Dreaming of Seoul Tower

The first time I saw Seoul Tower up close and personal was not the night I arrived in Korea, traveling down the Olympic Expressway on my way to my apartment not far from Olympic Stadium. It was earlier than that—in glossy travel literature, and in a dream.

When I found out I had been hired to teach at a language institute in Seoul in early October 1990, there wasn’t much information about Korea readily available. This was before Lonely Planet guidebooks, before the Internet, before a place could be known through a screen before it was ever felt in person. 

 

Curious about what awaited me, I called the Korean National Tourism Office in Chicago, and they were more than happy to send what they had—leftover material from the 1988 Seoul Olympics. When it arrived, it felt like something more than information; it felt like an invitation. There were glossy brochures of palaces and mountains, crowded shopping streets, the sleek silhouette of the 63 Building rising along the river—images that felt distant and somehow familiar at the same time.

 

But I wasn’t going as a tourist. I was going to work, to live, to build something, though I didn’t yet know what. I can’t say I studied those brochures the way I might have. I looked, I imagined, and then I set them aside. Whatever Korea was going to be, I would discover it soon enough. 

 

But one night, around the same time that literature arrived, I had a dream.

 

A city stretched beneath me—vast, quiet, and alive with light. A river cut through it, wide and dark, catching reflections that moved like scattered stars. I didn’t know its name then, but I would later come to know it as the Han River. And above it all, on a hill, stood a tower. It wasn’t just part of the skyline; it was the center of it—lit from within, rising into the night, less like a structure than a signal, something meant to be seen, meant to be followed. 

 

In the dream, I wasn’t surprised by it. I simply accepted it, as if I already knew it was there.

 

Weeks later, on a cold December night, I found myself in the back of a van, moving along the Olympic Expressway. The city was still new to me then—unfamiliar, just out of reach, humming with a life I hadn’t yet stepped into. And then the river appeared—broad, still, reflecting light in long, quiet streaks. And then, almost without warning, there it was.

 

Seoul Tower.

 

Exactly as I had seen it in my dream.

 

For a moment, the distance between dream and reality collapsed completely. The waiting, the long flight, the uncertainty—all of it fell away. What remained wasn’t surprise. It was recognition. Not the kind that startles you, but the kind that settles deep, as if something long displaced has finally returned to where it belongs.

Looking back now, I don’t think it was just a dream, or just coincidence. Sometimes, before we ever arrive somewhere, a part of us is already there—waiting, watching, holding a place for us in ways we can’t explain.

Some places you choose. Others choose you.

You don’t always realize which is which until much later.