This post is part of a larger deep dive
Curious about the role of the sleep stages and their role in dreaming, the meaning of dreams and lucid dreaming in Paprika? Check out Paprika Explained!
Or read the full Paprika article!
Hopefully, you’re now slightly more familiar with certain facts and theories about sleeping and dreaming, so let’s dive into the novel Paprika.
I’ll begin my analysis of Paprika by expounding on critical themes in the novel, namely, the functionality of PT devices, Paprika’s methods of analysis, Inui’s and Osanai’s plan to take over the dreamworld, and the dream battle in the second part of the book. As a curiosity, I have also added a section on Jinnai and Kuga, the two enigmatic bartenders of Radio Club.
The information in the sections below is explained, in some way or another, in the novel. I decided, however, to wrap and condense all the relevant information within each of these sections for ease of understanding.
For you people that arrived here after only having watched the movie, some of this information will be new to you. However, you might still benefit from reading these sections as it will give you a bit more background about the story, which has been greatly curtailed for the movie.
Before Atsuko and Tokita introduced their innovative technology, psychotherapy was mostly conducted in the conventional therapist-patient conversational setting.
With the advent of a series of devices invented by Tokita (the PT technology; PT stands for PsychoTherapy), in collaboration with Atsuko in the past few years, conventional therapy has been gradually replaced by the usage of these PT devices for treating mental disorders. This is particularly true at least at the Institute for Psychiatry in Tokyo, where Atsuko and colleagues are working.
The standard procedure consists in the patient wearing a helmet called a “gorgon” — a highly sensitive sensor that detects brain waves. The therapist also wears a device called a “collector” with which she can enter the dreamworld and induce emotions in patients and observe how that influences their dreams.
The gorgon and collector are cabled devices, some of which Atsuko keeps in her apartment so that she can treat her patients behind closed doors.
There is also a reflector that can detect users intentions, and if the reflector detects that the collector is being used for nefarious proposes, it will deny access to entering the patient’s subconscious.
It is unclear if any of these devices induce lucid dreaming, although they must, since even patients without any previous training understand they are dreaming from the very first therapy session.
Even though lucid dreaming tends to occur during REM, it is more likely that Paprika and her patients remain in N1 sleep — the transition stage from wake to sleep when most hypnagogic dreams take place. This is the lighest form of sleep and when most problem-solving dreams occur.
Now, a new generation of PT devices is introduced somewhere in the middle of book. Tokita named them DC Mini, which stands for Daedelus Collector. Mini because, as opposed to gorgon, this one is smaller and wireless; you can basically just attach one of these things on the head (e.g., with scotch tape) and you are ready to go.
One major problem is that there are no access restrictions in place for the DC Mini, so anyone could in principle use it to enter the subconscious of any unsuspecting dreaming person.
Moreover, there are several side effects of using the DC Mini that do not exist with the older technology.
Some do not seem adverse. For example, anaphylaxis occurs when someone uses the DC Mini for long periods of time, increasing its effective range of influence. Whereas a collector has limited range (possibly only within the remit of Atsuko’s bedroom), the maximum distance the DC Mini is effective at is limitless. So with repeated use a DC Mini user can enter dreams remotely, even if another dreamer is located kilometers away from the DC Mini user.
In fact, after wearing the DC Mini for an extensive period of time, a user could access dreams even without DC Mini, by exploiting the residual effects alone. However, these effects are temporary, and the strength of control won’t be nearly as potent as it would be if one were actually wearing one.
Another (potentially useful) side-effect is that the DC Mini also allows its users to read another dreamer’s thoughts. This could be useful in cases where a therapist might wish to find out what someone is really thinking. For example, during a dream confrontation with Inui, Paprika asks him where he has stashed his DC mini to force him to think of the place where he hid it, as she will be able to access those thoughts.
Towards the end of the book, Paprika realises that the DC Mini has the effect that you can teleport objects from the dream into reality. The way it works is that whatever object a DC Mini user grabs in the dream is reduced to atoms and instantaneously resynthethised in the place where they are physically wearing a DC Mini. This function was not actually programmed into the DC Mini but it spontaneously developed as a side-effect of using one.
A definitely more gruesome side-effect of prolonged use of the DC Mini is that it starts to be absorbed by the human head, to the point that it will be impossible to remove it, even surgically, without first killing the user.
In addition, repeated use of the DC mini causes the wearer to fall into a deeper and deeper sleep while inside the dream. Although this might allow you to gain more control over the dream setting, it becomes increasingly difficult to wake someone up once you enter deep sleep (for example, if someone holds Paprika’s nose to interrupt breathing, Paprika would just dream she was suffocating, and this could kill her in reality).
Equiped with an arsenal of PT devices, Atsuko uses the technology to treat her high-profile patients.
As I mentioned above, it is clear that Paprika (and her patients) are lucid dreaming, because she is, in most situations, aware that she is dreaming. Furthermore, she is able to conjure all kinds of superpowers like flying or making objects appear out of nowhere (see also the sub-section Summoning dream objects into reality).
For the actual analysis of her patients’ dreams, Atsuko subscribes to several theories of dreams.
First and foremost, Paprika draws on some of the ideas put forth by Freud. For example, she states that one important method is the transferring of her own emotions via the collector into the patient’s subconscious. This has the effect of turning something neutral into something pleasant and desirable, mostly connected to early sexual wishes during childhood and early youth. That way, Paprika will be able to decipher the origin of her patients’ malady, because, according to Freud, unconscious wishes lead to a range of neurotic symptoms if they aren’t resolved with proper psychoanalysis.
Her method of recording images in the collector only when the conscious mind has relaxed its grip is also reminiscent of Freud’s postulation of a censor that blocks unconscious/repressed material, which can only come to light when the censor relaxes during dreams.
On the other hand, some of Atsuko’s dream analysis borrows ideas from Jung’s theory of dreams. For example, at the beginning of the book, she suggests that injection of emotions into patients’ subconscious could make them change the dream to a scene that made them realise that something needs to alter in their life. This relates to the Jungian idea of archetypes — innate “templates” inherited from our ancestors that are usually invoked in dreams and point to specific aspects of the dreamer’s life that require attention.
There are also sporadic suggestions that Atsuko believes that one of the functions of dreams is problem solving. For example, during an interpretation of one of Konokawa’s dream, Paprika mentions that dreams provide clues to solving criminal cases.
As I mentioned already, it would be somewhat peculiar that a psychotherapist of the caliber of Atsuko based her therapy on conflicting theories. Specifically, Freud’s and Jung’s dream theories are almost opposite in respect to the meaning of dreams.
In order to be able to observe her patients’ dreams, Atsuko has also developed the ability to sleep lightly and almost immediately when treating her patients. She refers to it as autohypnosis, and it could be that the stage of sleep Atsuko learnt to remain in is N1. During N1, you still have much of your muscle tension, and it is during this stage that dream-aided problem-solving is most likely to occur.
Why is light-sleep important? Because it allows Paprika to restore her waking awareness at will. If she falls into a deeper sleep, it will be harder for her to wake up voluntarily, and she will not be able to bring herself to waking reality. This might refer to stage 3 of NREM sleep, when it becomes more difficult to wake someone up.
The book mentions ways to wake up however: using drugs, self-waking devices, or sleeping on a chair in front of the (older) PT device (which makes it easy to abort the programme I suppose). However, if dreaming transitions to REM, it will be impossible to operate PT devices. This could relate to the fact that, during REM sleep, the body is effectively paralysed, as I explained above.
In dreams, DC Mini users can be woken up if they get scared by something unexpected (e.g., loud ringing of telephone next to you), if something arousing happens (e.g., erection and ejaculation) or due to dreason (dream reason; guilty feelings produced, for example, by having unlawful sex in the dream, shameful enough to wake the subject).
Indeed, this is one of the strategies Paprika employs when she realises she has fallen into a deeper sleep and is unable to wake up using her usual methods. She asks Noda to rape her in front of Konakawa in the dream, which causes discomfort for both of them and causes them to wake up.
Individuals that can lucid-dream do mention that keeping your emotions in check while lucid dreaming avoids waking up. Similarly, keeping mentally focused helps preventing falling back into a non-lucid dream state.
Because the DC Mini has the effect of deepening sleep, which might prevent you from coming to reality, Noda and Konakawa have the idea that their DC Minis should be removed as soon as they fall asleep to help Paprika. This proves to be another successful strategy, as they can still access dreams through residual effects of the DC Mini.
Contrary to the film, Inui and Osanai are depicted as the villains of the story from the start in the novel.
They both share the belief that the world of psychiatry has succumbed to the rapid advances of technology, shifting thinking away from conservative practices, to which they both vehemently defend.
In their opinion, where therapists used to treat patients using human psychotherapy, has now been replaced by blind trust on technological devices that have not yet been thoroughly tested.
Above all else, they despise Atsuko and Tokita, as they believe the PT devices they developed are amoral. Inui and Osanai belive Atsuko and other adherents of this technology are violating the mental space of their patients for the sake of technological advance and recognition. On top of that, Atsuko and Tokita are on their way to receive a Nobel prize, something Inui opposes fiercely.
Inui had previously been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize of Medicine for the discovery of a method of treating a psychosomatic disorder that had become widespread at the time. Alas, a certain British surgeon incorporated Inuis method into his theory and received the Nobel prize instead.
To Atsuko, this is the reason why Inui is so obsessive about ethics and justice and why he is so jealous of Atsuko, Tokita and their invention.
To thwart Atsuko and Tokita’s chance of winning the award, he instructs Osanai to project the dreams of schizophrenic patients into some of Atsukos collegue therapists, either subliminally (as with Tsumura and Shima) or explicitly (as with Himuro). All of them were fervent adherents of these PT devices and were either actively using them in psychotherapy, or involved in their conception.
Once the infected victims were locked in their subconscious forever, their personalities would be completely destroyed. Blame would subsequently fall on Atsuko, Tokita and Shima (the current president of the institute) for bringing those abominable devices to actual treatment. Inui would become president of the institution by unanimity and, as a consequence, would have full control over the functionality of the DC Mini and the decisions regarding its use.
This is essentially Inui’s aim: he sees himself as a kind of saviour of the psychiatric world, and has no compunction in hurting Atsuko and bring the others down if it means restoring human values to psychoterapy. A clear case of the end justifying the means.
Clearly, the most interesting event of the entire book is the “dream battle”, encompassing all confrontations between Inui/Osanai on the one hand and Atsuko and her allies on the other hand, which takes place in the second part of the novel.
It seems that the first part serves as an introduction to the characters and sets the stage for the dream battle that occurs in the second part of the novel. It also serves to make the reader familiar with the dreamworld, although Paprika’s dream analyses in the first part of the book bear little relevance to the main dream battle.
There are three decisive dreaming aspects that ultimately decide the fate of the battle: 1) the ability to control the dream (i.e., the capacity to define and/or change the course of the dream), 2) the ability of the DC Mini user to transport objects/people from the dream into reality, and 3) the ability to control time.
The battle between Inui/Osanai and Atsuko was really the question of who had the upper hand. Whoever managed to control dreams and their effect on reality, was free to dictate the setting and progression of the dream and invade other dreams at will.
One way to gain control of dreams is by “joining” dreams of several sleepers together, as this tends to overwhelm any single sleeper. This is clear with a passage in the book where it reads “Since the men were in the majority their dreams overwhelmed Atsuko’s. She had no idea where her dreams had gone“.
For the final battle, we have then Atsuko and her allies Tokita, Shima, Noda, Konakawa, Jinnai and Kuga on one side, and Inui and Osanai on the other side.
However, dream supremacy appears to belong, in most situations, to Inui. For example, during the Nobel prize ceremony, Atsuko realises that a dream that had started with Noda suddenly became Inui’s dream.
In addition, Inui is able to unleash all sorts of phantoms, monsters and japanese dolls from his dreams to the waking world, running havoc in the city, and Atsuko and friends can do little to counter-atack.
One might wonder how Inui gained so much power in the dream battle, if Atsuko and her allies clearly outnumbered them.
Paprika mentions at some point in the book, that she wouldn’t be able to attack Inui directly in his dream because his resistance would be too great. She would need to make it her own dream. However, in order to do so meant that she would need to enter a deeper sleep and, as I explained above, there are downsides to this (such as losing control over one’s actions).
In fact, this loss of control did happen to Atsuko once. During a dream encounter with Osanai, he transmitted Himuru’s nightmares into Atsuko’s dream. Atsuko had a hard time waking up, which she found strange, as she can usually wake up from autohypnosis easily by herself. Confused, but resigned, she went back to bed, woke up again and moved on with her habitual routine. As it turned out, Atsuko had entered deeper sleep and was still dreaming (false awakenings are, indeed, a feature of lucid dreaming).
This is a very dangerous side effect of the DC Mini. It makes you dream, then dream of waking up, and go back to sleep and dream again, in a never-ending loop. Because it feels like reality to you when you wake up, you get stuck in this loop of sleeping, dreaming and waking up in a dream, falling into an even deeper sleep, dream even deeper dreams, and so on.
I believe this was Inui’s fate. After the last battle, which ends with Inui’s defeat, it appears that Inui had used his DC Mini for so long that it became deeply ingrained into his skull. This suggests the effective range of Inui’s DC Mini was limitless and its effect probably stronger than the dream powers of Atsuko and friends combined, thus explaining Inui’s incontestable dream-control superiority.
Because of the known side-effect of wearing the DC Mini for prolonged periods of time, he fell into a deeper and deeper sleep, giving him more and more control over the dream. The drawback, of course, was that once Inui entered that petrifying sleep stage, dreams became reality to him. Remember, entering ever deeper sleep due to DC Mini overuse will get users stuck in a loop of sleeping and waking inside the dream, and they will end up believing it to be reality.
Therefore, even though he could control his dreams with ease and steer them in the direction he desired, he sealed his fate by never being able to wake up again. In the end, he died of starvation.
As I mentioned in the lucid dreaming section, some individuals have the incredible ability to create dream objects out of thin air. Some of the tips provided by lucid dream researchers and lucid dreamers alike is to imagine the objects you’d like to see in the dream and convince yourself that the object will appear when you turn around.
This is a tactic Paprika and her friends employ while dreaming. For example, the book mentions that “Paprika envisioned an elevator with its doors open […]. The elevator appeared on cue.”.
However, in the novel, invoking objects in dreams takes on a whole new level when the characters become aware of the possibility to invoke dream objects into reality. There are many of such occurrences in the novel, here are a few:
All of this suggests that objects, including people, that exist solely in dreams can actually be brought to reality.
Nevertheless, objects that materialise during dreaming must come from someone who is dreaming, so as soon as that someone wakes up these objects should disappear. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case for some of the examples I mention above, which suggests that even if the dreamer has woken up, his/her dream objects can temporarily remain in the waking world, probably due to the residual effects of the DC Mini.
In the “dream battle”, it isn’t only Atsuko’s and Inui’s dreams that begin to merge with reality. Even the dreams of people that were not wearing DC Minis (but came into contact with people wearing them) begin to merge with other dreams.
Towards the end of the battle, Atsuko realises it is possible to summon “dream powers” into reality – that is, invoking some dream character or object into the real world. This happens with Atsuko, when, in the real world, she managed to switch to Paprika.
Note that I’m not saying she disguised herself as Paprika. Nor am I saying that she was sleeping and summoned objects into reality. No. What I mean is that Atsuko was actually able to transform herself into dream-Paprika in the waking world! Shortly after, when meeting Osanai, she switches back again to Atsuko. Somehow she can summon the strength from her dreams while she is awake, although it appears to happen spontaneously (she does not know how to control it).
Finally, there is one side-effect of wearing the DC Mini that tops all others, and that is the ability to time travel.
Apparently, it is possible to use the DC Mini to travel backwards in time. Even though Tokita suspects Inui is able to do it, it is Kuga, the modest bartender of Radio Club, who is endowed with the power to actually bring it off!
Chronologically, the final dream battle takes place between the Nobel Prize ceremony and Inui’s defeat. However, it is as if it hasn’t actually happened because Kuga reset time to the point of Atsuko’s award announcement.
Now, it isn’t clear whether Atsuko and the others remember the events of this final battle. My suspicion is that they do, as in their final conversation in Radio Club, Shima asks Kuga if he has recovered. Shima is possibly referring to the fact that Kuga collapsed after managing to bring everyone to the past.
A lingering question is left though: shouldn’t Inui be alive?
After all, he was alive when he broke into the Nobel Prize ceremony, and Atsuko and the others traveled to this point in time. But Inui is dead, which means that the effects on him (i.e., his death) were also brought back to the past. It makes a certain sense, otherwise Kuga wouldn’t have felt the need to recover from the DC Mini side-effect of time traveling.
This suggests that time did go backwards but people’s memories remained unaltered (that is, they brought all the memories to the past with them). Unfortunately, the book ends with no further interaction with people other than Atsuko’s closer friends, so this remains highly speculative.
The two waiters working in Radio Club are, in my view, two of the most important characters of the whole novel but, at the same time, two of the most mysterious.
Why do I say that?
For starters, it’s very weird that Radio Club is always empty, and the only customers that frequent the bar are Paprika and her prospective patients.
When the final battle ensues, Jinnai and Kuga seem completely oblivious to what is happening outside, although the city is in a complete disarray. They do not appear worried after Paprika explains what is happening and immediately agree to help her fight Inui and his phantoms.
Strangely, Kuga appears to possess Atsuko’s ability to sleep immediately, even when a vulture barges into the bar and starts attacking everyone. Similarly, Jinnai is able to invoke objects at ease (he even wonders “if he had some alter ego, a secret past“).
Furthermore, Kuga appears to know that it is possible to travel back in time even though he could not possibly have known that since the only time this is mentioned is during a conversation between Tokita, Matsukane, Shima and Tokita’s mother.
Even if he had come across this information, how could he have developed the ability to control time the very first time he enters dreams? In fact, it seems that neither Atsuko nor Inui is capable of pulling out that feat, but Kuga, a simple bartender with no experience in using DC Minis can? Very strange! Either this is a terrible oversight from the author, or Kuga (and Jinnai) are more important characters than we give them credit for.
Clearly, the most cryptic event in the whole book (which happens to be completely omitted from the film), is the final chapter, in which only the two waiters are having a conversation and Jinnai asks the question “So – it was all a dream, was it?“.
What the hell?!? Is Jinnai insinuating that every single event in the book was a dream, or only the dream battle event? Remember, Jinnai and Kuga were indeed dreaming when fighting Inui, but they were affecting reality, so it was not all a dream. The whole conversation between the two is very vague and riddled with ambiguity.
One thing is clear to me though: Radio Club does not appear to exist independently of Paprika. We never see anyone in the bar when she is not around (at the beginning of the novel, Noda is sitting alone waiting for Paprika, but she appears shortly afterwards). Everytime, Radio Club appears Paprika is present. So what could this mean?
Here is one of the rare occasions where the film offers more to say about this than the book. In the film, Radio Club is a fictional place where Paprika meets her patients in their dreams. Interestingly, the author of the novel, Yasutaka Tsutsui, lent his voice to Kuga so I guess he hasn’t objected to Radio Club being depicted as belonging to the dream world.
So, an intriguing possibility could be that whenever the Radio Club emerges, that would indicate we are entering someone’s dream, probably Atsuko’s dream. Perhaps Jinnai and Kuga are part of Atsuko’s unconscious, a sort of gatekeepers between the reality and the unconscious world.
Equally interesting is the idea that these two bartenders don’t belong to Atsuko’s subconscious, but represent the portal from which her patients Noda/Konakawa enter their own dreams, as the film suggests. In that case, perhaps that is the reason why the characters in the book are so unbelievable. Maybe the entire novel is a collection of dreams from different characters.
That would truly be mindblowing, and if I were more confident about this interpretation, I would need to revise the star rating and Bizarrometer score. However, I’m not sufficiently confident to put it forward as the main theory, which is why I relegated this section to a curious afterthought.
Still, I’m convinced that there is much more to these two characters than meets the eye, and would love to hear your thoughts about this matter!
Dream-related weirdness aside, the premise of the book is rather straightforward: bad guys take possession of a dangerous dream-intruding device that they use for their own nefarious purposes; heroine enters the scene with her intellect, tenacity and ravishing beauty to teach the bad guy a lesson and restore order; bad guy is defeated; heroine is praised and rewarded and marries the nerd of the story. Of course, the author brings surreal elements into the story, adding an extra layer of complexity and appeal.
As our characters use and abuse the DC Mini technology, a continuous battle for dream control unfolds, in which they gradually begin to unlock hitherto unknown functionality, such as the capability of reading dream thoughts of other dreamers, invoking dream images into reality and even teleporting their dream alter-egos to the waking world.
Dream and reality begin to conflate, and more dangerous side-effects begin to appear, particularly the risk of falling into such a deep sleep that prevents the dreamer from ever coming back to the waking world.
In the end, however, Paprika and friends prevail, and, somewhat abruptly, the order is restored.
Sure, there is plenty of action and the dream sequences are truly creative and full of awesome imagery, but, unfortunately, that wasn’t enough reason for me to give a better rating. The two parts that make up the novel are somehow disconnected and the various sub-plots add little to the principal, more interesting narrative.
The dream theories Paprika draws on for her dream analysis (e.g., Freud’s and Jungs theories) are only very casually considered, and there seemed to be no attempt to connect them to the main dream battle events.
But, who knows. Perhaps I completely missed the deeper meaning of the book, particularly if my suspicion of a more significant role of Jinnai and Kuga in the story turned out to be correct. If that is the case, oh well… you cannot win them all. 😉
The dreamworld is surely an exciting, vibrant and bizarre realm.
It comes as no surprise then that dreams have been a source of inspiration for many creative works of art.
For example, Dali was clearly inspired by dream imagery when he painted some of his most famous works (e.g., the persistence of memory), and many important scientific discoveries were allegedly forged during dreaming.
I cannot help but wonder if Yasutaka Tsutsui also took inspiration from his own dreams when writing the dream sequences of Paprika…
See you in the next article!
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