The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

But when the agents witness the flight of a mysterious craft, Mulder and a member of the Men in Black switch bodies, unbeknownst to the others.

In part two, Scully begins to suspect that her partner's strange behavior is more than it appears to be, while Mulder fights to return his life to normal before it is too late.

The episode is notable for a scene featuring Mulder-as-Fletcher encountering his reflection and proceeding to do the dance from the 1933 Marx Brothers comedy film Duck Soup.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) visit the Area 51 installation in Nevada after receiving a tip from an inside source concerning alien spacecraft.

As they drive on the highway, the agents are surrounded by jeeps carrying soldiers led by a Man in Black named Morris Fletcher (Michael McKean).

While changing his clothes, Mulder receives a call from Smoodge, who explains that the military has surveyed the wreckage of the craft from the night before, finding one of the human pilots fused into a rock but still alive.

Fletcher is indifferent to this news and Scully yells at him, sensing that his behavior is very strange and his lack of concern for the X-files is completely out of character.

Military police take Mulder to a meeting with General Wegman, Grodin and Smoodge, who believe that Mulder-as-Fletcher was trying to defraud the FBI, not help them.

Mulder bluffs his way through the meeting, claiming that the real proof is safe and that he did not tell them about the scheme because he did not know if he could trust his colleagues, thinking any one of them could be the source of the leak.

Mulder returns to Fletcher's house and tells Joanne of his true identity, but she thinks her husband must be undergoing a mid-life crisis.

Smoodge and a group of soldiers appear at the house and detain Mulder, Fletcher, Scully and the flight data recorder in their car.

Scully opens her desk drawer to place a file inside and finds the penny and dime that were fused together from the event at the gas station, indicating that while some things have reversed themselves, not everything has.

However, he was unavailable because he was filming the movie Town and Country,[3] but he would later appear in the seventh season episode "Hollywood A.D.", playing a fictional version of himself.

[5] Julia Vera was cast in the role of Lana Chee, the Hopi woman whose mind is switched with that of a young air force pilot.

[6] Production for "Dreamland" necessitated the series to temporarily relocate to "Club Ed", a movie ranch near Lancaster, California.

Because this filming location was outside the Los Angeles studio zone, Fox was required to pay all actors and production staff members a per diem covering the cost of meals and motel reservations, leading to budget constraints.

[8] Area 51, the government airplanes, and the alien craft were all created with CGI technology by visual effects producer Bill Millar.

The gate for the Area 51 set, for instance, was filmed at a desolate stretch of fence near the Los Angeles/San Bernardino County division.

The song was never officially released, and its identity remained a mystery, much discussed in fan forums, for many years until it was identified in a Twitter thread in December 2023.

[10][11] The scene where Mulder-as-Fletcher encounters his reflection and proceeds to dance is an homage to the Marx Brothers comedy film Duck Soup (1933).

In a review of part one, a critic from Knight Ridder wrote, "As disorienting as this body transfer had to be for Mulder, the experience provided amusing television.

Knowing that the human population's survival is imperiled by the colonization plans of a fierce extraterrestrial race, a large number of X-Philes want the show to focus on our heroes' efforts to come to the rescue".

[19] The newspaper's review of Part 2 was much more negative, with the article saying "by the end of the latest X-Files episode, we were wishing we could push a reset button on Dreamland II, just to forget some of the silly stuff that transpired in this show".

[22] Vitaris, in her review for part two, called the episode "purely illogical", although she noted it did feature "minor fun", pointing out the scene wherein Scully catches Fletcher by handcuffing him.

'Dreamland II' is a fairly unnecessary hour of television, and there's no reason this logy two-parter couldn't have become a much tighter one-hour episode.

"[24] Tom Kessenich, in his book Examination: An Unauthorized Look at Seasons 6–9 of the X-Files wrote that "my final judgement on 'Dreamland' [part one] is that I enjoyed the entertainment value it presented.

[28] Gareth Wigmore of TV Zone gave the first part of the episode an 8 out of 10 rating and highlighted the "strong story-telling, clever dialogue, and good acting".