We Asked Strangers About Their Weirdest Dreams. Then We Made a Movie Out of It.

Every movie has an origin story. Ours starts with a bar napkin in Portland, a dare between two writers, and the question that would eventually consume four years of our lives: what if we just filmed what people actually dream about?

Not Hollywood dreams. Not the glossy, slow-motion kind. The real ones — the ones where you're late for a final exam you took twenty years ago, or your childhood dog can suddenly talk, or you're falling and your whole body jolts you awake.

It Started With a Notebook Under a Pillow

Co-writer Dana Ruiz kept a sleep journal for a decade before anyone suggested it was material. "I never wrote them down to use them," she told us on set last spring. "I wrote them down because they were weird and I didn't want to forget. When I finally reread eleven years of entries back to back, I realized I wasn't reading dreams. I was reading a diary I never meant anyone to see."

That realization became the spark. Ruiz and director Marcus Hale spent eighteen months collecting dream journals from strangers — friends of friends, a retiree's group in Tucson, a college dorm in Ohio, a Reddit thread that got way out of hand. The final archive: 312 journals, roughly 9,000 recorded dreams, plus a stack of late-night voice memos people sent in after waking up.

The Problem With Adapting the Intangible

Hale's first instinct was to treat the journals like short stories and stitch them together. It didn't work. "Dreams don't have plots," he laughs. "They have logic. Emotional logic. And the emotional logic kept repeating across completely unrelated people."

That repetition became the film's architecture. Instead of adapting any single dream, the writers built the screenplay around recurring emotional beats — anxiety, longing, unfinished business — and let individual dreams illustrate them. A sequence about a woman in Detroit who dreams of her late father's kitchen ended up woven into a scene about a character she has nothing to do with. "That's the honest part," Ruiz says. "Dreams aren't yours alone. They're everyone's."

Casting the Unconscious

The actors had homework nobody expected: keep their own dream journals during pre-production. Lead actress Simone Adair's journal directly shaped her character's most vulnerable scene. "There was a dream I had in week two that I told Marcus about, half-embarrassed," she remembers. "He just said, 'That's the scene. That's the one.'"

Even the production design leaned on the archive. Set decorators pulled details straight from journal entries — a door handle described as "too big, like on a cartoon," a hallway that "smelled like my grandmother's church." Those specifics made it into frame.

Why It Mattered to Get It Right

Hale is blunt about the stakes. "People handed us their 3 a.m. confessions. Some of them had never told anyone. If we turned that into a cheap twist, we'd have betrayed every single notebook."

The film premiered to a test audience in Chicago last fall, and the crew did something unusual afterward: they handed out journals at the exit and asked people to write down the dream they remembered most. Hundreds did. Many of those pages are now part of the film's companion archive on this very site.

Because that's the whole point, really. The movie was never the dream. The movie is the excuse to finally talk about them out loud.

Have a dream you've never told anyone? Share it with us — it might shape what we make next.