Filmmaker Gilbert claims that the senior Dunham was not a furniture salesman, but rather a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent tasked with monitoring communists in Hawaii.

"[7] Gilbert says that more than one million copies of his film were mailed to voters in Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire and Colorado prior to the 2012 United States presidential election.

David Maraniss, author of Barack Obama: The Story, described the film as "preposterous", saying that it is "depressing to have so much fictional, unreported, conspiratorial, unhistorical stuff floating around."

"[2] The Daily Beast commentator Michelle Goldberg wrote, "It's tempting to ignore Dreams from My Real Father because it's so preposterous ... What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste.

[12][13][14] Gilbert's claim that Obama's mother posed nude, allegedly by Davis, was proven false after blogger Loren Collins found that most of the photos Gilbert presented as evidence of his claim came from a magazine that ceased publication two years before Obama's mother arrived in Hawaii.

[16] In 2014 activist Loren Collins filed a complaint against Gilbert with the Federal Election Commission, saying that the filmmaker was required to disclose his donors who financed the pre-election mailing of millions of unsolicited DVDs of the film to voters in several swing states.

The Washington Post reported that in March 2016, the FEC, split evenly between Republican and Democratic members, ruled that Gilbert's DVD mailing was considered "press", and therefore not subject to donor disclosure as the mass-mailing could be argued to be a "marketing effort".