Her husband, Paul, is an airline pilot, and is frequently away from home due to work (and possibly an affair with an Australian co-worker), leaving Claire to care for their eight-year-old daughter, Rebecca.

While a SWAT team attempts to snipe Vivian from a helicopter, he chases Claire along a bridge crossing a tributary waterfall, knocking both her and himself over the guardrail.

While lying in his bed, he has horrific visions of Claire's spirit haunting him and the phrase "Sweet dreams, Vivian" being scrawled in blood on the ceiling.

[5] Commenting on what the film's overarching theme was, Jordan stated: "I don't think the world behaves in a rational manner, but we all write about it and talk about it as if it does.

[10] Cinematographer Darius Khondji applied filters on the camera lenses to achieve lush accents on the film's autumnal imagery, noted by critic Nick Pinkerton as "hysterical and hyper-real.

[14] Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the film's cinematography and Bening's performance, summarizing: "At heart In Dreams is just a campfire story, and a pretty loony one at that.

"[9] Some critics, such as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, commented on the film's dubious plot, deeming it "the silliest thriller in many a moon, and the only one in which the heroine is endangered by apples.

She also survives three falls from very high places (two into a lake, one onto apples), escapes from a hospital and a madhouse, has the most clever dog since Lassie and causes a traffic pileup involving a truck and a dozen cars.

It's a courageous, anti-glamour effort, one of those sweat-and-drool "Snake Pit" performances that drives hair and makeup crazy, not to mention mental-health-care providers.

[16] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly awarded the film a C-minus rating, deeming it a "dismayingly schlocky and literal-minded thriller.

"[19] In a retrospective review, critic Nick Pinkerton referred to the film as "a fundamentally miscalibrated movie of rather piquant badness, the work of a preternaturally talented hack, if such a thing can exist.

"[20] Pramaggiore also stresses the importance of the uncanny in the film, citing it as one of several in Jordan's filmography—along with The Miracle (1991) and The Butcher Boy (1997)—in which "dreams assume the status of reality.