He says that he saw a photograph of his mother flying in the wind, then looked at the sky and heard a bird say that it was his mother; two hands came out of the bird’s body. The memory shows the child’s distress as well as the strangeness of the image. In-hye tries to reassure him that the bird must have been a mother bird and that she has not turned into one. At the time she offers the simple explanation that it was only a dream; much later, in the ambulance, she wonders whether that certainty was justified.

That later doubt is tied to In-hye’s own return from the mountain. She recalls walking down early in the morning, after turning her back on the rising sun, wearing a faded purple T-shirt. She had not understood the significance of the cold dampness on the path at the time. The remembered journey becomes difficult to separate from the stories, dreams, and transformations that have altered her family life. The text preserves the memory’s force while leaving its meaning unsettled rather than declaring it supernatural or dismissing it as coincidence.

The Unstable Line Between Vision and Waking

The motif’s recurring force lies in the transfer between registers. Yeong-hye’s visions are reported through the speech and perceptions of others, while In-hye’s own memories supply further uncertainty: a still mirror image, a child’s bird, a mountain path, and the remembered voice of her sister each make waking explanation feel incomplete. Yet the narrative does not establish that these images are objectively true. Its uncertainty is not a puzzle with a concealed solution so much as a sustained pressure on the characters’ ability to tell what can be dismissed as dream and what must be answered in waking life.

That pressure is especially sharp when In-hye repeats to herself that it was only a dream. She remembers Ji-woo’s sadness and her own reassurance, but in the ambulance she is no longer sure that the experience was merely a coincidence. The phrase becomes something she tells herself aloud and forcefully, not a settled conclusion. Its repetition thus marks an effort to restore a dependable boundary at the very moment that her memories make the boundary harder to trust.

The dream motif also changes what the characters can say to one another. Yeong-hye speaks of trees, roots, flowers, and water; In-hye answers with questions about food, treatment, and whether dreams have to end. Their words do not produce a shared explanation, but they create an encounter between Yeong-hye’s inward account and her sister’s attempt to remain in the world of care and obligation. The gap is visible in the hospital conversation, where a request for water and a question about the doctor stand beside the unexplained dream and the family’s urgent concern.

The Ambulance and the Unresolved Ending

In the ambulance, In-hye finally tells Yeong-hye that she too has dreams and could let herself dissolve into them, but asks whether dreaming can be all there is and says that they must wake at some point. Her speech is an appeal, not evidence that she has resolved the question. It holds together her recognition of the pull of dreams and her insistence that there remains a world to which they must return.

As the ambulance rounds the last bend away from Mount Ch’ukseong, In-hye sees a black bird rise toward dark clouds. Summer sunlight stings her eyes, and she can no longer follow the bird. The trees beside the road appear to blaze with green fire, moving like the flanks of a large animal. The images recall Yeong-hye’s plantlike visions and Ji-woo’s bird, but the ending does not say whether In-hye is seeing ordinary trees and a bird through the intensity of the moment or encountering something beyond ordinary explanation. She stares at the trees as if waiting for an answer, or protesting; the narrative leaves her gaze, and the boundary it tests, unresolved.

Narrative Significance

Dreams connect scenes and generations without making them equivalent. Yeong-hye’s visions shape her account of her own body and her refusal of food; In-hye’s recollections turn past events over in the light of the present; Ji-woo’s dream gives the child an image of a mother who might become a bird. Each episode carries a different relation to fear, care, and interpretation, so the motif does not reduce the characters to a single symbolic meaning.

The uncertainty also draws attention to the limits of explanation. In-hye can offer a child the reassurance that a frightening image was only a dream, and she can urge her sister that waking must come, but neither statement settles what the experiences mean. By ending with the ambulance still in motion and In-hye watching the trees without receiving an answer, the novel keeps dream and waking in unresolved proximity. The motif makes that uncertainty consequential: it shapes how the sisters understand Yeong-hye, what In-hye can believe about her own memories, and whether ordinary explanations can contain the experiences that have overtaken their family.