Dreams vs. Reality in Paprika

Watching Paprika for the first time at a Japanese Film Festival when I was eight, I remember being baffled by the film's many elements of fantasy. Following an absurd scenario where a dream monitoring machine is stolen and exploited, the film shows the chaos that ensues as dreams leak into reality. It was disturbing, confusing, eerie, yet intriguing, and left me pondering the films for days after I walked out of the theater. Now, with further analysis and a closer look, Satoshi Kon's techniques to evoking this reaction from the typical movie goer become more evident.
The title scene of the film establishes Paprika as Dr.Chiba's alter ego, and reveals her fluid essence. As she rides her motorcycle, she projects herself onto the vehicles and objects around her, and then jumps back and forth between different mediums and realms like billboards and computer monitors. When the sun begins to rise, Paprika returns to the road, and, in a match cut, transforms into Dr.Chiba. This launches the film's major concept of two existing worlds in which the characters live.
To blur the line between dreams and waking life, Kon heavily relies on match cuts, which are often confusing to audiences. The film begins with a sequence linked together by disorienting graphic cuts, and disturbs the viewer with absurd scenes that Detective Konakawa finds himself in. It is only when he wakes up that the audience is explicitly told that what it was just shown was a dream. But as the film goes on, the dreams become less distinguishable from reality. When Dr.Chiba investigates the home of a missing colleague, she follows a hidden passage into an empty amusement park, where she spots an eerie "Ningyo" doll staring at her. Wanting to approach it, Chiba hops a fence, and in mid-air, the park vanishes and she finds herself hopping over the apartment's balcony fence instead, with her partner grabbing her at the last instance before she plummets to her death. Experiencing this, the audience is directly taken into the environment of the film through the confusion and paranoia that the careful juxtaposition of dreams and reality evokes.
Satoshi Kon skillfully presents contrasting ideas and images in his animation to place his viewers in the shoes of Paprika's characters (whether they like it or not). By the end of the film, themes from the dream world begin to all merge with reality, and such contrast -- sometimes drawn within the same frame -- grounds the viewers in the world of the film.