Haruki Murakami's Sleep

The short story, “Sleep,” by Haruki Murakami, is told by a woman with insomnia who has not slept in seventeen days. She describes why she has not slept in seventeen days and what happens to her as a consequence of that. However, the narrator is unaware that she is asleep throughout the entire story and the prose is her dream. It is proven that she is asleep because she is not able to move, she includes things from the outside world and her past in her dream, there are several irrational events, and she wakes up at the conclusion.
The narrator believes that she wakes up in the middle of the night after a “dark and slimy dream,” (6). She claims to have a “climactic moment” that makes her come “fully awake with a start,” (7). However, she does not actually wake up and only dreams that she does. It is after this that her nightmare begins. It’s because she thinks it is real that her dream
One example is when the man is in her room and is “pouring water over my feet,” (7). There is no rational reason why someone would break into a stranger’s house only to do something like that. Strange things like this however are easily explained by the fact that it is a dream because anything is possible in dreams. Also, she points out how she “began to worry that my feet would eventually rot and melt away,” (7). It does not make sense that she would have this fear because this is not humanly possible. She should be more concerned with the identity of the man and how he got into her house than she is with her feet melting away. Another element that makes little sense is that she “couldn’t remember what he looked like,” (4). She is talking about her husband, and it makes no sense that she could “live with a man so long and not be able to draw his face to mind,” (4). There are several confusing parts of the story that make little since if this is reality but are logical because it is a