Joy for Life has republished my Dream Girl story.
and earlier they had reprinted cheating death twenty times
sharing life stories, making the world a better place…
Dream Girl
BY: Jake Cosmos Aller
You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your
dreams.
The dreams started when I was a senior at Berkeley High School in 1974. About a month
before I graduated, I fell asleep in a physics class after lunch and had the first dream:
A beautiful Asian woman was standing next to me, talking in a strange language. She was
stunning—the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was in her early twenties, with long black
hair, and piercing black eyes. She had the look of royalty. She looked at me and then
disappeared, beamed out of my dream like in Star Trek. I fell out of my chair screaming, “Who
are you?” She did not answer.
About a month went by, and then I started having the dream repeatedly. Always the same
pattern.
Early morning, she would stand next to me talking. I would ask who she was, and she
would disappear. She was the most beautiful, alluring woman I had ever seen.
I was struck speechless every time I had the dream.
I had the dream every month during the eight years during which I went to college and
served in the Peace Corps. In fact, when I joined the Peace Corps, I had to decide whether to go
Korea or Thailand. The night before I had to submit my decision, I had the dream again and it
made me sure that she was in Korea waiting for me.
After the Peace Corps, I still hadn’t met my dream woman. I got a job working for the
U.S. Army as an instructor and stayed in Korea. I kept having the dream, until I had the very last
one: She was standing next to me, speaking to me in Korean, but I finally understood her. She
said, “Don’t worry, we will be together soon.”
Why was that the last time I had the dream? Because the very next night, the girl in my
dream got off the bus in front of me. She went on to the base with an acquaintance of mine, a
fellow teacher, and they went to see a movie. I saw her and found the courage to speak with her.
We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to meet that weekend.
The next night, she was waiting for me as I entered the Army base to teach a class. She
told me she was a college senior and she had something to tell me. I signed her on to the base
and left her at the library to study while I taught, and then we went out for coffee after class. She
told me she was madly in love with me, and that I was the man for her. I told her not to worry as
I felt the same.
That weekend, we met Saturday and Sunday and hung out all day. On Sunday night, I
proposed to her. It was only three days after we had met, but for me it felt like we had met eight
years ago. I had been waiting all my life for her to walk out of my dreams and into my life, and
here she was.
Her mother did not want her to marry a foreigner. One day, about a month after we met,
she invited me to meet her parents. I brought a bottle of Jack Daniels for her father and drank the
entire bottle with him. He approved of me, but her mother still had reservations. After a Buddhist
priest told her my future wife and I were a perfect astrological combination, she agreed, and we
planned our wedding.
The wedding was a media sensation in South Korea. My wife explained it to me years
later. At the time, I was overwhelmed just by the fact that we were getting married and I didn’t
fully understand how unusual this was. My wife was of the old royal clan, distant relatives to the
former kings of Korea. In the clan’s history, only two people had ever married foreigners: my
wife, and Rhee Syngman, who was the the first President of South Korea. My father, who was a
former Undersecretary of Labor, came out for the wedding, which fueled even more media
interest. Our marriage defied the stereotypical Korean-foreign marriage where the women
married some hapless GI just to escape poverty and immigrate to the U.S. We were the first
foreign/Korean couple to get married at a Korean Army base. Over 1,000 people came to the
wedding, and my father was interviewed on the morning news programs.
This all happened thirty-five years ago, and I am still married to the girl in my dreams.
Now in my dreams she watches over me when we are apart.
