On a Cloud

If you had a choice to live a life where everything is happy or one where life isn’t perfect, what would you choose? What if you can sleep long-term (or forever) in the real world but live in your dream world? Would you choose to do that? Sometimes, it seems like a good option. But is it?

That idea has been floating in my head since I followed the promotions for This Man. It's the new album of the Seventeen sub-unit JxW (Jeonghan x Wonwoo). Promotions involved the story of a supernatural figure that enters people’s dreams.

The music video for the song and the accompanying audiobook made me stop and think about this story. In both the MV and the audiobook, Wonwoo plays “This Man.” He is that man that people often see in their dreams but hardly remember when they wake up.

Wonwoo is the man who visits you in your dreams and wakes you up from them. Because of that, some people might see him as a nightmare ripping them away from their happy dream world. But for him, it is a way of helping people to open their eyes. People should not only look for happiness in their dreams. He believes that happiness in dreams becomes bland and empty. He thinks happiness could be better found in the real world. Life is not perfect, but people can still find happiness there.

But there was another man that people thought was “This Man.” Jeonghan was also in the dream world. He was tapping into other people's dreams to recreate the life he lost and wanted to have back. This included bringing back the person he longed for the most. Unfortunately, the longer he stayed in the dream world, the longer it was degrading. Because of that, he kept tapping on more people and their dreams to recreate the world he wanted. He did this to make the fantasy world his reality.

Jeonghan would visit people’s dreams and promise to fulfill their wishes if they joined him. He would grant them their wish to a happy dream where they can stay forever. If they refuse, he turns their dreams into sand and leaves them unhappy. Wonwoo does not like this. He thinks the dreams Jeonghan gives are hollow and people never wake from them. He believed that if they stay in this dream world, they are as good as dead.

This story moved me because I could understand both sides. Jeonghan in this world only wanted to be happy. He was sad because of what he lost. The dream world allowed him to get it back. It's sad that no matter how hard he tried, that world was breaking down faster than he could keep it together. He was offering happiness to people in their dreams because that was how he was trying to get his old life back. He only wanted to help himself and others who were dealing with sadness to be happy. The methods he had to try to keep that world may not have been good, but he had good intentions.

It felt depressing to see how his world was breaking down. It was sad to see how he was desperate to rebuild everything again. That is something I can relate to. When you’re dealing with a loss, the one thing you want is to get back to that part of life where you were once happy. You want to get to that place of comfort again.

Jeonghan's focus on getting this person back and realizing he can’t remember his/her face anymore was so sad. Realizing he put a cloth over this person because he couldn’t remember and was in denial? It was heartbreaking. He was desperate to return to how life was but it was too late.

Wonwoo, on the other hand, only wanted people to live. He wanted people to find real happiness beyond their dream world. Even if it meant that they experienced hardships along the way. Even if people saw him as a boogeyman that was taking them away from something good.

At the end of the MV, Wonwoo approached Jeonghan. He confronted him and did what he had always done to people in the dream world, waking them up. According to the audiobook, the result was different for Jeonghan. Instead of waking him up, Wonwoo let him fall back to sleep. A dream within a dream. In this new dream, he was not "This Man." He was living in what seemed to be his new reality, in a life where he could start over again.

The audiobook and the MV end with Wonwoo again being the lone person visiting people’s dreams. He was a nightmare that people did not remember. They don’t know what the dream was about, only that he was in it. But this nightmare pushed them back into the real world, where they could look for real happiness.

It was so thought-provoking for me. On one end, I could understand Jeonghan’s intentions. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world without heartbreak or pain? But I also understood Wonwoo’s point of view. How could you measure your happiness if you did not know how to experience pain or loss? How empty would that happiness be and how could you appreciate it?

Another idea that caught my attention was the line about how you cannot make things go back to the way they were. There was an analogy about how you can't take out pepper already stirred into soup. It's the same with lemonade already spilled on the carpet. In the audiobook and the MV, Jeonghan was desperate to bring things back to how they were and failed. I take that as showing that you need to stop looking back. You cannot change the past. You can only move forward. There is no point in changing things that have already happened. What you can do is look at how you can still change your future and look for your happiness there.

I’m a bit on the fence about whose side I’m on in this situation. I am someone who has experienced heartbreak, loss, and disappointment. There are moments when I would have been willing to escape into a dream world where everything is OK. But if that world is going to be in a repetitive loop like Jeonghan's, I’m not sure how happy I would be. As hard as the real world is, I can admit that happiness is sweeter if you know how it feels not to have it.

If you had a choice, which man would you choose?