#especially given the sheer range of his activities in my subconscious...

[127-spring]

ranking my kpop dreams: 2022 edition

yes, i’m doing this again. i had a lot of fun last year ranking my various kpop dreams & nightmares, so as we face the last few hours of 2022, i’m at it once more with this year’s subconscious offerings. there’s been fewer of them this year, but no shortage of weird shit happening in them...

14) seventeen were on a british talk show, so i dragged my family down in front of the tv so they could learn about the group. at first, the interview was fine. then joshua started talking. and talking. about what, you ask? about the fact that his semen is so “chemically potent” that it bleaches his ceiling when he has certain dreams. at no point did anybody attempt to shut him up. of the members, only vernon looked mildly concerned. and joshua just kept going on. and on. -50/10, i have no words for this. why, joshua? why?

13) i was walking with an old friend around our high school campus, reminiscing. then, some guy got right up in our faces, trying to push us into some mud! i shoved him in return. he fell into the mud, and in doing so, broke one of his legs so badly that the bone was poking out of his flesh. we decided to leave him there. later, on a bus, i glanced out of the window and saw stray kids’ bang chan, hyunjin, and felix dancing. felix was one step out of time with the others, but i was the only one who noticed. gradually, the bus began to empty, until it was just me... and four members of tomorrow x together. they were deeply worried, and searching for yeonjun. as it turns out, he was the guy i left screaming in the mud with a severe leg injury. they hadn’t heard from him all day, and had no idea i was responsible, so i kept quiet, and joined them on the search. we looked through bushes for hours, but all we found were ghosts of grey squirrels burrowing underground. -15/10, oh yeonjun, i’m sorry. but maybe you shouldn’t have started the fight? his injury was hideously graphic, and seeing as he was presumably lost forever, it’s a pretty shitty dream overall.

12) i was back in high school with a bunch of people, though we were all our current ages rather than teens. it was never clear what the class was that we were all in - i was too preoccupied with trying to get the attention of seventeen’s joshua. nothing i did seemed to work. in a last ditch effort at the end of class, i deliberately let a bunch of intimidating academic articles spill out of my bag, hoping their titles would impress him. he didn’t notice. 2/10, he looked very pretty the entire time, but god, how humiliating. all that effort for a man’s attention. and it didn’t even work.

11) i had to go to hospital to undergo various tests. however, i was travelling there from the future, and knew that one test in particular would be incredibly painful. to distract myself from the agony, i had downloaded that 2020 male idols collab performance of red velvet’s psycho… but when i watched it, it was actually just a video of stray kids’ hyunjin performing adele’s send my love. 4/10 i was anxious about the pain to come so it was pretty stressful, but hyunjin’s cover was pretty good!

10) i was fleeing from a house, dragging nct’s shotaro and sungchan with me. i never saw what we were running from, but i knew it wanted to hurt shotaro & sungchan, and i was the only one who could protect them. along the way to safety, i found xiaojun attempting to flirt with a woman. i decided to drag him along as well. he did not appreciate my decision. 4.5/10, there’s something oddly sweet in the idea that i could protect those three from something, but it was deeply stressful trying to actually do so. also, xiaojun was very stroppy.

9) shortly after his military discharge, exo’s suho did a buzzfeed interview, wherein he revealed a secret idol tradition… any idols who wished to date non-celebrities would ask for the phone number of that person’s father. later, i had a fancall with seventeen’s joshua. towards the end of the call, he asked for my dad’s number. i whooped and punched the air with glee, while he looked visibly confused. it turned out, the entire idol industry had somehow missed suho spilling the secret. 5/10 i love the thought of suho casually revealing industry secrets like that, no fucks to give. but if it was ever real, it’d probably cause a hell of a lot more drama.

8) one day, ateez’s san announced he was transferring to monsta x… and that he was also going to become a rapper! both fandoms were fine with this news, and everyone was hotly anticipating his second debut in mx’s upcoming comeback. but when his first mx song dropped… the beat was completely destroying him. he was clearly doing his best, and looked so happy to be there, but. man sucked. 6/10 this is actually a dream from 2021 that i forgot about when i did last year’s rankings, so it gets a bonus slot here! and i feel so bad that my subconscious decided san would make an abysmal rapper, but i have to award points for his sheer effort and enthusiasm, not to mention the supportive attitude of both fandoms involved. there’d be carnage if this ever went down in real life.

7) woodz was in my bedroom… with stray kids’ hyunjin on his lap… and hyunjin was… the two of them were… there is no clean way to say this. they were both fully clothed, but i’ll let your imagination do the rest. 7/10 look i’m not the kind of person who ships idols together, i promise… but holy moly this dream was hot.

6) jiang yanli of the untamed challenged none other than monsta x’s kihyun to a challenge: who between them could make the best gazpacho soup?? to decide the victor, they had a sing-off. at the climax of her song, jiang yanli threw kihyun at a wall! when he landed on the floor, he found a lump of butter. he ate it. i proceeded to berate him over and over for his “raccoon behaviour”. 8/10, i know this is a kpop ranking, but jiang yanli deserves points for the vocals and for making great soup even in my dreams. also, kihyun did a fantastic job too, even if he did act like a raccoon afterwards. do raccoons even eat butter?

5) i was at my old high school (though again, everyone was their current IRL age), and my mum was showing me a photo of depeche mode that she wanted professionally printed for her birthday. however, i was more interested in the youtube thumbnail she had of seventeen, performing fear on a music show. she told me she was getting into them, and especially wanted to know more about “josh-hunk”. she said multiple members kept calling him that. i explained they were probably actually calling him hyung, at which point my sister yelled hyung at me and i said it wasn’t for girls. then svt appeared, and performed hot! at one point, joshua had a whole sexy strut moment that ended in him staring broodily out the window, right next to my mum! i internally screamed over not sitting next to her. then, jeonghan lifted mingyu off his feet and threw him at joshua! despite him hitting a brick wall, everyone thought it was good fun, mingyu included. 8.5/10, it was pretty cool bonding with my mum over a kpop group, but i can’t believe i chose not to sit next to her and consequently missed out on having one of the members that close…

4) seventeen’s joshua had transformed into a little yellow parrot called perus. he was being bullied by a bigger, meaner parrot, who kept insulting him and pecking him. eventually i stepped in, grabbing perushua and barricading us together in a bathroom where the other parrot couldn’t reach us. i proceeded to stroke his feathers until he relaxed. 9/10, despite him getting picked on for most of the dream, he made an adorable parrot, and his feathers were so soft.

3) i woke up one night needing to pee. i opened my bedroom door, and turned towards the bathroom - only to find a crowd of random people, all cheering for exo! exo were in a pre-performance huddle, right in front of the bathroom doorway, and as i watched, sehun slowly lifted his head and made eye contact with me. i promptly ran back into my bedroom and spent the rest of the night listening to their concert. after, i opened my door again to watch them leave. inexplicably, taemin was there with them, doing a little jig. 9.5/10, i spent most of the dream too shy to face them but even through a closed door, the concert was great!

2) i was taking part in some kind of gbbo spin-off with my old high school friends. inexplicably, seventeen were there too. at one point, jun was reading instructions. i was sitting between mingyu and minghao, and we had secretly inserted a pun of jun’s name into the instructions. i was watching for his reaction, and the three of us all grinned at each other when he realized. later, i looked up from making biscuits to find jun smiling warmly at me. 12/10, jun’s smile was just… so warm, and sweet. lovely smile to find aimed at you, even in a dream. i was also very snug between mingyu & minghao.

1) there was an apocalypse that turned people into bloodthirsty monsters! while porchay from kinnporsche was having a whole valiant hero moment, i was frantically trying to squeeze my arse through a window to escape. flash forward to a grand banquet thrown for all of the survivors. i ran into exo’s baekhyun, and told him we were cousins because we share a birthday. then he hugged me, and it was the sweetest, warmest, loveliest hug of my life. afterwards, i bumped into hyuna, and she was also my cousin, as she had replaced one of my real life cousins. we also had a pretty great hug. i went in search of more idols to hug… but got trapped by taylor swift, who regaled me endlessly with exclusive secrets about her music videos. i was too polite to walk away from her. 15/10 purely for the baekhyun hug. oh god. so warm. so firm. would hug him forever if i could.

and on that note... 2023, i can only wonder what dreams you have in store for me.