Japanese animation auteur Satoshi Kon has successfully staked out his own exhilarating style with such affecting, intricately meta movies as the mind-stalker thriller “Perfect Blue” (1998 )and the cinehistorical epic “Millennium Actress” (2001). His latest, “Paprika,” is another absorbing work, a hurtling, haunting adventure about a stolen dream machine. With its psychological dam bursts and its canny gloss on multimedia excess, it’s an intelligent and peculiarly suitable piece of counter-programming for the summer season of blockbuster franchise installments.

Paprika is the spunky alter ego of Dr. Chiba (voiced by Megumi Hayashibara), a buttoned-down researcher who works in a scifi form of psychology resembling guerrilla dream therapy. Using a slender, headsetlike device called the DC Mini, Dr. Chiba can patch into someone else’s dreams, Matrix-style, to watch or participate. As Paprika, she treats Detective Konakawa (Akio Ôtsuka), a burly cop who is unable to shake his recurring vision of a man being shot in a long corridor.

When one of the DC Minis is stolen, all Boschian hell threatens to break loose. Manipulated by the unseen dream “terrorist,” Chiba’s boss at the lab spews gibberish straight out of a Burroughsian cut-up, then exits via a third-story window. He survives, but marching through his dreams thereafter is a cacophonous parade of dolls, frog flautists, and walking appliances that seem bent on breaking through to the other side. Konakawa and Paprika investigate, dipping in and out of a dreamscape that has begun to bleed into the real world.

Even that much description parses the protean realities of “Paprika” more neatly than the actual experience. The handdrawn film’s transitions between realms of consciousness often go unannounced. Even the first scene opens within Konakawa’s dream, which starts with his being caged at center ring in a circus. Meanwhile, Paprika’s relation to Chiba, and the extent of her independence as an entity, is left to the viewer to discern.

Instead, Mr. Kon’s original take on dreams is a continuous hopscotch across a Mobius strip of reality and fantasy, unlike the atmosphere and bogeymen in David Lynch’s work or the full-fledged fantasy worlds of fellow “japanime” artist Hayao Miyazaki. While the sci-fi plotting demands treating the dream machine as a Pandora’s box, the resulting spectacle is also a canvas for mapping the anxieties and obsessions of Chiba and Konakawa.

Both are at risk of being swallowed up by their jobs, almost literally. Chiba juggles opposition from the lab’s chairman — who is nervous about the missing machine — and her colleagues, a simpleminded, obese boy-wonder and a suspicious assistant. Konakawa remains haunted by the shooting he could not prevent, and he’s touchingly intrigued by the possibilities of the dream therapy (and a little smitten with Paprika).

For all its fantasy, “Paprika” is deeply perceptive about the fluid interplay between unconscious desires and the rapidly expanding, interconnected mediascape we inhabit. At one point, Konakawa follows Paprika onto a Web site (after checking that no co-workers are watching) that offers another avenue to the world of dreams. Mind and identity are diffused, spread across several planes of media, much as the hero of Mr. Kon’s “Millennium Actress” told her story by surveying the history of Japan and Japanese cinema.

Adapted from a trippy novel by the Japanese science-fiction author Yasutaka Tsutsui, “Paprika” is also about unstoppable cultural overload in a country just as buried in the stuff as ours. The recurring dream parade is mesmerizing and overwhelming, populated by a panoply of cultural touchstones — samurai, tubby-cheeked dolls and lucky cats, fetishized schoolgirls (pursued by men with cellphone cameras for heads), and Shinto temple gates. The music that accompanies the parade roars with the sound of every instrument in an orchestra being played at once.

“Paprika” has several such tour de force scenes that replay in your head for days because of the strength of the images and their lasting force as metaphors. Standouts, besides the parade, are the nimble medium-hopping credit sequence and the terrifically creepy sight of a dream assailant peeling Paprika off Chiba like a full-length mask. Though it’s easy to grab on to the film’s coattails for a bewildering ride, “Paprika” has too much on its mind to be pure escapism.

Mr. Kon packs the narrative turns of his story more tightly than perhaps necessary, but his skill with shifting frames of reference keeps the film from degenerating (except, of course, when demanded by the plot and the emergence of its villain). Expertly crafted and unnervingly reflexive, “Paprika” qualifies as the must-see, feel-strange movie of the young summer season.