When we are happiest in real life, we call it a dream come true. When we are most scared and anxious, we call it a nightmare. What we experience in our sleep as we resort the real-life events and emotions is mysterious, sometimes disturbing. But that line between our conscious and unconscious perceptions is sometimes more permeable than we acknowledge. “In Your Dreams” is an exciting, imaginative, and sometimes funny adventure story about a sister and brother who try to use their dreams to change their reality. But it is also a wise and touching story about the challenges of family and of change.
We first see four-year-old Stevie (Hailey Magpali) in a moment of perfect happiness, making pancakes with her parents, devoted to her and to each other. Dad (Simu Liu) and Mom (Cristin Milioti) are musicians. But it turns out that scene is just a dream. She wryly points out that this happy memory is the way disaster movies start, pointing to her then-baby brother as the disaster. While Stevie remembers her earliest childhood as ideal, even then she saw herself as being responsible for fixing everyone’s problems.
Stevie (now voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) is now in middle school. Her brother Elliot (Elias Janssen) annoys her because they share a room, he keeps trying to do magic tricks, and he does not recognize the conflict Mom and Dad are experiencing. Mom is no longer performing with Dad. She is a teacher and is about to leave for an interview with a job that could mean a lot more money for the family. But they would have to move. Leaving their home in the suburbs is unthinkable to Stevie and Dad. The alternative, Mom’s leaving them behind to take the job, is unbearable. Stevie worries about the stress in her parents’ relationship. She makes breakfast but tells each parent the other one made it for them, to try to bring them closer.
And then, Stevie finds a magical dreams book. When she and Elliot recite the incantation together, they find that when they sleep, their conscious selves can enter and change the worlds of their dreams. There is a recurring joke about the way Elliot’s white noise machine puts him into a deep, instant slumber. Over the course of the film, Stevie will learn to appreciate Elliot as a partner. And she will learn that she cannot fix everything, and that’s okay. More important, she will learn to see understanding and new opportunities inside what appeared to be insurmountable problems.
On the way there, they visit vividly imagined lands and a variety of colorful characters, including the delightful Breakfast Town, where dancing breakfast foods hark back to Stevie’s happiest memory of making pancakes with her parents. It is fun to see the real-life events remix and distort in their shared dreams, including an anime segment and Alice in Wonderland-style shrinking and growing.
The visual artists have a lot of fun with a dreamworld (and nightmare world) setting that makes anything possible. There is a sequence highlighting universal nightmare themes, mostly played for comedy: flying, being in school with a test you’re not prepared for, teeth falling out, being naked in public. Parents will be amused by the needle drops on the soundtrack, including (of course) The Eurythmics singing “Sweet Dreams” and two songs for The Sandman, a cover of the 1954 Chordettes classic and a sample from the also-classic Metallica number.
Images and ideas pay tribute to the greatest of all visual dreamworlds. The inventor of animation, Winsor McCay, created the comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland, about a little boy’s adventurous dreams, and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, with stories about the disturbing dreams of a character who unwisely eats nightmare-inducing food before bed. Elliot’s bed, like Nemo’s and the Rarebit Fiend’s, grows long legs. It soars like an eagle and bucks like a bronco. I particularly liked the way Elliott figured out how to use his blanket as reins to steer the bed. The film also nods to Disney’s theme parks with its own variation on an It’s a Small World-style ride and to animatronic attractions like the Country Bear Jamboree or restaurants like Chuck E. Cheese.
Important characters in the dreams and nightmares include Elliot’s well-worn and well-loved stuffed animal, Baloney Tony, endearingly voiced by Craig Robinson, and the two rival leaders of the dream world, the Sandman (Omid Djalili), who promises Stevie she can bring her parents back together by willing it in her dream and Nightmara (Gia Carides), who is just what you think.
The colorful and imaginative images in Stevie’s and Elliot’s sleeping adventures are a lot of fun, but the heart of the movie is its insight that it may not be what Stevie sees that has changed; it is her deeper understanding of the people around her when she realizes that reality may be messy, scary, and painful, but it’s better than a faux version of perfection, especially when families stick together.
