One of the clues to this story is the repeated mention of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is known for his novels and stories in the magical realism genre. Magical realism can be defined simply as placing magical elements into an otherwise realistic world. (As a counterexample, Harry Potter has magical elements in a magical world and is therefore fantasy.)
An author might employ magical realism to create a detachment from what otherwise might seem like real life in order to explore some human truths that might be too difficult to see without the magical elements. One of my favorite Marquez stories, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," is about an injured angel who lands in a farmer's yard and is treated with absolute cruelty by the farmer, his family, and the people in the town. By using these magical details, Marquez is able to explore how cruel people can be to those who are different, a theme many might not be able to see otherwise.
In "TV People," Murakami uses magical realism to explore the narrator's detachment from reality and how he is allowing others to create meaning for his life. His wife bullies him, but he just watches dispassionately. Clearly, his work is another area in which he is unable to express himself and doesn't even remember when he does stand out.
The airplane the TV people are creating is an airplane because they've decided to call it so. By the end of the story, the narrator begins to understand this. That reality is what one makes of it. If they want to call this non-airplane an airplane, they can.
This is why magical realism is so important to this story. Murakami explores very postmodernist ideas, such as creating meaning, instead of having one's meaning defined by society, through fiction, not through a long, postmodernist essay. As the narrator begins to understand things, particularly the fact that he is in an unhappy marriage and as he begins to see how the TV people could call that object an "airplane," he begins to turn into a TV person himself.
Interesting question! The dream sequence appears to be another metaphor for the author's detached reality. The ambiguous story-line allows us to interpret this surreal phenomenon on a few levels.
First, the room in the author's dream is populated by dead people who have been turned to stone. In the dream, the windows are broken, and the author feels the chill of the air. He stands to give a statement to his lifeless colleagues but doesn't know what he's talking about, merely that he must keep talking in order to live. There is animated fear and anxiety in his tone; we question whether he is delirious or in the throes of schizophrenic hysteria.
The stone figures are significant in that they appear to be a metaphor for the author's alienation from society; he experiences neither emotional connection to his colleagues or his own wife. Earlier in the story, the author relates how he and his wife often go days without speaking to each other when work obligations require their dedicated attention. Later, he relates how his colleague ignores him when he mentions the TV People.
At home, the author's wife is consumed by her penchant for neatness; her magazines must be arranged in a certain order and be placed in a designated area. The author suggests that his wife becomes unreasonably angry when her magazines are disturbed in any way. In light of the narrative, it appears as if the wife's obsessive compulsive behavior mirrors that of the author's: he's just as obsessive about the TV People and his own need for professional relevance as she is about the arrangement of her magazines. However, just as his stone colleagues and wife can't "hear" what he's saying to them, neither can the TV People. The author is disconnected from his colleagues, his wife, and even the seemingly imaginary characters that assault his consciousness.
The stone people in the dream sequence is a metaphor for the author's lonely and detached existence. It may also be a metaphor for his (and his wife's) inability to face the emotional devastation of living such a life. Both bury themselves in meaningless conversation and repetitive tasks on a daily basis. Their lives are as devoid of warmth as the cold winds that blow in through the broken windows in the dream sequence. On another level, the stone people and TV People are similar in that they represent the enigma of different realities.
The TV People exist on a different plane, perhaps reinforcing the idea that technology and media can distort one's reality. At the same time, the stone people are totally incapable of relating to the author's words; he might as well be speaking gibberish to them, on account of the fact that they are dead. So, the stone people are symbols (much like the TV People), reinforcing the theme of detached reality in a world powered by technology and circumscribed by a corporate dystopia.
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