A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 1-150

“There are symbolic dreams…that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities…that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councilors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers” (67). This quote makes me think that dreams belong to another, very real, tangible world, separate from our own. The narrator’s life in this book symbolizes a dream from this other world. In this world, there is nothing unusual about a “sheep that by all rights should not exist,” has a star-shaped birthmark, a will of its own, and possesses people to enact its will (112). We have a tendency (at least, I think we do) to reserve all the bizarre, unusual phenomenon, people, or things for dreams. We shirk them in our daily lives and when we encounter them, we hesitate to accept them as real; we try to logically explain them away. But if dreams are real, (and even if they’re not) then everything that’s bizarre (this sheep, for instance) is real as well; maybe they just slipped out of the dream world into our own, just as we slip out of our world into the dream one.

I can’t help but think that our disbelief in the bizarre is debilitating. Our unwillingness to accept things that seem beyond reason has made the world “mediocre,” as the Strange Man says (113). The narrator is only “half-living” because he is stuck in this mediocre world: “Nothing changed from day to day…I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept” (40, 20). He sleeps so often in this text (or at least mentions it so much), and I think it’s because the dream world of the bizarre is preferable to the mediocre reality we’ve created that excludes all that is illogical. If we (and the narrator) allow the illogical into our reality, we’d be more content living in it.