If a Korean person tells you they had a pig dream (돼지꿈, dwaeji-kkum) last night, watch what they do next: a real number of them will go buy a lottery ticket before lunch. No other dream in Korean culture carries this specific, immediate, financial reflex. The pig dream isn't just "a good sign" the way a four-leaf clover is elsewhere — it's specifically, almost mechanically, associated with money arriving.
Where this comes from is older than the lottery itself. In traditional agrarian Korea, a pig was one of the most valuable animals a household could own — expensive to buy, slow to raise, and a genuine store of wealth on four legs. Pigs also breed prolifically, which folded a second layer of meaning into the symbol: not just wealth, but wealth that multiplies. By the time Korea urbanized and the lottery became a national pastime in the late 20th century, the pig had already been carrying "money is coming" as its core meaning for generations — the lottery ticket was just a new place to point that old instinct.
The details of the dream matter more than people expect. A pig entering your house or your arms is read as wealth arriving to you directly — the strongest version of the dream. Being chased or bitten by a pig is read differently by different interpreters: some treat it as ambiguous or even a warning about money handled carelessly, not a guaranteed windfall. The number and size of the pigs matters too — a whole litter is often read as bigger, more significant fortune than a single pig, and a healthy, clean, light-colored pig is generally read more favorably than a thin, dirty, or dark one, though interpretations vary by region and by whoever is doing the interpreting.
The lottery-winner story is its own genre in Korean media, and it's worth being precise about what that genre actually is. Local news outlets and online communities regularly carry stories of jackpot winners who say they bought their ticket specifically because of a pig dream (or a dragon dream, its equally famous cousin) the night before. These stories get shared, screenshotted, and retold because they're satisfying — but it's worth noticing that nobody writes a viral post about the pig dream they had on an ordinary Tuesday that led to nothing, which is what happens to the vast majority of pig dreams. The stories that survive are the rare hits, not a representative sample.
None of that makes the tradition meaningless, though. A pig dream doesn't predict your finances any more than this site's Saju reading predicts your life story down to the day — what it does, the same way Saju does, is hand you a shared cultural script for a feeling that's hard to name otherwise: the specific, giddy sense of "something good might be coming." If you had one last night, the honest, low-stakes version of the tradition is simple: enjoy the feeling, maybe buy a ticket if you're the type who enjoys the ritual of hoping, and don't restructure your week around it.