Somnium Files 1 spoilers.
I want to talk a bit about Date’s Somniums/Somnii (well, his one Somnium and the tutorial dream).
It’s very telling of Date as a person that the rules of his Somnii are based on color.
The Somnii of characters are all reflective of key aspects of themselves, for example, Iris’ Somnii are fundamentally informed by 1) her passions, that is, streaming (particularly ShovelForge), dancing, mythology, and the occult as the foundation to her psyche, 2) her delusions, the flawed perception of reality that comes as a side effect of her brain tumor, to which her love for the occult feeds, and 3) her fear of her coming death, which mixes with her passion for mythology to create an escapism where the Fruit of Immortality may save her. There’s a cohesive connection between Who Iris Is and What Iris Is. The same goes for Saito, whose Somnii all take place in ideal locales for murder (abandoned warehouses and factories), and all necessitate revisiting either his childhood of killing animals, represented by childish drawings of animals being brutalized in various ways, or his latest ‘achievements’, the Cyclops Serial Killings both old and new. The foundation of both of these is, again, passion. The only way Saito knew any sort of joy was when killing. It was quite essentially all he lived for.
If we do a cursory look of other Somnii, passion paints an important picture and plays and important role in all of them: Ota’s love for tokusatsu makes his Somnium play out like a toku fight, Ota’s mom focuses on the moments with her family, both the sad and the joyful, and even Mizuki’s Somnium, the one most colored with sorrow and trauma (it took place shortly after discovering her own mother’s corpse, after all), takes place in the park that housed the sole happy memory she had with her parents, and some parts of the Somnium allude to this joy and how important that is for Mizuki. The grand exception would be Hitomi’s Somnium and Rohan’s Somnium, which are entirely rooted in past regrets and sorrows. One could say these overpower their passions at that point in their lives.
So, we return to Date, Date Kaname, our dirtbag of a man, sleazy ass cheeky piece of shit, lovably charming loser. For all of this and more that he is, however, it’s easy to miss something essential about Date, something that also makes him stick out among the gallery of amnesiac protagonists: He’s happy. He’s perfectly happy where he is, he is not wholly uninterested in his past, but he doesn’t pursue it, either. He’s very content where he is in life. He likes Boss. He likes Aiba. He likes Mizuki. He likes Reika from the cabaret club and her fat thighs. He likes Mama. He likes hitting the bar with his drinking buds such as Okiura and Shoko. Date is in a good place... More than that, he’s thankful.
As the dream tutorial immediately shows us, there’s plenty of subconscious memories he is not even remotely aware of inside of him, of his past life, and even in these, the prime directive of his Somnii, the foundation, the passion, is represented by color.
In the Dream, it’s color that leads the way and dictates what can and cannot be interacted with. Date’s Somnii are very straightforward because he has nothing to hide, and what he is hiding, he doesn’t even know of. We see the stew, we see drawing Iris made of the Okonomiyaki Incident, we take a peek inside of Iris’ toy box where she keeps her UFO toys and occult magazines, right before being thrust into the completely colorless scene of ‘Rohan’ shooting at ‘Falco’, accidentally injuring Hitomi in the incident. Completely colorless, because what’s done is done and there’s nothing he can do about it, the guilt being such that even in his dreams, he cannot change those events. The main characters of this deep dream, however, were the good times, lingering as fractal memories that Date has no easy access to.
In the Somnium proper, when Mizuki is Psycing with the comatose Date, color once again dictates the rhythm. It’s no coincidence that his Dream took place where he considered home as Yagyu -- the Sagan Household -- and that his Somnium proper takes places where he, as Date, considers home, the Date Household: Domestic joy and stability is invaluable to him, again, he’s thankful. He has no memories of his days as a vigilante assassin, but the associated emotions linger, he wanted out of that life, he wanted to simply live a nice and peaceful life. As Date, that is exactly what he has. That’s what the ever caring Boss made sure he got. His passions are his peaceful, fun days with Aiba and Mizuki. Getting in fights, arguing, joking around, making up, going for disgusting stew, awkwardly greeting each other, covertly doing good things for each other, never honest, always earnest, a domestic routine, a life as regular as can be, despite the eccentricities of the events themselves (such as regularly diving into people’s heads and having an eye that’s also a buddy).
It’s precisely because Date has nothing to hide that his Somnii are so incredibly linear, he’s not making any secret of his memories, he is, in fact, proudly showing them. Unlike the other Somnii, where one has to do puzzles and use esoteric dream logic to peel each layer away, Date’s Somnii is basically a tour. He’s showcasing an exhibition of memories dear to him. Even the moments that were no doubt stressful, such as Mizuki throwing a tantrum or, worse yet, throwing his police badge out of the window, are regarded as dear and frankly fun memories. There’s no shortage of them. And eventually, when Mizuki does reach the innermost sanctum of the Somnium, a black void where he stands opposite to Okiura and Shoko, the negativity and sadness he keeps buried under so much happiness and color, it’s all born from a feeling of guilt towards Mizuki, believing himself insufficient as a guardian for her. “She should have her proper parents, I don’t stand a chance, is this the best for Mizuki?” In the end, it’s not that he doesn’t want to take care of her, it’s that he’s unconvinced that he’s the best option, and that maybe he’ll screw up and Mizuki won’t be the best version of herself.
Which is such a mundane and completely understandable inner sorrow to have! Of course you care for the ones you love, especially when you suspect it might be you that’s holding them back! End of the day, Date is many things, but the most important of them is that he’s a fun-loving, caring dude of all time. He’s a pathetic garbage dirtbag man that blows his money pouring ponzu between Reika’s thighs and can’t see anything but a pair of tits behind the reception desk at Lemniscate, but he’ll go through hell and back (silently and without ever admitting it, of course) for those he loves.
It all ties to one of the other biggest themes in Somnium Files: “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. With the exception of the Matsushita family, every single family by blood relation in Somnium Files is a strained mess, and to contrast, every single family tied together by love for each other rather than by blood -- Hitomi and Iris, Date, Aiba and Mizuki, even Rohan and Moma! -- is healthy and loving as can be.
To wrap this up, I do want to call attention to something important that is referred to very subtly in both the Dream and the Somnium:
In the Dream, Date can instruct Aiba to wear the box on her head. When she does, the box also covers the skeleton’s head. As we learn much, much later, the skeleton with the bleeding left eye socket represents Date’s old life, Yagyu.
In the Somnium, when Mizuki find Date in the innermost sanctum of his psyche, Date’s left eye is yellow, or in other words, Aiba.
In the Dream, Aiba wearing the box on her head puts it on the skeleton as well because Date considers Aiba as a literal part of himself, and is not whole without her, ergo, her wearing the box is essentially him also wearing the box, and in the Somnium, Date doesn’t have his proper eye or his eye closed, and has Aiba very clearly in there, because, again, his image of the self is simply not complete without her.
Date loves Mizuki and Aiba so much that they are inseparable from his deepest memories, psyche, and even sense of self. He is not only the dude of all time, he is the tsundere of all time (who happens to love his tsundere foster daughter Mizuki and his tsundere best friend-slash-literal part of his body Aiba).
