Full disclosure #1: I honestly wouldn’t know where to put this story: “Right”, “Working”, or maybe even “Romantic”. And that’s because of full disclosure #2: I made it up. Well, sort of — I did it subconsciously. It’s about a weird dream (like an actual dream, in my sleep, not a metaphorical one) that I had about an odd customer request at the grocery store where I worked at the time.

It also involves my girlfriend at the time, who was of Korean descent. The grocery store where I worked was pretty big and prided itself in having a vast product range, including quite a lot of Asian food products. All of this fed into the dream’s storyline.

In my dream, a coworker comes up to me to ask for my help with an Asian food product that a customer is looking for. She says she’s pretty sure we don’t have it, but maybe I can help anyway because I’m a bit more familiar with that stuff since I have a Korean girlfriend. (This has happened before in real life; having a Korean girlfriend made me the closest thing they had to an actual Asian or Asian-descended employee!) So, I go up to the customer and ask him what he’s looking for, and he goes, “Kimchi Schnapps.”

Now, if you’re Korean, or at least familiar with Asian cuisine, you’ll know, A, what kimchi is and that it’s THE national dish of Korea, as well as, B, that Kimchi Schnapps doesn’t exist. So, you’ll know how absurd this request would be in real life. (If you don’t, imagine being asked for coleslaw liquor.) That’s why it stuns me so much that I just repeat it questioningly.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m a sleeptalker, much to the annoyance of [Girlfriend], who’s a relatively light sleeper. So, while I had slept silently next to [Girlfriend] up until that point, I not only said, “Kimchi Schnapps?!” in my dream, I said it out loud. In my sleep. In the middle of the night.

[Girlfriend] and I woke up and, after taking a moment to process this, we broke out in fits of laughter, through which I tried to explain this dream to her — a scene that repeated twice the next day when we told her mum and sister about it. Plus, it led to the phrase, “How about you drink a Kimchi Schnapps first to calm down?” becoming an inside joke for us.

The relationship ended badly several years later, but I’ll always remember this as one of the funniest moments we shared.

So, you tell me, who was at fault here: the (admittedly not even real) customer for having an impossible request, my store for not carrying that product, or me for waking [Girlfriend] up by sleeptalking?