The Best Movies About Dreams And Dreaming
“What are the best movies about Dreams or Dreaming?” We looked at 79 of the top Dream films, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!
The top 36 films, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Dream” movie lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 40+ movies, as well as the sources we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.
Top 36 Dream Movies
36 .) An Andalusian Dog (1929)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB 2
- Taste Of Cinema
Un Chien Andalou is a classic European avant-garde surrealist film from the cooperation of director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. The film changed the way people made movies. Most famous is the scene of a woman’s eye being cut with a knife.
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35 .) Flatliners (1990)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Unreality Mag
Five medical students want to find out if there is life after death. They plan to stop one of their hearts for a few seconds, thus simulating death, and then bring the person back to life. A science fiction thriller from the early 1990’s with a star studded cast.
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34 .) Open Your Eyes (1997)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- The Cinemaholic
A very handsome man finds the love of his life, but he suffers an accident and needs to have his face rebuilt by surgery after it is severely disfigured.
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33 .) Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Unreality Mag
The hopes and dreams of four ambitious people are shattered when their drug addictions begin spiraling out of control. A look into addiction and how it overcomes the mind and body.
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32 .) Shutter Island (2010)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Unreality Mag
World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by his troubling visions and also by a mysterious doctor.
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31 .) Spellbound (1945)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man’s murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.
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30 .) Spirited Away (2001)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
A young girl, Chihiro, becomes trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free her family.
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29 .) Take Shelter (2011)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Popoptiq
Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.
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28 .) The Bothersome Man (2006)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment – even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there’s no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to “the other side”? A new plan for escape is hatched.
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27 .) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is eerie and expressionistic, silent and surreal. It has become not only a classic of German Expressionist cinema, but a landmark in film history, with creative scenery and an unusual ending.
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26 .) The Cell (2000)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- List Challenges
A psychotherapist journeys inside a comatose serial killer in the hopes of saving his latest victim.
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25 .) The City of Lost Children (1995)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
A scientist in a surrealist society kidnaps children to steal their dreams, hoping that they slow his aging process.
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24 .) The Good Night (2007)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
Gary, a musician, is trapped in an unhappy relationship with his live-in lover, Dora. He becomes enthralled with a beautiful seductress who enters his dreams, and tries to control his dream-state so he can spend more and more time with her. When Gary sees his mystery woman’s face on a bus billboard, he discovers she is real, and fate brings him an opportunity to meet her.
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23 .) The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- List Challenges
George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind — with bizarre and frightening results.
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22 .) The Woman in the Window (1944)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
A seductive woman gets an innocent professor mixed up in murder.
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21 .) Until the End of the World (1991)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- List Challenges
Until The End of the World is an odyssey for the modern age. As with Homer’s Odyssey, the purpose of the journey is to restore sight — a spiritual reconciliation between an obsessed father and a deserted son. Dr. Farber, in trying to find a cure for his wife’s blindness, has created a device that allows the user to send images directly to the brain, enabling the blind to see.
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20 .) Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
Zia, distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to end it all. Unfortunately, he discovers that there is no real ending, only a run-down afterlife that is strikingly similar to his old one, just a bit worse. Discovering that his ex-girlfriend has also “offed” herself, he sets out on a road trip, with his Russian rocker friend, to find her. Their journey takes them through an absurd purgatory where they discover that being dead doesn’t mean you have to stop livin’!
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19 .) 8½ (1963)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
With 8 ½ Frederico Fellini leaves a self-portrait where dreams and reality are a mix. With help from a most excellent cast and unique scenery this self reflecting film is one of his master works.
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18 .) Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
- Unreality Mag
On a golden afternoon, young Alice follows a White Rabbit, who disappears down a nearby rabbit hole. Quickly following him, she tumbles into the burrow – and enters the merry, topsy-turvy world of Wonderland! Memorable songs and whimsical escapades highlight Alice’s journey, which culminates in a madcap encounter with the Queen of Hearts – and her army of playing cards!
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17 .) Dreams (1990)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
A collection of magical tales based upon the actual dreams of director Akira Kurosawa.
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16 .) Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
After Dr. Bill Hartford’s wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings — and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
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15 .) Solaris (1972)
Lists It Appears On:
- Learning Mind
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.
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14 .) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.
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13 .) Total Recall (1990)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
Construction worker Douglas Quaid discovers a memory chip in his brain during a virtual-reality trip. He also finds that his past has been invented to conceal a plot of planetary domination. Soon, he’s off to Mars to find out who he is and who planted the chip.
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12 .) Brazil (1985)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
- Unreality Mag
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.
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11 .) Dreamscape (1984)
Lists It Appears On:
- Huffington Post
- IMDB
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
A government funded project looks into using psychics to enter people’s dreams, with some mechanical help. When a subject dies in his sleep from a heart attack Alex Gardner becomes suspicious that another of the psychics is killing people in the dreams somehow and that is causing them to die in real life. He must find a way to stop the abuse of the power to enter dreams.
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10 .) Mulholland Drive (2001)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Popoptiq
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.
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9 .) What Dreams May Come (1998)
Lists It Appears On:
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
- Unreality Mag
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
Chris Neilson dies to find himself in a heaven more amazing than he could have ever dreamed of. There is one thing missing: his wife. After he dies, his wife, Annie killed herself and went to hell. Chris decides to risk eternity in hades for the small chance that he will be able to bring her back to heaven.
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8 .) Paprika (2006)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
- Taste Of Cinema
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient’s dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it: Paprika.
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7 .) The Science of Sleep (2006)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- List Challenges
- Manifatturafalmo
- Superhero You
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.
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6 .) The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them.
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5 .) Vanilla Sky (2001)
Lists It Appears On:
- IMDB
- Manifatturafalmo
- Superhero You
- Unreality Mag
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
David Aames has it all: wealth, good looks and gorgeous women on his arm. But just as he begins falling for the warmhearted Sofia, his face is horribly disfigured in a car accident. That’s just the beginning of his troubles as the lines between illusion and reality, between life and death, are blurred.
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4 .) The Matrix (1999)
Lists It Appears On:
- Huffington Post
- IMDB
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
- Taste Of Cinema
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
Set in the 22nd century, The Matrix tells the story of a computer hacker who joins a group of underground insurgents fighting the vast and powerful computers who now rule the earth.
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3 .) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Lists It Appears On:
- Huffington Post
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
- Popoptiq
- Superhero You
- The Cinemaholic
- Unreality Mag
Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop’s daughter, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger (Robert Englund), who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers’ children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp), must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world…
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2 .) Waking Life (2001)
Lists It Appears On:
- Huffington Post
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- Learning Mind
- List Challenges
- Superhero You
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.
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1 .) Inception (2010)
Lists It Appears On:
- Huffington Post
- IMDB
- IMDB 2
- List Challenges
- Manifatturafalmo
- Superhero You
- Taste Of Cinema
- The Cinemaholic
- Unreality Mag
- World Of Lucid Dreaming
Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.
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The 40+ Additional Best Dream Movies
| # | Movie | Lists |
| (Films Appear On 1 List Each) | ||
| 37 | Abre los ojos (2013) | IMDB |
| 38 | Aliens | Popoptiq |
| 39 | American Beauty |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 40 | American Werewolf in London | Popoptiq |
| 41 | Arizona Dream (1993) |
List Challenges
|
| 42 | Avatar (2009) |
World Of Lucid Dreaming
|
| 43 | Bad Dreams (1988) | IMDB |
| 44 | Black Swan (2010) | Popoptiq |
| 45 | Dead End (2003) |
List Challenges
|
| 46 | Dead of Night |
Huffington Post
|
| 47 | Donnie Darko | Popoptiq |
| 48 | Dumb and Dumber |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 49 | Dumbo |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 50 | Enter the Void | Learning Mind |
| 51 | Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (2004) |
World Of Lucid Dreaming
|
| 52 | In Dreams (1999) | IMDB |
| 53 | Jacob’s Ladder | Popoptiq |
| 54 | Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989) |
List Challenges
|
| 55 | Mirror (1975) |
List Challenges
|
| 56 | New Nightmare (1994) |
List Challenges
|
| 57 | Nightmare |
Manifatturafalmo
|
| 58 | Peter Ibbetson |
Huffington Post
|
| 59 | Samsara | Learning Mind |
| 60 | Sleeping Beauty |
Manifatturafalmo
|
| 61 | Sleepless in Seattle |
Manifatturafalmo
|
| 62 | Sleepwalk with Me |
Manifatturafalmo
|
| 63 | Terminator 2: Judgement Day |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 64 | The Big Lebowski |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 65 | The Exorcist | Popoptiq |
| 66 | The Grey | Popoptiq |
| 67 | The Machinist |
Manifatturafalmo
|
| 68 | The Manchurian Candidate | Popoptiq |
| 69 | The Mirror (1974) | IMDB 2 |
| 70 | The Shining | Popoptiq |
| 71 | Trainspotting |
Views From The Sofa
|
| 72 | Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) | IMDB |
| 73 | Un Chien Andalou (1929) |
List Challenges
|
| 74 | Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives | Learning Mind |
| 75 | Under the Skin | Learning Mind |
| 76 | Warning Shadows |
Taste Of Cinema
|
| 77 | Warning Shadows (1923) |
List Challenges
|
| 78 | Wild Strawberries (1957) |
The Cinemaholic
|
| 79 | Wizard of Oz | Unreality Mag |
13 Best Movies Featuring Dreams Sources/Lists
| Source | Article |
| Unreality Mag | 10 Awesome Movies About Dreaming – Unreality Mag |
| The Cinemaholic | 10 Best Dreams Movies of All Time – The Cinemaholic |
| Popoptiq | 120 Essential Horror Scenes Part 5: Dreams & Hallucinations – PopOptiq |
| List Challenges | 50 Movies About Dreams – How many have you seen? – List Challenges |
| Learning Mind | 6 Mind Expanding Movies That Will Make You Question Reality and … |
| Huffington Post | 7 Great Films About Lucid Dreaming | HuffPost |
| Manifatturafalmo | 8 Famous Movies About Sleep That You Should Not Miss! |
| Views From The Sofa | Dreams and Nightmares Month: 3 of the Best vs 3 of the Worst Movie … |
| IMDB | Movies about Dreams – IMDb |
| IMDB 2 | The 10 Best Dream Movies – IMDb |
| World Of Lucid Dreaming | The 20 Best Movies about Dreams and Dream Worlds – Taste of Cinema |
| Superhero You | Top 10 Lucid Dreaming Movies – World of Lucid Dreaming |
| Taste Of Cinema | Top 10 Movies About Dreams – SuperheroYou |
