I’m sorry for sharing a dream story 💦
I just couldn’t help writing it once the idea came to me.
A cabbage core stuck in my throat.
This morning, I dreamed that I split a whole cabbage in half with my hands and bit into it.
In the dream, I didn’t question at all why I was eating it like that. That’s the scary part of dreams—but that’s not the point right now.
The problem is the core.
As you know, a cabbage core is hard. In the dream, I forced myself to swallow that chunk.
As expected, it got stuck in my throat.
Even when I swallowed saliva, it wouldn’t go down.
Even when I drank water, it wouldn’t move.
I tried eating rice to push it down with the weight, but it didn’t budge at all.
To make matters worse, perhaps the initial irritation caused the core to expand slightly, and the longer time passed, the stronger the foreign-body sensation became.
It won’t come out.
It’s getting bigger.
My breathing becomes irregular.
It’s painful.
That’s when I woke up.
Even though I knew it was a dream, it wouldn’t go away.
The moment I woke up, I immediately realized, “Oh, it was a dream.”
But.
The foreign-body sensation wouldn’t go away.
There’s something in my throat. That sensation I felt in the dream is still there, exactly as it was.
My mind understands perfectly.
There is no cabbage core.
I didn’t even eat it in the first place.
It was all a dream.
And yet my body insists, “No, it’s there.”
Even by noon, the sensation stubbornly lingered.
This is strangely fascinating and intriguing.
In the world of *Ghost in the Shell*, this is called “hacking.”
To give a bit of context, I’m not especially knowledgeable about *Ghost in the Shell*.
However, I love Mamoru Oshii’s works, and after discovering *Ghost in the Shell*, I found that their worldviews fit me perfectly, so I watch them over and over again.
In the world of *Ghost in the Shell*, the human brain is connected to a network, allowing information to be fed directly from the outside. This system, called a “cyberbrain,” is a core concept of the series.
When a cyberbrain is hacked, experiences that never actually happened are implanted as real memories and sensations. One cannot doubt them or erase them by one’s own will.
It’s a terrifying world where people can no longer tell whether their memories are truly their own, or whether the pain, smells, and every sensation they perceive are real or fake.
And this morning’s experience felt exactly like that.
My brain received the “false information” of a dream and kept sending signals to my body that there was something stuck in my esophagus. And those signals didn’t disappear even after I woke up.
The body isn’t lying.
It’s just that it was believing incorrect information.
There was a sensation as if a cabbage core were truly stuck in my throat.
“Mind over matter” works on the same principle, doesn’t it?
As I was thinking this far, the proverb “illness comes from the mind” crossed my mind.
I think this follows the same structure as well.
When your mood drops, your body genuinely feels heavier.
Your face tilts downward, and you might even become hunched over.
When anxiety continues, your stomach really starts to hurt.
If you convince yourself “I’m no good,” your performance can actually decline.
Our bodies are this deeply connected to our brains.
What they’re based on is not “reality,” but the brain’s interpretation of it.
If the interpretation is wrong, the body will honestly follow in the wrong direction.
Whether it’s someone whose cyberbrain has been hacked, me swallowing a cabbage core in a dream, or someone convinced “I’m no good,” isn’t the underlying structure the same?
Humans are fascinating.
Senses are unreliable. But.
That doesn’t mean I want to say, “Don’t trust your senses.”
On the contrary, I think our senses are extremely honest. The real issue is what kind of “input” those senses are responding to.
Are they responding to reality?
Are they responding to assumptions?
Are they responding to past memories?
Charging ahead assuming “it must be right because that’s what my senses say,” without checking that point, may not be so different from acting based on a hacked cyberbrain.
What on earth am I even talking about today? 😂
In short, it was a story about a dream where I couldn’t get a cabbage core out 😅
It’s true—the strange feeling in my throat didn’t go away even by noon.
That’s all for today’s article. The latest updates are shared on Instagram Stories. Please follow and stay tuned! ❣️
