Teenager Tomokazu Mikuri is an Ordinary High-School Student, an orphan, tortured by a Sadist Teacher, and, it seems, trapped in a perpetual malaise. He's something of a loser and more than a little lonely, having been raised all by himself in a large house by his older cousin Nanase.
However, everything changes for him on the night before his sixteenth birthday. When he falls asleep, he dreams he is in a bizarre landscape where he watches a flying purple-haired girl fight a strange warcraft. When she is shot down, he saves her from certain death.
And when he wakes up the next morning, she's in his bed, naked.
Tomokazu soon learns that the dream landscape that he was in is very real indeed — Moera, the land of dreams. And the strange warcraft he saw was a Faedun — a creature born of mankind's nightmares. The Faedun seek to conquer Moera so that they can use it to stage an attack on the waking world.
Before he knows it, other girls begin entering the dream world with him, starting with Mizuki, a childhood friend who has long had an unrequited crush on him. Joining them are Neneko, a street kid with a strange hat and stranger habits, and Kuyou, Nanase's little sister, whose unexpected return from America is not a coincidence. And then there is the mysterious Silk, oldest of the girls, who seems to exist only in the dream world and whose masked face is never revealed, even when she's in a bathing suit. In the dream world, each one has a distinctive costume and power, and together they fight the Faedun.
Tomokazu soon learns that he is the lynchpin of the group, with the ability to supercharge any them into a Wave-Motion Gun. He also learns that he is critical to the defense of the waking world from the Faedun — from one of the few survivors of their successful conquest in the future, who has reincarnated into the past in order to change the timeline. If Tomokazu and the girls fail, the Faedun will leave the Earth a wasteland of ruins and corpses.
Yumeria is a Namco game that later has a twelve-episode anime. The anime starts off looking like a screwball sentai harem comedy but reveals a darker underpinning the further in you get. It is licensed in North America and available on DVD.
Neneko and Neito appear in Project × Zone as part of the Bandai Namco Entertainment characters included in the crossover.
This show provides examples of:
- Beach Episode: A beach appears in the dream world in episode 4, and the characters proceed to spend episode 5 at said beach.
- Because Destiny Says So: A major plot point: the second half of the series is about averting a future that has already come to pass for one character.
- Calling Your Attacks: Invoked: The girls decide that since they look like a sentai/magical girls team, they should act like it.
- The Cameo: Taira no Kagekiyo shows up. Of course, you'll only know him in the crossover game.
- Catchphrase: Neneko frequently says "It's a mystery!" in both English and Japanese.
- Color-Coded Characters: Each of the main girls have a different hair color/style.
- Color Failure: Happens to Mr. Ishikari after Mone chooses Tomokazu over him when the former suggests she stay with him for some "special tutoring". Tomokazu gloats a little over it as well.
- Combined Energy Attack: Coordinated attack variation, and they take turns delivering the coup de grace. Their Wave Motion Gun in the final episode also counts.
- Cranial Eruption: Tomokazu after at least one encounter with Neneko's Hyperspace Mallet.
- Crash-Into Hello: Tomokazu does this to Mizuki when he's running late for school in the first episode.
- Denied Food as Punishment: In episode 9, after making Mone cry, Tomokazu is denied dinner that night by Nanase, even though he apologized to her already.
- Eye Color Change: Neneko has violet/purple eyes, but when mental time traveler Neito takes control of their shared body, they turn green.
- Fan Disservice: Tomokazu has an Imagine Spot in episode 3 where Ishikari is wearing a female S&M costume when he's referring to a make up test.
- Fanservice: Including lingering butt-and-crotch shots of Mizuki while in her bathing suit.
- Humongous Mecha: The Faedun at least take the appearance of flying war machines of often quite abstract design.
- Invisible to Normals: All the battles take place in the world of dreams.
- Limited Wardrobe: All the characters seem to have one only one set of "civilian" clothes — except for the yukata they wear during the Festival Episode.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: It's vaguely implied that the Man in Black is Tomokazu's father. In the end of the series he is Tomokazu's father in the reset world.
- The Nose Bleed: Many, powerful enough to knock their victims over, courtesy of Nanase.
- Parental Abandonment: Tomokazu's an orphan being raised by his cousin Nanase; Nanase's entire family has been in America for years at the start of the series; Mone apparently has no history whatsoever; Neneko seems to be a street urchin with no fixed abode or family save her kitten Koneko, although she says, in her first appearance, that she'll tell her parents about the mysterious occurrence she's just seen.
- Pigeonholed Voice Actor: Zigzagged as Kikuko Inoue gets to play a Yamato Nadeshiko and a gruff tomboy — who are both the same person.
- Pixellation: For some reason, a candy or snack given to Neneko by a shopkeeper is very obviously obscured in one scene.
- Sadist Teacher: Ishikari definitely has a major grudge against Tomokazu.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Kuyou's motivation for setting Tomokazu and the others free from the Head Family's headquarters.
- Shout-Out:
- Tongue-in-cheek, to Sailor Moon.
- Another near the end to the "alternate universe" sequence of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- First episode: Hilbert Effect?
- Nanase plays a word game with Tomokazu. She ends by saying "Raideen".
- Eighth episode: Tomokazu wonders if Laputa could exist.
- Then later, we get a Imagine Spot scene with characters from the old Namco game Genpei Tōma Den.
- Sitting on the Roof
- Speech-Impaired Animal: Borderline case: Koneko, Neneko's kitten, who says only "Nono"; this is not the Japanese onomotopeia for "meow".
- Spinning Paper: Variation: Headline text spins into place over a shot of a printing press; played more or less straight.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: Several characters seem capable of doing this, usually Nanase/Silk. Tomokazu at one point even wonders how they suddenly showed up in his classroom in episode 7.
- Stock Footage: Transformations and attacks; both are subverted in the Beach Episode where the standard footage was reanimated with the girls in bathing suits instead of their costumes.
- Street Urchin: Neneko.
- Super-Deformed: Mild, infrequent.
- "Super Sentai" Stance: Complete with I Always Wanted to Say That.
- Team Shot: Invoked: The girls decide on a standard "victory pose" that they will assume after a battle.
- Thanks for the Mammary: During one battle with the Fadeun, Tomokazu, Mone, and Mizuki (who all happened to be in swimsuits since it was a Beach Episode), barely dodge an attack, and he ends up on top of both girls, with each of his hands on one of the boobs of each of one of the girls, which eventually triggers their Wave-Motion Gun and saves the day.
- Time Travel: Via reincarnation into the past.
- Undead Tax Exemption: Mone's entry into school. Even into Tomokazu's class, despite being a few years younger.
- The Unintelligible: Mone, who — like a Pokémon — can only say her own name and its component syllables.
- The Unreveal: It seriously doesn't need to be spoilered that Silk is Nanase.
- Unusual Ears: Neneko, kinda sorta: her hat has "ears" — and they move in response to her emotions. Some viewers believe she has actual cat ears under it.
- Unwanted Assistance: Tomokazu is thinking this when Neneko and Mone try to help him to "relax".
- Verbal Tic: In the North American dub, Kuyou uses "frankly" in almost every sentence; Neneko uses "really" just as much. These tics are also present in the original Japanese as "subari" and "no da."
- Wave-Motion Gun: Any of the girls plus Tomokazu, plus all of them together in the final battle, with a literal supergun formed from all their weapons combined.
- Wrap Around Background: Variation, in opening credits only: watch the traffic behind the sleeping Tomokazu and see the same truck — with the production company's logo on it — drive past three or four times.
