[mslee's thoughts] Ep. 1& 2 While You Were Sleeping - First Thoughts

Honestly, I don't know how to share my thoughts on this drama. The basis of the story line is about dreams versus reality. Watching the first episode [half hour] viewers were shown from the first scene how everything that follows were a flashback. The camera goes on a rewind motion bringing back to the heroine coming awake from sleep.

The story is about a girl who always dreams about strangers and mostly they are scary like dying. She jot down notes from her dreams, maybe trying to figure them out when those dreams will happen in reality. What is a fact in the story is that all her dreams do happen and unchanging. 

Until she met her new neighbor Jung Jae Chan. Then she dreamed of her mother dying because of an accident that she herself would cause. It was a fate that will happen if her dreams are basis of her future. So far everything that she had dreamed about turned into reality. There was an overlap in the middle of the first episode where dreams and reality happens. Nam Hong Joo's fear about her mother happened one night in February 14, when she was out with a prosecutor named Lee Yoo Beom, who happens to be Jae Chan's colleague. There was an accident and a man died. She was in a coma for nine - ten months. When she woke up her mother is already dead. And she was a suspect for hitting the man who died that night. What was clear in her memory is that she was not the one who drove that night but Yoo Beom. She clearly gave him the keys. But ironically and hurtful, he denied everything.





What she never knew about Yoo Beom was that he was a habitual liar and his history with Jae Chan proved that he used Jae Chan for his own greed and then left him alone to face the consequences of their agreement then. Jae Chan suffered the anger of his own father for deceiving him about his grades. Yoo Beom use to tutor him then and wanted to earn more in place of tampering his grades. Maybe naive Jae Chan went with the plan but it backfired on him.

I could have missed the overlap in the story if I did not understand the latter part of episode one. Jae Chan for the first time dreamed of Hong Joo. His dream started from after the accident happened and the consequences that followed. With her as a suspect on the death of a man, a policeman, with her mother dead, she felt alone and no reason to live. He was the prosecutor in charge and in his dream he saw the moment she jumped off the rooftop of the hospital, his hand extended to rescue her but she did not hold his hand.

The day he woke up after that dream was on the day of the impending accident, on the 14th of February 2016. 

Now I find it confusing really but I think the story that showed the accident was actually Jae Chan's dreams. It was his dream seeing both Hong Joo and Yoo Beom in a date that night. And he worried about his dream. To believe that it will happen or not. In the end he chose to believe his gut. He was there outside the restaurant where Yoo Beom and Hong Joo will meet for a date. He was not able to stop them from dating or telling them about his dream. The car key was the key point of that night. Who will drive it and who will cause the accident.



In the end he decided to mess with fate. If the dream is turning into a destiny then he on his own decided to change the fate of everyone on that night. He chose to cause the accident on that night by hitting his car with Hong Joo's car of which Yoo Beom was driving. What he did saved the man from dying who was then standing at a far shocked at what happened in front of his eyes. The moment he lived, surely Hong Joo's mother will live, too.

The question here, did he really changed the fate or destiny of that night? Does he have the power to change a dream?



The ending has come full circle in episode 2 showing the first scenes in episode one where Hong Joo walked in slow motion with snow falling towards Jae Chan and hugged him tightly saying she believed him.. She was also thankful. She knew her dream was somehow changed.


I did make gif scenes of episodes 1 and 2 in a separate blogs. The scenes of HER reality and dreams and HIS reality and dreams.  Check them out. They will be posted after this.

Thoughts on episodes 3 and 4 soon.

-mslee1107-