or, it takes xiumin ten thousand years to realize that five-year-old him 
wasn't actually completely insane.

When Kim Minseok was five years old, he found an entire world in his dreams. For four years, he lived in two worlds -- one waking, where he trudged to elementary school in the morning and played soccer with his friends at night, and one sleeping, where the world was made of unmelting snow and he commanded frost like the ice prince he was. He had parents, kindly guardians of this realm who reigned with compassion and strength. He had friends, children his age who taught him how to ice skate and build snow forts and shared secrets. He even had a girlfriend -- Woo Haneul, a pretty little thing with skin as white as the snow and a laugh that tinkled like bells.

Two months before his tenth birthday, his parents died in a plane accident.

When he went to sleep that night, his dreamworld had frozen over. The air that had always been mild even with the snow had turned bitterly, chillingly cold, and the ice palace he'd come to know and live in and love lay in throusands of scattered chips, black and shattered.

He woke up shivering in the late July heat, drenched in sweat and yet feeling as if his very bones had frozen over. When he fell back asleep, he didn't dream.

He hasn't dreamt since.