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In Your Dreams
Movie

In Your Dreams

2025 • Unknown

Woke Score
3
out of 10

Plot

Stevie and her little brother Elliot journey into the wildly absurd landscape of their own dreams to ask the Sandman to grant them the perfect family.

Overall Series Review

The animated adventure focuses on siblings Stevie and Elliot, who are distraught over their parents' impending separation and their mother’s potential move for a new job. The children venture into the dream world to find the mythical Sandman, believing he can magically grant them the perfect, intact family they desperately desire. The journey is a high-energy, surreal caper designed to help the perfectionist Stevie confront the messy reality of life, change, and divorce. The film’s core message is the acceptance that families are not perfect, and the value of living in the challenging, real world rather than clinging to an unrealistic, idealized fantasy. The narrative destigmatizes the mother's pursuit of a career and ultimately frames the siblings' bond as the critical relationship, which strengthens through their shared experience of embracing imperfection.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics3/10

The family unit is intentionally portrayed as multi-racial, with the father voiced by Simu Liu and the daughter by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport. Casting utilizes diversity in key roles. The central plot, however, concerns the universal issue of divorce and family conflict, not an explicit lecture on systemic oppression or privilege.

Oikophobia2/10

The narrative's major stakes involve the potential loss of the family home and the family unit itself, which the children try to save. The film does not demonize the home culture or ancestors, but instead promotes the acceptance of a 'modern family' structure resulting from the parents' change in life goals.

Feminism6/10

The core conflict is driven by the mother pursuing a stable, higher-paying teaching job that requires a move, directly conflicting with the father’s dream of being a struggling musician and his desire to stay put. This valorizes the woman’s career path for stability and destigmatizes divorce, shifting focus away from the traditional nuclear family structure as the singular ideal. The main child protagonist, Stevie, is a strong-willed girl who must learn to relinquish her 'perfectionist' desire for control.

LGBTQ+1/10

The story is solely focused on the traditional male-female pairing of the parents and the relationship between the brother and sister. No content regarding alternative sexualities, gender identity ideology, or queer theory is present in the plot or character dynamics.

Anti-Theism2/10

The conflict’s antagonist is the mythological Sandman, who is not a representation of traditional religion but a figure of *escapism*. The film's message ultimately encourages a return to reality and acceptance of an imperfect, messy life, suggesting a morality based on objective, shared experience rather than a subjective worldview. This is not hostility toward religion.