My mother recently asked me if I had any strange or memorable dreams when I became pregnant. I then recalled that Koreans believe a woman begins her pregnancy with a 태몽 (tae-mong), or a dream about the conception of the child. (I thought this was unique to the Korean culture but apparently not - J just confirmed that the Chinese believe the same thing!) When my mother first became pregnant with me, she dreamt that she was caught in a terrible thunderstorm. To escape the rain, she sought shelter in a dilapidated building. She looked up at the ceiling and was horrified to see a great number of snakes writhing and squirming on the roof beams. While most of them were a dull...