Hương Tích Cave was one of the first majestic landscapes etched into my childhood mind — vivid enough to return, again and again, in my dreams.
It was also the first time I experienced a recurring dream. I must have been only three or four years old then, dreaming of a vast cavern. The cave walls weren’t made of stone, but of skinned human bodies.
There was no gore, no blood — the flesh glowed like pink tourmaline, and the bodies were still breathing, rising and falling gently.
In any case, it was a kind of nightmare, and after reliving it many times, I became truly afraid.
The cave even had a name. I went around asking everyone:
“Dad, Mom, big brother — where is Đống Xương Động?”
Of course, they brushed it off as nonsense.
The funny thing is, I had already figured out how to reverse words in the Sino-Vietnamese way — probably from watching Journey to the West a bit too much. That kind of naming went hand in hand with dreamy, faraway places like Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, Water Curtain Cave, or Flowing Sands River, and so on.
