Five days have passed since I was a prisoner in those red brick walls, but every night I return there. In my night-time terrors I am back in the squalor of that cell, surrounded by anguished people, so cramped that you can barely sit comfortably, let alone lie down to sleep. Cells without heat in the harsh Seoul winters, or cool relief in the sweltering summers; breeding grounds for exhaustion, frostbite and death.

During the night in these mountains, my spirit rises from my body hidden in the undergrowth, and floats back to Seodaemun prison to review its structure. Here is where the workshop is, where we produce clothes and paper. Here is the poplar, a mournful tree beside the execution hall, which prisoners cling to in their last haunted moments, weeping for a country lost. And here is a dark, long tunnel, leading out of the compound, along which the spent bodies are deported.

Here is the cell, no larger than a standing coffin, where we are kept in isolation. And here is the box with spikes nailed into its sides, where we are forced to crouch, gasping as they kick and shake it. My cell mates say that hardship faced by the body is painful, but it’s preferable to the hardship of sharing names, facts and locations. That will only cause a deeper kind of damage; the kind that wears away bodies from the inside out.

Here in the undergrowth I’m changing back into a human from an animal. In the secret enclosures of the mountains, my battered