In Your Dreams showcases Stevie, a young girl who hopes to keep her family from breaking apart. When she discovers the existence of the Sandman, an entity with the power to make dreams come true, she hopes he’ll be able to help her. The movie offers some positive messages about courage, but some crude humor and the movie’s god-like depiction of the Sandman will make some viewers uncomfortable.
“Life could be a dream,” as The Chords so eloquently put it in their 1954 track “Sh-Boom.”
And for Stevie, life was a dream—for a time.
Her dream wasn’t anything big: Stevie simply loves her mom and dad and wants to spend all her time with them. (Her younger brother, Elliott, could stay or go.)
But Stevie’s noticed how her parents’ relationship has slowly degraded. And her mom’s decision to apply for a job in another city throws another wrench in the relationship, since her dad doesn’t want to move.
Stevie would do anything to get that perfect family life back, and she just may have found it—in the form of a strange book Elliott brought home from the store.
The Legend of the Sandman, the Giver of Dreams.
The siblings muse over its strange, ancient pages. They find something of an incantation, muttering its words to themselves before falling asleep:
“Sandman please, I call unto you. Grant me my dreams, make them come true.”
They “awaken” to find Elliott’s bed with a literal mind of its own. It soars off into the night sky with the siblings in tow. There, they encounter a figure in the clouds. The figure promises that, if they can find him, he’ll make their dreams come true—dreams that include keeping their family together.
But finding the Sandman is easier said than done. He’s not the only ethereal entity lurking in the dreamscape: Nightmara stands ready to make Stevie and Elliott’s journey to Sandman as frighteningly difficult as possible.
But the brother and sister will do whatever it takes to recover their perfect family.
After Nightmara scares the children for the first time, Elliott refuses to go back to sleep. However, when he recognizes that it may be the only way to keep the family together, he musters up as much courage as he can and dives right back into the fray.
Amidst the fantastical dreams, In Your Dreams offers a refreshing taste of realism in its waking moments—particularly when it depicts the argument between Stevie’s parents. Stevie’s father wants the family to stay where they are because it’s familiar, and it’s where the kids have both memories and friends. Stevie’s mother wants to move the family because her new job will better provide for the kids financially, giving them more opportunities. Neither parent is in the wrong in this disagreement; rather, they have come to different conclusions on what would be best for the family as a whole. The film uses this to showcase how even good intentions can cause strife in a relationship.
Stevie and Elliott spend much of their time arguing with each other. But when it matters most, the two learn to work together to overcome obstacles. And when Stevie gets in a bad spot, Elliott works hard to save her.
[Spoiler Warning] Ultimately, the story forces Stevie and Elliott into making a difficult choice: Should they live with the perfect version of their parents in the dreamworld, or should they wake up and face reality? Though tempted, the two eventually decide that living in an imperfect reality is better than a perfect forgery, and they choose to face those potential hardships head-on.
At the center of In Your Dreams is the Sandman, traditionally an entity (sometimes depicted as benevolent, sometimes hostile) from European folklore who sprinkles sand into the eyes of children to give them dreams. In this variation, he has some omniscient capabilities: He states that he knows the thoughts, desires and dreams of people on Earth. Though we don’t spend as much time with her, Nightmara acts as a dream entity, too, using her powers to give people nightmares.
When Stevie comes to the end of her rope, she opens up the ancient book on the Sandman; she closes her eyes, as if in prayer, reciting the book’s incantation: “Sandman please, I call unto you. Grant me my dreams, make them come true.” We find out later that, because she and her brother said the words at the same time, they formed a psychic link with each other—which allows them to share the same dreams.
The siblings also discover that they can “lucid dream,” that is, they can control these shared dreams. So long as they hold hands and think of the same thing, it’ll happen in the dream—which is depicted by a golden glow coming from their linked hands. (While many Christians view lucid dreaming as a neutral, natural phenomenon, some believe it can open us up to spiritual attack and won’t appreciate its positive depiction here.)
Stevie and Elliott come across the dream version of Elliott’s favorite childhood toy—a wise-cracking stuffed giraffe named Baloney Tony, who joins them on their adventure. While in the dream, Tony tells Elliott that he got stuck behind the fridge, a fact that Elliott uses to find him in real life. When Tony tries to summon weapons to protect himself in the dreamworld, he claims that he can “feel the power of the dream-verse flowing through [his] stuffing.”
Stevie becomes flustered after bumping into a boy she finds attractive.
When Stevie and Elliott first encounter Tony, he dusts himself off whilst golden light shines on him and Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” plays in the background. Then, he tosses a slice of baloney at Elliott, who catches it playfully. While there’s nothing inherently sexual about the scene, it has a sort of exotic-dancer flavor to it.
During a nightmare, Stevie and Elliott find themselves naked in a department store: Stevie hides in a clothes rack, but Elliott doesn’t seem to care. He struts before the camera, his private parts censored by pixelation. (Tony’s “parts” are pixelated, too.)
As Elliott cleans out his backpack, he tosses a variety of items into the air, including a pair of underwear, which smack his dad in the face. Elsewhere, Elliott attempts to vanish during a magic trick, leaving his pants pulled slightly down. Stevie quips, “I can see your crack, Houdini.” A creature made of sand jiggles its large rear during a dance. Animatronics at a pizzeria parody The Pussycat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha.”
Stevie and Elliott face a number of deadly moments while in their dreams—from being tossed into a giant toaster to falling from great heights—though they wake up before such things can bring about their grisly ends. Still, young children may find some of the nightmares frightening, like when Stevie’s teeth fall out of her mouth, or when sentient food creatures turn into mold-covered zombies. Someone punches a dream entity.
Stevie burns her hand on a cast-iron skillet. Someone shoots lasers from his rear. A dream attacker nearly stabs the siblings with garden shears. The kids use “dynamite fists” to cause a Kaiju-sized teddy bear to explode.
God’s name is used in vain twice. There’s one use of “crappy” and a couple of “dang.” Elliott calls his sister a “turd nugget.” Someone yells out, “You dirty custard!”
None.
To help out her family, Stevie suggests getting herself a job by “buy[ing] a fake ID on the Dark Web to subvert child labor laws.”
After a scare, Elliott says that he “almost had a nightmare in [his] pants.” We hear jokes about flatulence. A dog urinates on its owner’s leg. In a medieval dreamworld filled with sentient food, an orange tosses liquid out of a window, yelling “fresh squeezed” before it drenches a bacon man—a reference to the popular myth that people once threw their excrement out of windows and onto the street.
It’s true that some dreams have meaning behind them; Jacob, Joseph and Daniel all had dreams that pointed to (at the time) future events.
Other dreams, however, seem to be our brain’s equivalent of a splatter painting. Or at least, I have no other explanation for that dream where I dug up the floorboards of my house to find out someone had buried thousands of bags of corn beneath it.
But whether you dream about your bed taking flight or a medieval town inhabited by sentient food, In Your Dreams posits that such dreams are the machinations of the Sandman, the European folklore character blamed for all those sleep-induced crusties in your eye.
In Your Dreams comes with some nice messages about courage—whether it’s in facing your nightmares or (often harder) in tackling the difficult problems of reality. There’s certainly wisdom in such a message.
But In Your Dreams’ depiction of the Sandman comes across as more than just a folklore character: He’s just shy of god-like, with supernatural knowledge of everyone’s thoughts and desires. One uncomfortable scene shows Stevie in a prayer-like stance, reciting a phrase in the hope that the Sandman might grant her the desires of her heart. And outside these spiritual considerations, though content is generally tame, a couple of moments of crude humor can toe the line, too.
In Your Dreams isn’t the worst or best thing you could watch, but it may make Christian viewers feel a little groggy.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
