is a one-hour Japanese television drama

Japanese television drama

, also called , are a staple of Japanese television and are broadcast daily. All major TV networks in Japan produce a variety of drama series including murder romance, comedy, detective stories, horror, and many others...

 broadcast in 2000, based upon a manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

 by Junji Ito

Junji Ito

is a Japanese horror manga artist best known for his series of short stories about Tomie, an immortal girl who drives her stricken admirers to madness, and Uzumaki, a three-volume series about a town obsessed with spirals.-Biography:...

, and directed by Higuchinsky, whose film adaptation of Ito's Uzumaki

Uzumaki

is a horror manga written and Illustrated by Junji Ito, and serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits.The story concerns the inhabitants of the small Japanese town of Kurôzu-cho as they become obsessed by the occurrences of natural and artificial spirals around them...

had been released earlier the same year.

Plot

Dr. Kuroda's credibility is taxed when his young patient Mukoda Tetsurou claims that his fear of sleep is due to dreams that last for months, though they occur in a single night. As Mukoda's condition worsens, with dreams that subjectively last for years and even decades, Kuroda begins to take an unhealthy interest in the case.