No More Yielding but a Dream: Paprika and the Waking World

Many artists have attempted to take on the subject of dreams, from Ono no Komachi to Christopher Nolan. It is notoriously difficult to capture in a way that makes sense to others; there's nothing more difficult than describing a dream you had to an audience and giving them the same sense of fear, wonder, or magic that you experienced while your eyes were closed.

That's because dreams are among the most personal experiences that we can have, brief windows into our own subconscious mind that show us glimpses of who we may truly be. Lewis Carroll's Alice discovered that Wonderland and the world beyond the Looking-Glass were figments of her mind, setting the literary stage in 1864 in a way that other, earlier dream-based works couldn't, and although it isn't a stated influence on Satoshi Kon's 2006 film Paprika, it's hard not to see a little bit of Alice's world in Kon's dreamscapes.

As a story, Paprika isn't breaking new ground, although its method of storytelling may be. It explores the boundaries between the waking and dreaming worlds, using technology to break into the subconscious mind so that therapists can better help their patients cope with their trauma.

It's an idea that Kon has played with before: Magnetic Rose is a dark tribute to the way that people can turn to their dreams to escape from harsh reality, and Millennium Actress explores a different idea of becoming lost in a dream as an actress lives many lives through the roles she plays. We can see both of those elements in Paprika – the fairy tale sensibility of Magnetic Rose's predatory Sleeping Beauty carries over into the parade of nightmares in Paprika, and she plays many roles as she flits through dreams, like Chiyoko of Millennium Actress. The idea of a dream turned into a nightmare that marks Magnetic Rose is refined into a sharper, keener form in Paprika, and the notion that a dream is a state that you must wake from becomes a key point. A dream is meant to be fleeting, something acted out on the stage of the mind.

That dreams and cinema are linked in Paprika feels like a given. After all, this is a regular theme in Kon's works which, provides context for Paprika, particularly in the recurring parade of nightmares that Paprika and Detective Konakawa see on their journey.

The parade is chaotic, a festival of madness where dolls and fey folk and floats all move in semi-synchronized insanity, relentlessly moving forward until it breaks through from dreams to reality. There's so much to see in the parade that it becomes overwhelming (helped, of course, by the stellar soundtrack); there's no way to easily just pick out one dream to track. It's the amalgamation of every dream ever dreamed, mashed together into a hideous nightmare. When it rips through from the sleeping to the waking world, it's akin to a film bursting through the screen in a theater, carrying through the particular trauma that Konakawa is coping with, which is related to a friend who dreamed of making films.

The idea of forcibly mingling dream and reality is at Paprika's core. The entire idea of the DC Mini, the in-world technology that allows people access to others' dreams for the purpose of psychiatric treatment, is based on it, and Kon takes that theme and runs with it in the film. One of the most striking scenes is when Osanai, having captured Paprika, peels away her skin to reveal Dr. Atsuko Chiba underneath. We already know by this point that Chiba and Paprika are one and the same, but the symbolic removing of her dream skin is raw. It's treated as an assault; Chiba screams as Osanai forcibly undresses her.

And he is assaulting her, because Paprika is more than just a form Chiba takes on in her dreamwork. Paprika is her dream self, a version of Chiba who can move freely and do anything. We could frame her as the self Chiba wants to be, or possibly who she really is underneath her everyday façade. When Osanai robs her of that form, he's stripping off her armor, and maybe her very self. Seen another way, when he deprives her of the Paprika skin, Chiba may be forced to reconcile with the fact that she's Atsuko Chiba, and that Paprika herself is the dream.

Paprika ultimately shows that's what makes dreams so important. They aren't real, and they are fleeting, but that doesn't make them any less valuable. When Paprika becomes a free entity, not tied to Chiba, she's representative of the piece of all of us who dream, the timeless freedom of the subconscious. It's not that Chiba doesn't need her dream self anymore, but more that she doesn't have to hold on to her alter ego so tightly. Sometimes you have to let dreams go.

Theater is a dream. Shakespeare perhaps said it best in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Puck's final speech tells us to pretend, “That you have but slumber'd here/While these visions did appear./And this weak and idle theme,/No more yielding but a dream.” As a film, Paprika embodies this. It gives us a bright dream, sometimes a nightmare, to enjoy for a brief time, and when Konakawa at the end is finally able to go to the movies, he is all of us asking for a ticket to enter a dreamworld. It is no coincidence that these are the final lines of the film – it is a reminder that this is a dream we can experience again and again. It doesn't matter that it came out nearly twenty years ago, because dreams are brief, but eternal. The film is a strange, twisting journey through the idea of dreams and nightmares. And most importantly, Paprika reminds us that dreams are valid and important, even the strange nightmare parades that might march through them.

Whether it for the first time, or the first time in a long time, you can view this masterpiece on the big screen yourself this week only, on February 7th to 11th as part of AX Cinema Nights' Satoshi Kon Fest organized by Anime Expo and Iconic Events Releasing. Click here for details, theater info, and tickets.