Dreams play a crucial role in this novel. Murakami explores how dreams can affect our conscious behavior and moods. Tsukuru has several striking dreams, each so vivid and intense that they linger in his mind for days, or sometimes years to come. Typically, these dreams have a sexual component: A dream in which a woman demanded that Tsukuru choose either her body or her heart stirred him out of his despondency after his high school friends abandoned him. The passionate feelings he still had the morning after the dream so severely contrasted with his waking apathy that his psyche was jolted out of its depression.

At the same time, the novel deliberately obscures the line between dreams and reality. Often, Tsukuru has dreams so realistic—or so wish-fulfilling—that he cannot tell the difference between wakefulness and sleep. The most significant of these happens when Tsukuru has what reads almost like a lucid dreaming experience: Tsukuru thinks he wakes and sees his college friend Haida in his room. However, the novel never quite confirms whether Tsukuru is actually seeing Haida: “how much of this is real? he wondered. That wasn’t a dream or an illusion. It had to be real.