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Reviews WesternAnimation / In Your Dreams 2025

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BonsaiForest Since: Jan, 2001
11/16/2025 05:53:04
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Not quite what I was expecting So Okay, It's Average 69

The trailer doesn't lie - this is indeed a movie about a sibling duo who enter the world of dreams together, to try to find the Sandman, so he can make their "dream come true" - that is, their wish, to have their parents stay together. And they do enter the dream world and experience dream-like events, including things like the "my teeth are falling out" dream.

But I was expecting some kind of big adventure. We get a little bit of that, kinda, but things go in a very different direction, particularly when they actually reach the Sandman.

Anyway, the main idea is that the two kids are a constantly arguing duo, with the older sister always annoyed at the younger brother and even trying to prevent him from entering the dream world with her. But since they both said the chant together (the sister mockingly playing along because she didn't think it was real), they are now "psychically linked" and so if they dream, they appear together.

How the dream world was handled is interesting. Whoever wakes up disappears from the dream world. If they fall asleep again, they teleport back in. And the dreams themselves are things like a giant food world, an execution by giant toaster, things like that. When we see "dream worlds" in fiction, I always wonder, are these accurately based on dreams that real people have, or are they fantasy worlds using "it's a dream" as their excuse to be random? I have a dream log of my own dreams, and they overwhelmingly take place in the real world. But I don't have my dreams from childhood and teenhood in there except a small few that I remember. One definitely did not take place in the real world.

The Sandman and Nightmara feel pretty generic. Actually, a lot of the movie does, to me. It also feels like they're rushing through the story without letting emotional beats resonate. I can't care about the divorce of parents I haven't been given time to care about. And any other emotional elements are also rushed through. The running length of this movie, not including credits, is about 1 hour 17 minutes. Really, they could have used 13 more minutes at least, to flesh things out more and make the story work more.

There is a major plot twist that itself leads to the story going in very different directions. It occurs between halfway and two-thirds into the movie. It changes the nature of the story, but I have to give a spoiler warning.

SPOILERS

The Sandman turns out to be bad, and Nightmara to be good. How? The Sandman wants people's "dreams to come true" by having them stay so long in the dream world that they forget it's not real. This is basically being in a coma - which we literally see Stevie in when she embraces the fantasy of the happy family, something even her little brother Elliot recognizes is wrong. And we do in fact see her in a coma in the real world. Meanwhile, Nightmara was waking people up to try to keep them away from the Sandman, so they wouldn't suffer this fate. She even explains that nightmares help people solve problems in the real world, that they make people stronger. Definitely an original idea that I must give this movie credit for.

Original ideas (in the spoiler space) aside, I just didn't think this movie was all that great, though to be fair, that has more to do with my personal tastes and possibly expectations than anything else. I wanted a big adventure, and I got a very different kind of story. But even then, what I did get felt rushed, not giving enough time for the emotional beats to hit. And that, to me, is what hurts this movie.


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