동아시아 꿈담론과 판타지 영화의 비교 연구: <아바타>와 <매트릭스>를 중심으로

Abstract

Regardless of the East and the West, the past and the present, it has been man's great wish for a long time to move to another world different from this world where they are living now to experience new things. "Dream" has been functioned as a channel to fulfill the wish, and "fantasy movies" of today also serves as an alternative device of the dream. Working with the "Butterfly Dream" in the Namhwa chingyŏng by Changja and the "Story of Buddhist monk Sarana" in the Chappo changgyŏng as representative dream discourses of East Asia and the "Avatar" and the "Matrix" as Western fanstasy movies, this article intends to explore how this primary desire acquires the universality beyond the difference of the time and the place. The characteristics of dream discourses can be capsulated as follows: first, a dreamer moves to another world different from real world by the act of dreaming to experience unreal things, and secondly the dreamer becomes to get a kind of awakening relating to life. This awakening or the change of mentality does not occur in the horizontal level like from A to A', but occur in the vertical level like from A to B, which is accompanied by more matured view of life and human existence. This article showed the extent to which if the change of mentality embodied in the "Butterfly Dream" takes on the ontological character, that of the mentality embodied in the "Story of Buddhist monk Sarana" takes on the axiological character. Furthermore, this article extended the discussion to the fantasy movies to explain that the case of the "Avatar" is close to the Taoist paradigm represented by the "Butterfly Dream" and that of the "Matrix" is close to the Buddhist paradigm represented by the "Story of Buddhist monk Sarana."