Hello everyone! I’m sure this has been a stressful week for everyone, so let’s unwind with some Japanese science fiction. Paprika is a Japanese animated film about a team of psychiatrists who have created a device (the DC mini) to enter the dreams of their clients. Unfortunately, the psychiatrists haven’t properly secured this device, so a nefarious agent hacks into the mainframe and begins controlling the clients’ behaviors in the real world through their dreams. With the help of a police inspector, the psychiatrist Chiba and her alter ego Paprika rush through the dream world to find the agent responsible for the security breach.
This week we’ll be examining one particular dream sequence that occurs early on in the movie. We will not be using Jungian psychology or literary tools to analyze this dream today; we will be using pure dream analytic tradition!
Onto the dream!
Circus Doubles
[Here is a clip of the dream. It lasts from 0:00 to 2:35. Unfortunately I could not find any videos with English subtitles, but you should be able to get the gist of the dream from the footage above. I will also type a description of the dream sequence below for those of you who prefer to read.]
The dream opens in a circus full of children and bright colors. A lion jumps through a blazing ring of fire and acrobats fly through the air. The police inspector speaks surreptitiously with Paprika on the phone in the crowd. The ringmaster of the circus enters and pulls away a red sheet, revealing that the police inspector is somehow trapped in a cage onstage despite being in the crowd moments before. People rush out from the crowd toward him and as they come closer it becomes apparent that they all have the police inspector’s face. They reach through the cage and the police inspector falls through the floor.
He is caught in the air by a daring Paprika, who is flying on an acrobatic swing. As they fly through the air, they fall into the roles of Tarzan and Jane. They are knocked off of their jungle rope and suddenly find themselves in a speeding train, where the police inspector is cornered by a man trying to cut his throat with a wire cutter. Paprika hits the man with a suitcase.
As the suitcase hits the man, it becomes a guitar. Paprika and the police inspector find themselves on a red carpet with live music. The police inspector holds a camera and gestures for Paprika to pose for a picture, but then they see a shadow rushing through the crowd. They chase after it.
The police inspector chases the shadow into a back building, where he sees a boy being shot, his body falling to the ground. The shadow runs through a door down the hallway. The police inspector tries to follow it, but the floor warps, scrunching up, and he falls through the ground. This is where the dream sequence ends.
The Analysis
This dream sequence perfectly captures just how bizarre dreams can be! Jumping from one setting to another, at a surface level the police inspector’s dream has no discernible connective tissue. However, upon further (police) inspection, we see that the dream means quite a bit.
The first notable symbol in this dream sequence is how, once the police inspector is caged, the people that rush toward him and begin crowding the cage all have his face. This produces a chilling, quite creepy effect in the video. Being caged and surrounded are motifs in dreams that indicate a fear of being trapped. This fear is evident in the way his dreams jump from one setting to the next, never settling on one place for long. He doesn’t want to get stuck in one location (even in his mind), so he keeps flitting from Setting to setting.
The fact that the people that stoke this fear of being trapped or confined all have his face shows a lack of union with the self. This could indicate that the police inspector has a dark past or shadowy part of his personality that he hasn’t reconciled with. Indeed, the movie alludes to a dark past.
Another symbol in the dream sequence is the camera that the police inspector tries to take a picture of Paprika with. Cameras are entangled with the concept of memory. To have this symbol in the dream indicates that the police inspector wants to remember Paprika and his dream when he wakes up. Because Paprika is Chiba’s (the psychiatrist’s) alter ego, the police inspector only gets to interact with her in dreams. The police inspector comes to have feelings for Paprika, which he tries to immortalize with a snapshot. She is his dream girl (literally).
This absurd dream sequence shows that the police inspector fears being trapped and confined, especially when it’s confinement of his own making. In addition, it highlights his desire to remember Paprika. Wouldn’t you want to remember a dream-hopping pixie alter ego? Stay loose and dream lucid!