#paprikagate

First off let's quickly go over what Camazotz is, it comes in two parts:

First it is presented as a prison by Max, a labyrinth of memories, often painful, that is made to make you suffer by forcing you to relive your own trauma. This is where Vecna takes his victims after he curses them.

From the moment that his victims are cursed, all the following memories are then stored in his mind, adding new rooms to the labyrinth. That’s where Max ended up when Jane brought her back from the dead. She was first stuck inside Henry’s memory but found a way to access her own memories when Lucas held her hand and played her song.

"Like a nightmare prison world ruled by an evil, psychopathic piece of shit."

"Camazotz is like this dark planet that's under the control of IT, which is this giant disembodied, evil brain."

Max describes Camazotz as a nightmare while Holly likens it to a planet.

The other part is the one where Henry traps Holly and the other kids, the Creel manor. Henry remodeled his own memory of the house that he grew up in to create a world that looks perfectly happy and peaceful, a sanctuary. However we know that this is just a facade, for some reason he needs the kids to cooperate so he created this fantasy to lull them into a false sense of security.

One thing interesting to note is that although he was able to turn the Creel Manor into a bright place this world is very small, he forbids the kids to wander past the playground because they would soon find out that this place isn’t real. I imagine that is because Henry’s power is limited and creating a vast illusion like this isn’t easy to do for him. Despite how convincing the manor is, it’s still a part of Camazotz and therefore the kids could easily find themselves accidentally wandering into the other parts of the labyrinth.

This part of Camzotz is dreamlike, it's perpetually sunny there. There are banquets of cakes and candies, toys and the wardrobes are stocked with pretty dresses.

His MO in season 4 it the following; first he tortures his victims psychologically, inflicting horrific visions until he pulls them into a trance and kills them. He used to present himself as the monster that he is, haunting and terrorizing his victims, much like Freddy Kruger and IT. He used the deepest fears of his vicims against them to create their own personal nightmares.

However we see this season that he does the exact opposite with the kids, instead of openly scaring them, he becomes their friend and gains their trust. And he does this with gifts and half-truths. More preciseley he inverts the truth. We're going to put a pin that.

He tells the kids that the manor is their santuary when it is their prison. He presents himself as their savior when he is their captor. He tells them that the monsters are hiding in the woods when talking about Max.He tells Holly that the only comfort that her parents have is knowing that she is safe with him.

So he he lies but only partially, and that's what is so convincing to the kids, because to them it sounds like he is revealing truths. Now with that we can try to look into what he tells them for clues about his plans.

He keeps talking about reshaping the world, and he did so back in season 4 as well, but Vecna/Henry doesn't have the abilitiy to actually build anything as far as we know. His goals seem really vague, he doen't even says what he wants his perfect world to be like.

Let's first go back to season 4 and his monologue to Jane.

"Like you I didn't fit in with the other children. Something was wrong with me. All the teachers and doctors said I was… “Broken” they said. My parents thought a change of scenery, a fresh start in Hawkins, might just cure me. It was absurd. As if the world would be any different here."

He blames the world he lives in for making him feel different and ostracizing him. He was an outcast, alone and misunderstood by the people around him. He then likens himself to Jane despite the fact that he participated in pitting her against the other kids, encouraging her to compete with them when he knew what Dr Brenner was doing. He could’ve helped the other kids too, making them realise that the competition was only created for the benefit of their captors but he was never after true human connection.

He does not want to break the cycle. No, he was trying, much like Brenner, to create a new him. A cold and inhumane killer. So he made Jane feel like him, alone, ostracized and broken, hoping that she would see what he does, that she too, would choose to hurt others in an attempt to feel whole.

"But the human world was disrupting this harmony. You see, humans are a unique type of pest, multiplying and poisoning our world, all while enforcing a structure of their own. A deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day."

Time was nothing but a constraint to him, he hated the rules that were imposed on him by his parents, his teacher and eventually Brenner. His vision of the world is very bleak, he sees the mundanity of work and the performance of happiness that his parents put on as lies but to him there is nothing underneath those lies, no love, no dreams, just nothing but the slow wait for death.

Existence is utterly hollow in his eyes, he felt trapped in a prison that he couldn’t escape from. So one would think that this is strange then that his motif is clocks and time itself, especially when he tells Jane that he wants freedom.

"I could make my own rules. I could restore balance to a broken world. A predator… but for good."

He says that he wants to make his own rules, but even when he is able to create illusions he can’t seem to be able to ever break away from the world that he hates so much. He is only capable of hate, to the point where it looks like it’s physically consuming him.

His vision of freedom is not to break free of the rules and to abolish them but instead to become the enforcer. That's why he made Camazotz. He is unable to conceive true freedom because he is blindsided by his hatred. It narrows his own personal world, reducing it to the view that he has of everything else, a prison. Reshaping the world to him only means that he will recreate the oppressive systems that have hurt him in order to become the oppressor on top. There is no place in his vision of the world for love, beauty or kindness, he does not understand these concepts. To him there are only preys and predators.

"I saw my parents as they truly were. To the world, they presented themselves as good, normal people. But like everything else in this world, it was all a lie. A terrible lie."

So, just like his parents, he uses lies and deceit to use and hurt others. He chose to perpetuate the cycle himself to gain a sense of control, that’s what he is after, revenge and total control over the people that he sees as beneath him. His parents made him feel like an actor in his own life and Brenner tried to puppet him and turn him into nothing more than a tool for violence. So he became a puppet master and a stage director. He appropriated for himself the tools that oppressed him, including time.

When he talks to the kids he tells them this:

"In my travels I discovered another world. A world far from Earth. This world is much like ours, only... good. Free of monsters and darkness. It is the light."

And to Will he says this:

"Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine"

As he points to his head, the world he is refering to is Camazotz.

"With each life I took I grew stronger." "They're still with me. In here."

He consumes people's mind to strenghten his own.

When he talks about reshaping the world, he talks about Camazotz, he reshapes memories, that's his power, his entire MO. When he says that he wants to "draw the worlds together" I believe that he wants to merge reality and Camazotz, he wants to project his mind into the physical world to create a world of lies and be its master. And I think that's also why he chose Hawkins' library as the junction for the cracks splitting Hawkins.

We rarely get a good view of it but the library has a belfry. Vecna seeks control, and what better sit of power for him than a clock tower to be the master of time. He took 12 kids for the same reason, he uses them to amplify his power and 12 stands for the hours on a clock. He wants to trap all of Hawkins into HIS own personal nightmare, that is of course conformity.

"Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before."

Plenty of people have made posts analysing in depths the epilogue and theorizing that it's all fake so I won't expand on it, but we'll work on the assumption that it is an illusion.

When looking into this I was wondering if Vecna's illusions were real or not at the end. Is this a Matrix situation where everyone's minds are trapped in a fake wolrd while their bodies are left to wither and eventually die ? Or is this Paprika where dreams bleed into the real world ?

And the more I thought about it the more I saw some really intersting parallels with Paprika. Was this an excuse to watch it again ? Absolutely. But I also found many more parallels than I originally expected to the point that I think it might have been an inspiration for this season.

For those who haven't seen or don't know about the movie, Paprika is an animated movie released in 2006 about the duality of dreams and reality. Dreams both as in what we dream of at night and what they represent and our personal aspirations. I will try not to spoil to much of the plot for those who might want to watch it.

In the world of Paprika, a genius scientist, Okita, has invented the DC mini, a device that allows two people to share a dream. This device was created for psychotherapeutic purposes, it allows the therapist to help the patient explore their trauma safely within their dream to confront them and heal. The device records and can broadcast the dream on a computer, allowing a third person to monitor what's happening inside.

However someone steals a DC mini and starts to invade people's dreams, infecting them with a the dream from a patient with severe delusions. And he even invades their dreams while they are awake, meaning they fully believe that they are in a dream and act as such. People start spewing nonsense and jumping from windows, thinking they are flying.

They can't escape the dream on their own and are unable to recognise what's real anymore.

It starts to get worse when Atsuko, a dream therapist notices that her colleague who was trapped in a dream and is still sleeping isn't dreaming. She can't access his dream from the computer despite the fact that he is still asleep.

"it's as if their cousciousness itself has been taken away."

This is exactly what happens to Max and Will when they get trapped in Camazotz, their cousciousness, their mind isn't in their body anymore. Jane can't find them at all.

The dream terrorist starts merging people's dreams meaning all the people that he traps are all sharing the same delusional dream together. They are "invaded by a collective dream".

This is what he says about this collective dream.

"In a world of inhumane reality... it is the only sanctuary left. That is a dream. The parade is full of refugees who were unwillingly chased out of reality." "There are no boundaries to dreams. The spirit will be freed from the constraints of the body and gain limitless freedom."

That's very similar to how Henry talks, how he felt constrained by the world, he wanted to break free of it, that's what he told Jane. He invited her to follow him and be "trully free". He sees spiders as gods and wants to become one, just like the antagonist in Paprika.

"I control the dreams and even death."

And speaking of Henry, during his spiel to the kids, he says something when he talks about drawing the worlds together that I find odd everytime I watch it.

"And as the light... reaches the darkness, the light will expel the darkness, your loved ones will be saves and you, you will be heroes."

The themes of night and day come back alot in Paprika, night representing the realm of dreams while the day is waking reality. More specifically there is one scene that struck me when rewatching it. In the dream there is a giant parade, and the guide of the parade appears to chase out the invaders, he says the following:

"The sun during midday will light up the dark night. Night dreams of day. Light dreams of darkness. But the ignorant sun will chase away the darkness and burn the shadows, eventually burning itself."

The night represents the dream, and near the end of the movie the dreams and reality merge together, causing chaos and death. This dialogue forshadows that.

Now it's time to go back to the pin, how Henry inverts the truth, he called Hawkins the darkness and "his world" the light. But just like in Paprika, Hawkins is reality, the physical world, it is the light and Camazotz is the darkness and it will eclipse Hawkins.

Camazotz isn't made of dreams but it's compared to nightmares by Max and it works very similarly to how dreams do. Doors will lead to completely different places, breaking a panel in a merry-go-round leads to a mirror in a wall and much like dreams it's a place of repressed trauma. Vecna himself is designed after Freddy Kruger after all. So it's fair to say that Vecna and Camazotz are heavily thematically tied to dreams and nightmares.

Now I'd like to talk about the other part of the movie that made me decide to make this post about Paprika.

Here are Atsuko (on the left), a dream therapist and Parpika, her dream self. Paprika is spontaneous, soft, bubbly and very expressive while Atsuko is the exact opposite, she’s very serious and quiet, with a lot of sharp angles, she’s not very approachable and doesn’t show emotion easily.

They are the two halves of the same person but they are disconnected. Whilst Atsuko enters other people's dream she can't see her own, she considers Paprika to be a completely different person from herself. When talking about her, she refers to "her" saying for example that she'll "pass the message to Paprika".

Paprika represents her childlike wonder, her innermost desires and her aspirations. She is very playful and enjoys childish things, the same one that Atsuko holds in contempt. As a result Atsuko doesn't accept her, she represses her feelings and ends up pushing away the man she loves as a result.

Now I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, Paprika is Will the Wizard, she is the repressed queerness of Will and his desire for happiness. She is all the parts that he doesn't accept and tries to hide. She is Holly the Heroic and Mike the Brave.

When Atsuko finally accepts Paprika and what she represents, it gives her the strength she needs to defeat the antagonist. She is finally able to dream again and to confess her love for her the man she loves.

Just like Will accepting his queerness and childlike wonder gave him the power to fight back against Vecna.

She's become true to herself hasn't she ?

This is said at the end of Atsuko after she has accepted herself fully. Being true means embracing all the parts of herself and following her heart.

"We stay true to ourselves."

I already talked at length about how important truth is this season in my previous posts so I won't go into it here but this echoes what Dustin says in ep 1 about refusing to blend in.

"It's truth that came from fiction."

One of the characters has overcome their trauma and realised that they never abandoned their dreams, he lived the stories that he would dream of and lived out their dream in a way. Just like Holly found courage in Holly the Heroic the divine cleric.

Both stranger things and Paprika talk about truth as refenrencing one's inner child and wonder. Robin says that accepting herself, her truth freed her from all the fear and doubt that weighed her down. Holly can't cast spells of protection or ward off evil spirits but she found real bravery in that story. And the first thing that she did when she entered the deam part of Camazotz was to become Holly the Heroic by dressing up like her.

Vecna uses lies to imprison his victims whilst Will embracing himself frees him from his control. Lies are stories and the stories that Vecna tells are devoid of love and creativity, they only twist and corrupt reality. The lies, the stories that Vecna tells are used to oppress, conceal and weaken. Mike tells stories to empower and inspire his friends to fight and be themselves, to embrace their inner truth.

Now I believe that Hawkins is trapped in an illusion, that either Vecna can influence the physical world with his illusions or that his illusion or so convincing that everyone is unable to distinguish between what is real and what isn't. That they are living and going about their day while being trapped in a dream that isn't physically real.

Personally I'd really like to think that he managed to make his illusions real, that would be fascinating and to me it sounds like that's what he was trying to do.

As a bonus here's a few more fun parallels here and there, I won't go into details because this post is long enough already but I'll go over them quickly :

This amusement park is important to the story, it's where the dream where the giant parade was first implanted. And I noticed that the playground in front of the Camazotz Creel house has the exact same colors than the wheel. I was wondering why it was red white and blue like this and this is an interesting coincidence if it is one.

The movie gets pretty meta with talks about moviemaking and Paprika watching a client's dream in a theater while she's in his dream.

There's also some circus imagery, Paprika rides a spaceship-ship at the begining of the movie and the secret place where she meets people is an internet cafe called the radio club.

Stranger things if anything is about abuse and trauma and how trauma changes and shapes us. How it affects our lives if left unresolved, we see it in Hopper and Joyce who both respectively hold on to Jane and Will too tightly, so much so that they smother them. Hopper has anger issues caused by his fear of losing Jane, instead of communicating he tends to lash out at her. Steve acts the same in s5 towards Dustin, he fails to be vulnerable with him and instead they fight because they can’t understand each other.

In st people who experience trauma and pain tend to turn to anger as a defense, to protect themselves. That's what season 2 is all about, Max, Billie, Hopper, Jane, Mike and Kali are all angry and lash out because of their own respective pain. And Kali is the only one of the lot that chooses to keep hurting others to “heal” her pain, she is a foil to Jane but also to Nancy. In season 2, Nancy is mad that the Hawkins’ lab is still operating after what they did and that they are still covering up Barb’s death. Her way to address this is to expose them with the help of Jonathan to stop them for good in order to bring justice to Barb and peace for her parents that are bound to look for her their whole lives. Nancy seeks through justice to end the cycle, while Kali wants revenge. Her actions won’t stop other kids from disappearing and getting experimented on. And although it’s true that the men that hurt Kali deserve to face justice for what they did, murdering them in cold blood won’t heal Kali. In fact when she comes back in season 5 she has realized that the cycle continued and that what she needs to do is to stop it, however she feels that her only choice to stop this is to die.

---I need to make a quick sidenote here, usually in these posts I just analyse the text to understand the overall plot and worldbuilding without giving my opinions on the writing itself. I need however to talk about Kali, I hate that the only brown woman of the show is the stereotype of the "woman who wants to punish those that have abused her but goes too far and must be stopped". First it's a shitty sexist archetype and having Kali incarnating that is gross. They villanize and demonize her in s2 and keep doing it in s5. She's not allowed to have any real depth and is completely forgotten by the plot after her appearance in s2, only to be brought back and killed off.

I just wanted to make it clear that while I will keep analyzing her character as she is written I don't support or agree with how she was portrayed. If you want to read a much more in depth post about it, @kaypeace21 wrote this post about the racist writing in st and other problematic things.---

“Pregnant women. A secret government program Does that not remind you of anything? It's a cycle. A terrible, vicious cycle.”

Kali talks of cycles, very obviously referring to cycles of abuse. And this season we have a number of them, there’s the military kidnapping kids, just like Brenner did, and potentially experimenting on pregnant women (if we assume that Kali isn’t lying since we never actually see the pregnant women on screen), Vecna kidnapping kids via demogorgons, Mike watching Jane sacrificing herself again and even Will getting possessed again.

“I ... I just know I'm having serious déjà vu, because this is exactly what happened to Will at almost exactly the same time.”

And with characters seemingly getting flayed and regressing to how they used to be in season 2 as well, this has to be intentional. It all adds up, the events of season 5 look like a deliberate attempt to retraumatize the characters by making them relive the exact thing that they experienced in the past. Vecna specifically reminds Will twice of the day that he captured him and brought him to the library. He finds power through fear, he weakens his victims by scaring them, making them more vulnerable to him, and while that’s definitely part of his MO I think that there is something much deeper to all of this.

This is where we need to talk about Terry Ives. After she attempted to free her daughter that was taken from her by Brenner and failed, she got caught and to silence her Brenner used electroshock therapy on her, effectively crippling her indefinitely. Since then she is stuck reliving her own most traumatic memories again and again, a sort of forever PTSD. Although a part of her is still somewhat conscious, as seen when she uses the lights to call Jane to her, she can’t seem to be able to really “escape” from this unending loop.

Her trauma entraps her, she is stuck in the past and can never move on from what was done to her and her daughter. She tragically relives it like it’s still happening to her everyday. Now that might remind you of a few things, some that we see in season 5.

"-It's like everyone Vecna targets has something in their life. Something that's- -Hurting them. Haunting them."

This is what Max says to Lucas in season 4 to explain Vecna's vissions. Pain is also how Vecna tortures and traps his victims, he uses their unresolved traumas against them, reminding them of it, making them relive their deepest pains. Traumas act as a force of stagnation and entrapment, it keeps you locked away in the past. In Camazotz Max is lost and finds herself right at the beginning, looping the same memories again and again.

This is why and how Vecna captures his victims, he chooses hurt people against whom he can weaponize the bad things that have happened to them. In st, trauma can both metaphorically and literally cut you off from the present and anchor you in a frozen state.

This is the foundation that Camazotz is built on, Henry's own painful memories of when he was a neglected kid. It's a mind prison fueled by traumatic memories.

Jane, similarly to her mother, was also stuck in her memories in season 4 when she was trying to get her powers back. They looped back to the same moment and the only way forward for her was to relive and confront what has happened in order to escape and move on.

This is further proof that trauma works as a mental prison, because although this wasn't Vecna's doing, Jane still found herself trapped in a loop of her own memories where she felt the most vulnerable and scared. She was trapped within her own mind.

The show touches briefly on PTSD in season 2 through Will, it's only named directly by Hopper in passing. But it comes back frequently in subtle ways, and first we need to define what PTSD actually is.

"Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's caused by an extremely stressful or terrifying event - either being part of it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety and uncontrollable thoughts about the event."

Vecna is a sort of physical, albeit magical, representation of PTSD. He haunts people with their past through nightmares and hallucinations until he can kill them. This ties in with his motivations, as I said in my post about Paprika, he abhors time. To him, time as a concept was as much of a constraint as Brenner's secret government prison. This is why his power is memories and trauma manipulation specifically because they are a way for him to circumvent time. What is a memory if not a moment frozen in time, outside of time even.

"I felt, frozen. [...] Like how you feel when you're scared and you can't breathe or talk or do anything."

This is how the upside down comes into play. The nature and origin of the upside down has been one of the biggest of the mysteries of the show and the UD itself is central to this series yet we know so little of it. Now I believe that the explanation that we get this season is complete bullshit. Just another ploy by Vecna to distract and confuse our protagonists. Because, besides all other inconsitencies pointing to this being a lie, if it trully is a wormhole that means that the same day that Jane made contact with the demo Brenner created the exotic matter. And that makes absolutely no sense, how would he even been able to do such a thing ?

So we'll operate on the basis that this entire explanation is wrong for the sake of this theory. What is then, the upside down ? In season 2 Dustin is right when he compares the shadow monster to the mf, in the sense that the shadow monster does target its hosts brain.

"And there are the hippocampal abnormalities we had discussed. Nothing out of line with what we've seen others suffering from post-traumatic stress. But …this is Will from last night. And as you can see, there are now abnormalities in the limbic and paralimbic areas. And this... is from an hour ago."

Without even knowing that Will has developped abnormalities in his brain he gets it right, at least partially. I think that the other dnd analogies are key to figuring out what the true nature of the upside down may be.

"Well, if you're in another plane, you can't interact with the material plane."

"True Sight? It gives you the power to see into the ethereal plane."

They refer to the UD as the ethereal plane, in dnd it's the dimension opposite to what we'd call reality, or the prime material plane in DnD. It's an immaterial place where ghosts and other imaterial creatures reside. When traveling within the ethereal plane adventurers could move in any direction through sheer force of will like ghosts. This doesn't sound like the UD at all. The UD is very much a physical place, people are restricted by gravity and cannot pass through matter. The only ethereal thing about the UD is the mf, or as Will calls it the "shadow monster", but we don't know if it originated from the UD.

"It is a plane out of phase. It is a place of ghosts and monsters. It is right next to you, and you don't even see it." — Manual of the Planes

However I think there is some truth to this and maybe even in the wormhole theory. Vecna tends to lie through half-truth, as seen in the previous posts. He does this to give his lies the appearance and credibility of truths to make them easier to believe in. That's why I think that the UD might very well be a transitional place, but it doesn't lead to the abyss nor is it the ethereal plane, it is more likely a demiplane.

"A demiplane is a small plane with its own unique properties. They may be created by powerful forces, but wizards and other spellcasters can create demiplanes using spells such as demiplane and Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion."

Demiplanes are usually physical and have set boundaries with other planes or dimensions. Some serve as transitional places to go from one plane to the other. Some like the Feywild or Shadowfell, are an "echo" of the prime material plane. Meaning it's a sort of warped reflection of the prime material plane and here Shadowfell is what interests us.

"It is the toxic plane of darkness and power. It is the hidden place that hates the light. It is the frontier of worlds unknown."

Shadowfell is a place of darkness and decay, inospitable and home to many monstruous creatures, it borders other planes and it allows those who travel through it to move great distances into the prime material plane.

This is much closer to the UD that we know, at least the "warped reflection of reality devoid of light and filled with monsters" part of it, and the fact that demiplanes can be created by wizards and other magical forces.

The upside down, beyond being cold and empty seems to be linked to people's minds in some way.

In season 3 when Jane entere Billy's mind she finds the same storm that Will saw when he had visions of the UD and there's even spores around it. Here the storm is where all of Billy's bad memories coalesce, and at the eye of the storm is the memory of him getting flayed. It's unclear whether or not the storm itself is the mf or simply an effect of Billy being flayed.

However we could infer that the thundering storm and darkness is a representation of Billy's anger and pain caused by the abuse inflicted by his dad being exploited by the mf and used against him.

“He uses my memories against me. But… only my darkest memories. It’s like he only sees the darkness in us.”

Max talks about darkness to refer to all of the pain, grief and suicidal thoughts she feels after witnessing Billy's gruesome death, and she uses "light" to talk about her good memories, saying she'll run towards the light when Vecna pulls her into a trance. Beyond the litteral sense of the word echoing the fact that the UD is a place without light, this darkness is also more directly tied to the UD and Vecna. When Max hides in her happiest memory, as Vecna approaches the UD leaks into her memory. The light changes, there's red flashes of light from the UD neverending storm and spores appear in the air.

The "darkness" of her mind literally seeps into even her happiest memory, with the darkness itself being the upside down.

On top of that in season 2 the UD is heavily paralled with psychic, emotional wounds or unresolved trauma. It's Kali that brings it up when she talks about her and Jane's shared trauma of being taken by Brenner and experimented on.

"You have a wound, Eleven, a terrible wound. And it's festering. Do you remember what that means? Festering? It means a rot. And it will grow. Spread. And eventually, it will kill you."

She tries to scare Jane through an illusion of Brenner into joining her crusade with these words. She's telling her that she has to heal and the only way for her is through violence.

She explains that the pain and anger she feels lingers, she can't move on from it and her "solution" is to seek vengeance like I said earlier. But although that's what she claims will heal both her and Jane, her thirst for blood is what drives her, she has completely given up on living a peaceful life and it can never trully save her. She has lost hope and has resigned herself to the role that was imposed upon her, a weapon.

Her pain will never heal because she dedicates her life to the violence that she was trying to avoid. She says it herself, after losing her found family she decided to "play the part" and to hunt down those that have hurt her. She isn't healing her wounds, she is doing the exact opposite of that by keeping them open. Her own pain keeps growing.

"They're growing and spreading… Killing."

This is what Will says about his "now memories" he is talking about the vines digging, spreading right underneath Hawkins and destroying crops and demodogs killing small animals. The exact same words are used to describe the UD spilling into the real world than to talk about trauma. The mothergate itself looks like a rotting, gaping wound, it's fleshy and organic.

The gate is a litteral wound on reality, on that needs to be closed or it will keep bleeding out monsters and abominations into the world. Just like with Kali, it will keeping killing and hurting people again, perpetuating the cycle. This means that the UD is associated with emotions and trauma, as if it, itself was someone's psyche or mind. And if the UD is indeed created from someone's memory of Hawkins, it might not be so far off from that.

"They had done things Eleven. Such Awful things. I showed them who they really were. I held up a mirror."

Henry explains that he showed his parents the "awful things" that they had done to confront them with their terrible deeds. He does the same things to Max and all his victims, his shows them the "ugly" part of themselves. He holds up a mirror that only reflects the darkness in people.

The upside down itself is a dark reflection of Hawkings, even it's name implies it, it's a reflection right below the town like it is flipped on it's horizontal axis.

"The last entry is November 6, 1983. The day Will went missing. The day the gate opened. We're in the past."

The only really solid information about the UD is that it is frozen in time, precisely when the mothergate was opened by Jane, the same day that Will was taken. This suggests the fact that the UD was in fact created by someone or something rather that it being a natural alternate world/dimension. Now, knowing Vecna/Henry's hatred of time, his obession with clocks and his "wizard" powers of weaponizing memories, the fact that time is seemingly stopped in the UD just can't be a simple coincidence.

For all these reasons I think that the UD is effectively the halfway point, the bridge between Hawkins and Camazotz. It's a reflection of Hawkins, a dark and corrupted memory of it but is is also a physical place. It's frozen ins time because it is a bad memory of Hawkins. It IS a bridge but not in the way that it is explained in s5. That would explain its biggest mystery, why exactly it's stopped in November 6th of 1983. Time has stopped because it's a bad memory, or was built from one. The upside down is indeed a place between mind and physical reality. It's a place that is spiritual in nature and it's very likely that it was created, or shaped, by Vecna himself.