In Your Dreams: Learning to Face the Unknown

In the Netflix animated feature “In Your Dreams,” directed by Alex Woo, young Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her brother Elliot (Elias Janssen) plunge into a dream world that is alternately wonderful and terrifying. Their goal is to find the legendary Sandman (Omid Djalili) and ask him to fix the relationship problems between their Mom (Cristin Milioti) and Dad (Simu Liu) before the unthinkable happens and their family is torn apart. Helped by a stuffed giraffe called Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) and evading the fearsome Nightmara (Gia Carides), they reach the Sandman’s castle only to discover that, in the realm of dreams, nothing is what it seems.

“In Your Dreams” begins with Stevie and her family preparing a sumptuous breakfast to a playful and energetic melody. A charming string of small domestic moments conjures up the quintessence of family life, centered around the time-honored ritual of preparing and sharing food. Suddenly, in a twist that teases one of the many counter-realities contained with the film, the rug is pulled out from beneath us. “This is all a dream,” Stevie announces. “Lately all my dreams are turning into nightmares,” she continues as dark forces start tearing the kitchen apart. “Maybe they’re trying to tell me something.” 

Maybe they are. It turns out that Stevie’s nightmares are fueled by an unspoken fear that her parents are about to split up. A natural problem-solver, she attempts to fix things, without success. Then Elliot discovers a mysterious book called “Legend of the Sandman,” which contains instructions on how to make dreams come true. Could this be the answer to their problems?

Poring over the book, Stevie and Elliot discuss their own dreams, at which point we become acutely aware of the age gap between them. Elliot’s dreams are very much those of a child: “I want a “jet-pack, a six-pack and dynamite fists!” Stevie’s more literal dream betrays her hidden hostility towards her younger brother: “I want my own room.” Later, believing the book’s magical powers might be real, she decides to ask the Sandman for the one thing her adolescent heart truly desires – to keep her parents together.

The age gap between brother and sister is beautifully drawn throughout “In Your Dreams.” It is also thematically important. At the beginning of the film, Stevie refers to her brother’s birth as a “disaster,” a seismic event that forced her to share her parents with an unwelcome newcomer. Stevie’s repressed enmity eventually leads her into a dream in which Elliot does not exist – a universal wish that has no doubt been expressed, at least occasionally, by many older siblings watching the movie. Later the Sandman grants Stevie her wish. But her relief at being an only child again is short-lived, as she finally realizes that her brother is a vital part of her life. That she does, in fact, love him.

While Stevie is plagued by jealousy and anxiety, Elliot is still in touch with the magic of childhood – a fact expressed quite literally by his love of magic tricks. This difference between them is further reflected in their dreams. Stevie dreams about being caught naked in a store or failing at a school test. The limitations of her fantasy life are apparent in her toe-curling encounter with dreamy bookstore assistant Chad (SungWon Cho), when all her Freudian desires bubble awkwardly up to the surface. In hilarious contrast to all this teenage angst, Elliot gleefully dreams that he can fart laser beams.

Like Calvin with his beloved Hobbes, Elliot sees his stuffed toys as living characters – an ability that Stevie, on the edge of the adulthood, has lost. This ability becomes pivotal to the story when Baloney Tony takes the stage. While Elliot adores the irreverent antics of the stuffed giraffe, Stevie just groans. Yet Tony proves to be a valuable companion, a Virgilian guide who imparts vital information about how to reach the Sandman.

But Tony is more than just a hyperactive mentor. He has a deep understanding of Stevie’s role within the family unit. Stevie is indeed a miniature version of her responsible, serious-minded Mom. In contrast, fun-loving Elliot has clearly been drawn from the same mold as Dad, a playful musician. The rest of the family seems to acknowledge this dynamic (when Mom leaves town for a job interview she says to Stevie, “You’re definitely in charge while I’m gone”) but Tony is the one who really hammers it home. At the end of the movie, when Tony finally calls Stevie by her real name, he is signaling that she has grown beyond being just a carbon copy of her mother. She has finally found her true self.

Tony’s role goes even deeper. At the beginning of the film he is presented a simple lost toy. Then Elliot and Stevie discover him hidden behind a fridge in the phantasmagorical dream world of Breakfast Town – a spooky environment that rouses Stevie’s childlike fears of darkness and dust-bunnies, but which Elliot takes completely in his stride. By now the siblings are at war with each other – Stevie wants to journey through the dream world alone. However, since they said the chant together asking the Sandman to make their wish come true they are now psychologically bound and in order to reach the Sandman they need to work together. 

At the end of the film, this idea that Baloney Tony is a uniting factor reaches fruition, as Stevie remembers the day when she and Elliot bonded at an amusement arcade in what turned out to be a shared naming ritual. Who did they name together? Baloney Tony, of course. And so it turns out this ridiculous stuffed giraffe is the glue that unites brother and sister in love.

“In Your Dreams” wraps up these deep themes in sheer visual splendor. The dream world sequences invite us into an overwhelmingly playful space. The candy colors of Breakfast Town create a wonderland more vibrant than any theme park – this is a larger-than-life iteration of the real world as seen through the eyes of a child. Then, in a heartbeat, the tone changes, as brightly-colored breakfast cereal characters mutate into lurching gray zombies. Later, as the children become lucid dreamers with the power to change the dream itself, the visual style switches to high-octane anime as they unleash their new-found abilities, including – you guessed it – dynamite fists.

As Stevie and Elliot journey deeper into the realm of dreams, the beauty becomes transcendent. The Sandman’s castle basks in an aura of gorgeous golden light. Inside the castle, the children joyfully navigate the interior, whose gravity-defying walls bring to mind MC Escher’s famous lithograph “Relativity.” The Sandman himself appears as a benevolent Santa-like figure with flowing robes and a full beard (although, as Stevie and Elliot discover, appearances can be deceptive).

The cultural references continue as the filmmakers display a deep love of literature and cinema. The illustrations in “Legend of the Sandman” resemble Winsor McCay’s classic “Little Nemo” comic strip. Elliot’s flying bed could be Aladdin’s magic carpet, and it certainly owes a debt to Disney’s “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” which was itself adapted from the stories of Mary Norton. When the bed soars in front of a full moon we cannot help but think of “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.”

Other films are referenced at a more conceptual level. The storyline of “In Your Dreams” requires its characters to gain a superhuman power – the ability to transition from one world to another. In “The Matrix,” such transitions are effected by an exotic blend of drugs and telephone calls. In “Avatar,” Jake Sully enters his avatar body by jacking into a high-tech Link Unit. “In Your Dreams” gives us the turtle-shaped “Sleep Machine” – a soothing nursery device that has been lulling Elliot to sleep since he was a baby – and imbues it with the magic required to flip the children across the threshold between reality and fantasy.

One final threshold lies between the children and their ultimate enlightenment – the whirlwind in which Nightmara resides. While the imagery is familiar from “The Wizard of Oz,” what lies within the tornado is a surprise. Nightmara turns out to be a force for good, not evil. In a poignant speech, she tells Elliot that the bad dreams she creates have a vital purpose. “Nightmares makes you strong,” she says, “so you can face what’s really scary in life – the unknown.”

Here is the hidden heart of “In Your Dreams,” a truth that Stevie finally learns when she picks up a family photo inside the idealized reality created for her by the Sandman. Seeing that Elliot is not in the photo, Stevie realizes that she has conjured up the very thing she has been trying to avoid – a broken family. It is a powerful moment. The photo has already achieved iconic status as a metaphor for all Stevie’s fears, having smashed earlier in the film. Now it is whole again. Tragically, however, it is incomplete.

Rejecting the Sandman’s doomed attempt to make her happy, Stevie is reunited with her family. Mom validates her daughter’s fears with a few short words that reinforce everything Nightmara has said. “Hearing about all this change must be so scary for you,” she says. “But listen to me - no matter what happens, we will always love you - we will always be a family.”

This assurance gives Stevie the confidence to embrace the change that comes the following spring. The family is moving to a new town where Mom will begin a new job and Dad will start a new band. But Stevie is no longer afraid. She has learned that her dreams really were trying to tell her something.“Life isn’t perfect,” she says, “and neither are we. But no matter how it changes, we’ll always have each other, and you can’t get any better than that, not even in your dreams.”

Dr. Maria Elena Gutierrez is the CEO and executive director of VIEW Conference, Italy’s premiere annual digital media conference. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz. VIEW Conference is committed to bringing a diversity of voices to the forefront in animation, visual effects, and games. For more information about the VIEW Conference, visit the official website: http://viewconference.it