Dream and Reality (Parts one and two)

In Murakami’s novel, there is a thin line between dream and reality.  His dreams about Creta Kano may appear somewhat ‘normal’ at first. But as the novel continues and Creta lets us know that she is a “prostitute of the mind”, and that she knew very well what he dreamt about because she was basically the one controlling it. The effect of this is to make dream and reality closely linked so much so where you are unable to tell apart which events happened in reality and which ones didn’t. When the Lieutenant Mamiya is describing events back when he was on the war field, he mentions that, “[His] life went by as a dream.” (133) Although this may appear to not have much significance, this motif of a dream reoccurs throughout the novel in different times, in different circumstances, for different characters. Before Kumiko decides to leave Toru, she is talking to her husband and says, “’There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something or-other is there, somewhere inside me like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a closet... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.” (236)

As toru is in the well, he is dreaming (or not) of several things. We are confused as to if what is happening is a dream or not, and so is Toru. “Before dawn, in the bottom of the well, I had a dream. But it was not a dream. It was some kind of something that happened to take in the form of a dream.” (241)