She felt the light on her eyes before she even opened them. When she did open them, she saw her boyfriend sitting in the office chair next to her, his eyes closed, head resting on one of his hands, his arm propped against her bedside table. “Hey,” she called, poking him as she sat up. “Wake up, sleepy head.”

Woohyun’s eyes snapped open, and he practically jumped out of the chair. “Chunhee!”

What was his issue? Why was he so excited? “I just had a dream where you were a king,” she informed him, smiling in amusement. “It was a really weird dream, actually…I was on a train…” The details were starting to escape her already, and she had just woken up.

Woohyun sighed, and a closer look at his face told her that he was about to cry. “That wasn’t a dream, Chunhee.”

“What?”

“Actually, should I say, that was more than a dream.”

“You’re not making any sense, Woohyun,” Chunhee groaned. “Is this your idea of a funny joke?”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, it isn’t. You were lost in your own mind. Don’t you remember what happened within the past year?”

She did. Her sister’s death, her mother’s sickness, her father’s withdrawal from her life…all of it. “Of course.”

“Well, you almost forgot all of it,” said Woohyun.

“I did?”

“Just listen to me speak, please.” He was looking at her pleadingly, so she stayed silent and complied. “You couldn’t handle the pain, so your mind began to close in on itself. It constructed something called a worldspace, an imaginary place, and you closed it off from everything else. At first it was only temporary. You would go into the worldspace and then come out, not knowing what had happened. Eventually you began to live in the worldspace, constructing identities for yourself where you were the hero of your own story, blameless, and not a victim of anything. It was relentless cycle. And on the outside, you were a human vegetable.

“So we had to get you out. You have no idea how hard it was to get your dad not to call the hospital when the isolation was complete and you passed out. We stopped him the best we could. Then we had to enter your mind, find the worldspace, figure out a way to get inside. When we finally did, we found that we couldn’t really control what was happening. Your mind was still mostly in control. So we did what we could and interfered at key points, at weak areas in the structure, setting into action a new cycle of stories, except this time, the memories were bleeding back through into your worldspace, forcing you to remember, slowly, but surely. We had to make sure it happened gradually, otherwise it would have caused your worldspace to implode, possibly driving you insane. We had to make sure to set it up in a way that would connect everything together and create order out of everything, let the story run to its end, so the memories wouldn’t completely overwhelm you. And, thank God, we succeeded.”

His explanation sounded like something out of a science fiction or fantasy novel, like something out of the books she used to read by the cartload when she was younger, before she began to push herself into her schoolwork. It sounded utterly outrageous.

“This isn’t funny, Woohyun,” she said. “Could you stop? You’re hurting my head. And who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about? You and what army?” She laughed, punching his arm, expecting him to say “just kidding” at any moment.

Instead, he called over his shoulder in a loud voice, “You can come in now.” The door to the room opened, admitting seven people. One of them, a tall boy, she recognized right away.

“Sungyeol!” she exclaimed. It had been over a year since she had last talked to him. She felt horribly guilty about pushing him away, and she had never gotten the chance to make it up to him.

“Long time no see,” he said, grinning, though there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. They had been best friends, after all. Past tense.

Four of the other six she also recognized, and she gaped at them. It was Dongwoo, Hoya, Myungsoo, and Sungjong. But they were figments of her imagination, characters in her dream. Weren’t they…?

“I told you it wasn’t just a dream,” said Woohyun. “They were helping me. When we entered your mind, and they managed to find a crack in the worldspace’s protective shell, your mind took their appearances and constructed characters out of them, and since parts of them were in your worldspace, they were able to interfere a little with what was happening in it. They helped you along at key points, keeping you going in the right direction. So did I.”

But then the last two people…One was a guy who looked like a senior, maybe a graduate student, with small eyes and a broad build. The other was a girl, a few years younger, with long hair, who smiled shyly at Chunhee.

“That’s Sunggyu and Juri,” Woohyun explained. “They stayed outside of the worldspace, which is why you never saw them in your…dream. Juri was the one holding your mind steady and the worldspace fixed so it didn’t keep shifting all the time and creating new worlds. And Sunggyu was the one who went deep into your mind to collect all the scattered memories that you had tried to throw away and bring them back to the surface, where they could reconnect and revive.”

The whole thing was implausible, but so was her dream, and these people had shown up in her dream, and yet they were real, and she had never met them before. So an implausible dream plus an implausible explanation equated to a plausible reality? Logic had always been her strong point, but it didn’t seem to work for her at this point.

“I still feel like this is a hidden camera prank,” Chunhee remarked, looking from one face to the next, searching for some sign of deceit or of hidden mirth. She found none.

“It’s not,” Woohyun insisted. “And really, I don’t care if you believe me or not, I’m just glad you’re alright.” Woohyun bent over and hugged her tightly. She felt as if she hadn’t felt this kind of intimate contact in too long, so she hugged him back. “I love you, Woohyun,” she whispered in his ear. Chunhee regretted that it was the first time she had told him that in the year that they had dated.