Paprika Read Online Free PDF Page B

about anything he wanted. And while she tended to speak childishly, she never said anything that made Noda feel uncomfortable – unlike most young women these days . Yes, she was young and beautiful, but at the same time she had a motherly quality that served to restrain a man’s baser urges, surrounding him instead with warm, reassuring sensations. Noda breathed a huge sigh of satisfaction. There would certainly be no anxiety attacks occurring here tonight.
    Several times a month, Noda would arrive home at four or five in the morning. His wife, preoccupied as she was with their son’s education, had never shown undue concern; Noda knew she wouldn’t be particularly perturbed, even if he turned up at seven o’clock. And Noda’s wife must have known, more perhaps than Noda himself, that having an affair was simply not in his nature.
    “ Your condition is only mild ,” Paprika had said. Maybe, to a therapist, his condition seemed unspectacular. But Noda himself found no comfort in that at all. It mattered little that the symptoms were not yet affecting his daily life. Now was the most crucial time. Above all, his enemies must never know of his illness; he had to be cured before they could hear about it.
    In the old days, thinking about his enemies both inside and outside the company would have been enough to keep him awake until the small hours. But now he’d grown accustomed to the struggle. Now, planning cunning strategies in his head would send him off to the land of nod with a satisfying degree of mental fatigue; he almost enjoyed it. He felt sure he would fall asleep quickly tonight. As his consciousness started to fragment and crack, meaningless images started to cavort through the crevices of his mind.

5
    Noda woke naturally. Or perhaps he only thought as much; perhaps Paprika had roused him with some kind of device. Paprika sat in a position where they could see each other if Noda turned his head slightly to the right. She was looking at the console monitor with a helmet-like apparatus on her head. Noda thought it must be the “collector” he’d heard about. The light from the monitor screen lent Paprika’s face an ethereal glow.
    “What time is it?” asked Noda.
    Paprika removed the collector and smiled. “Not yet two o’clock. You’ve just finished your first REM sleep. Do you always wake up around this time?”
    “No. I thought perhaps you’d woken me deliberately.”
    “No, I wouldn’t do that. It must have been this dream that woke you. You remember it, of course?”
    “Yes, I do.” Noda sat up. “But how do you know that?”
    “When we’re woken during REM sleep, we usually remember what we were dreaming at the time. So, shall we just analyze this dream tonight?” Paprika took Noda’s clothes from the wardrobe and placed them at the foot of the bed. “Although morning dreams are actually much more interesting.”
    “It was a very short dream. Can you really learn anything by analyzing that?” Noda said as he dressed himself.
    “Of course! Dreams in this phase of sleep are usually short, but the information they contain is condensed. It’s like watching an experimental short film. Morning dreams can sometimes last an hour or so. They’re more like epic feature films.”
    “Really? You have statistics of that sort? How interesting.”
    “Let’s watch an experimental short then, shall we? Come on, sit here,” Paprika said, patting the foot of the bed invitingly. Now fully dressed, Noda sat next to Paprika. He looked at the monitor. The screen was motionless for now, frozen in an alternating pattern of gray and black waves.
    “Can dreams only be monitored in black and white?”
    “There’s not much point seeing them in colour, is there?” Paprika said as she pressed a button to start the picture.
    It was a school classroom. In Noda’s dream, he was looking toward the teacher’s podium. On the podium stood a slender man of about sixty. He was talking, but his speech was so