Haruki Murakami fans discussion

What is the relation of the two "worlds" in psychic or psychological terms?

On reflection, I got the sense that the ending suggested a kind of equivalency of the conscious and sub-conscious. All along you're thinking, well this guy is living his regular sci/fi life, but deep inside his head this other stuff is happening. Murakami leads you along a path that suggests he'll escape from the latter with his shadow into "reality" so he can survive as a human, but he tricks you at the end and they separate. It calls up ideas like maybe our subconscious lives are the real ones, or at least as real. Who is the shadow and who is not the shadow? Does his escape allow the conscious character to go on living? Maybe the electrical circuits get rewired into a new configuration and all's well that ends not at all.

Coping my own comment from the other thread on Hard-Boiled to this one:
I'm just about to finish reading this book....but it got me overthinking.

For me, Hard-Boiled at the start was not that impressive, yet as it progressed or as I got my head around the plot I started to see similarities with the protagonist, especially the world within our own mind, the head space we keep to ourselves, that space we let our autonomy run wild or not so wild. Here Murakami has the professor trick the protagonist to submerge in to a replica of the world the protagonist had made, but I found it similar to times when I close up from the real world and find solace in a world in my mind that is all of my creation. Is that real? Or is the 'real' world real? half way through my mind was doing cartwheels trying to figure out what Murakami had done and how it relates to our own existence. I'm loving it