Entry 5, Hmmm

The more I think about A Wild Sheep Chase, the more I'm in awe of Murakami's achievement. I needed to look back to Lynch once again to question why he is the only director whose movies I can come back to time and time again. The answer is simple: a mystery isn't always solved; the milk carton doesn't always nourish (the child isn't always found). Some mysteries aren't solved. Some mysteries stay lodged in our minds forever. For me, I've always wondered about the recurring dream I had as a child: four doctors worked on a patient in a rectangular glass room in the middle of a factory lunchroom filled with plastic picnic tables. The only boundary in this dream is as far as the light from above the patient stretches. One doctor is a mummy, another is a wolfman; and outside the glass room, where the picnics tables are, intermittently roams a wild creature (a lion, a wolf, a hybrid: i'm unsure). It is only when this creature appears that I awake in a panic. On a basic level, this dream always had a profound effect on me which was both exhilarating and frightening: a mystery. On the other hand, not being able to figure out its meaning was a letdown. I'm starting to realize, as I get older, that meaning, while it has its purpose, doesn't always exist in full. Sometimes meaning is derived from the context itself, it can bring one closer to an understanding of self. For me, very simply, I was always affected by horror movies and ghost stories, and this recurring dream proved that to me: I was always excited to experience it. And if there was intention in this dream to tell me something more than that, I do not know, but I do know that it will always have me enticed. This spiel is not to say that Murakami's novel had political intentions and that it had a goal, or a purpose, but it is to say the effect that dreamlike sequences and imaginative thinking can impose are great. In short, whether or not Murakami intends to make a socio-political commentary, which he almost surely does, his story still pleases on other levels that alone can be satisfactory.