Jin I-Soo has led a life of comfort and utmost luxury as the youngest son of the Hansu Group. However, apart from a tense relationship with his father and adopted mother, a recurring dream has also perturbed him over the years.
Jin I-Soo is in a big exhibition hall and walks towards a big white wall in front of him.
On the wall is a large painting, which shows a woman sunken in water, surrounded by colorful shrubbery.
He is always walking towards that picture in his dream, which is a recurrent thing with I-Soo.
He is also disturbed by a series of images that include one of this very painting and a woman submerged in a bathtub, during his first case when he sees the dead body at the coroner’s office.
Myeong-Chul’s decision
Jin I-Soo was found near the bathtub in which his mother drowned to death after taking sleeping pills.
The trauma was too much for him and he developed aphasia because of it, unable to even talk for a good while after that.
I-soo’s father, Jin Myeong-Chul took custody of him and deemed it necessary to get him psychiatric treatment.
He took I-Soo to Dr. Seo, thinking the death of his mother was too huge and shocking for a little boy, and had to be repressed in order to save him.
Making and breaking the dream
Dr. Seo switched his mother’s death — the scene of her submerged in water after dying — into a picture.
It was the very picture of that sunken woman that always appeared in I-Soo’s mind. It is also a real painting that is affixed to the ceiling at Dr. Seo’s office.
Dr. Seo created the whole dream of the exhibition hall and the white wall, and through her hypnotherapy, his mind repressed the traumatic memory of his mother’s death.
That is until he investigates a case involving Dr. Seo Yuk-Yung, where she becomes the prime suspect in the murder of two men.
She is eventually arrested when Jin I-Soo gets her professor’s help and hypnotizes her into confessing.
While in captivity, she gets her attorney to arrange a meeting with I-Soo, who visits her.
She shocks him by telling him how and why she created that dream, before performing hypnotherapy to take him to the real scene of his mother’s death.