From MadCap's Couch - Supernatural: "Dream a Little Dream of Me"

"What's wrong, Sam?"
"My Friday the 13th movie won't get a sequel..."

Oh, right... I was supposed to finish up Season 3. Whoops!

Dream a Little Dream of Me begins with a recap with some callbacks to The Kids Are Alright (particularly Dean and his connection to Lisa), Bela Talbot's appearances thus far, and a reminder that Ruby has been lying to Sam about being able to save Dean from his demon deal. In the present, we are witness to Bobby going through a dilapidated house with flashlight in hand, looking for something. It's clear that something is pursuing him, though neither he nor we get a clue as to what until a woman in a nightgown leaps out of the darkness and attacks him... and then we cut to Bobby, lying in a motel bed. A maid comes in to clean the room and, upon realizing he isn't waking up, calls for help. 

This is intercut with Bobby, apparently trapped in a dream, fighting the woman.

After the title card, Sam is drinking at two in the afternoon, much to Dean's... frank confusion. It's the return of Drunk Sam, asking Dean what's wrong with him that he doesn't want to be saved from Hell. Dean is interrupted from answering Sam by a phone call, and the boys head to a hospital in Pittsburgh where Bobby is being kept. The doctor tells them that Bobby is perfectly healthy save for the fact that he can't wake up. They check Bobby's motel room, finding Bobby had indeed been working a case, a case about a neurologist who apparently went to sleep and then never woke up. As Sam starts to look through Bobby's work, Dean puts on the police detective suit and goes to question at the university. Apparently, the doctor was conducting some very, very bad experiment without the knowledge of the college.

If Bobby doesn't wake up screaming, he won't wake up at all!

After getting Dr. Greg's research, Dean goes to question one of his subjects - Jeremy Frost. He gives Dean a beer and tells him about the doctor giving him a foul-smelling yellow tea that gave him dreams, something he hasn't had since he was a kid due to an injury. Jeremy claims that it scared him and that he dropped out of the study not long after.

Sam explains the Dreamroot, an herb used by shamans and mystics to dreamwalk in a lot of different lore, which could make anyone into a regular Dream Master. Yes, like that. While the boys ponder why Bobby was left alive, Bobby is screaming for help inside his own mind. Sam laments that they'd usually call Bobby for help in this situation, and Dean suggests that they go and ask him... using the Dreamroot. Unfortunately, they have no Dreamroot and the only person they can ask for help... is Bela.

...okay, this is just a cheap excuse to have her in the episode, but whatever.

Back at the motel, Sam brings a trenchcoat-wearing Bela in... her moving Sam against the door and removing said trenchcoat to reveal a negligee. Sam throws Bela on the bed... and then he wakes up, apparently having fallen asleep during research. Dean teases him about his dream, apparently Sam was making some very happy noises. In the meantime, Dean called Bela and she apparently said she wasn't going to help... until she comes knocking on their door, which should immediately put both the boys on high alert, but doesn't.

Do you have any Colt 45 Malt Liquor?

Bela insists that she's doing them this favor, bringing them the Dreamroot, because of Bobby. He apparently saved her once and she's returning the favor. Dean puts the jar of Dreamroot in the safe, showing the Colt is there as well, before kicking Bela out. The boys brew some Dreamroot tea, complete with a bit of Bobby's hair, and down it. At first, they think nothing's happened... until they see that it's raining outside. Specifically, it's raining upside down. When they turn back around, they find their motel room has been replaced with a house that they quickly recognize as Bobby's, admittedly with a great deal less clutter than usual. The boys begin looking for Bobby as something stalks them...

Sam goes outside, finding an idyllic rural scene... and the door slams shut behind him, locking and with him unable to get Dean to hear him despite pounding on the window. Dean finds Bobby... who doesn't seem to remember the job he was just on and doesn't think they're in a dream. The woman in the nightgown appears again... and Bobby tells Dean that she is... his wife. She asks Bobby, as she's bleeding from the chest, why he did this to her. He apparently stabbed her to death... because she was possessed and then he didn't have the hunter skills he has now. She... doesn't take this well and attempts to kill both him and Dean.

Jeremy finds Sam... and gets beaten down by his superior Dream Master abilities.

Dean tries to snap Bobby out of it, insisting that he won't let him die and that Bobby is like a father to him. This seems to work as Bobby takes control of the dream... and his wife vanishes. Just as Sam is about to be killed by Jeremy, Bobby wakes up and pulls the boys out of the dream with him. At the hospital, Dean questions Bobby about what happened to his wife, Bobby verifies it. "Everybody got into huntin' somehow," He tells him. Bobby fills in some blanks for the boys - Jeremy didn't lose his ability to dream in an accident, but when his father took a baseball bat to his head. With Jeremy out of the picture, though, they have to hunt him down.

Bobby admits to having a moment of weakness and accepting a drink from Jeremy, which is the only way that he was able to get into Bobby's head... and, given that he has Dean's DNA from his own beer, it means Jeremy can come after him as well.

Shades of a normal life that Dean can never have...

Two days later, they are no closer to finding Jeremy and Dean is becoming increasingly erratic. Bobby has gotten Bela to assist, though not so much it seems as the spirit world isn't feeling chatty. Bela brings up Flagstaff as the reason why she's helping, but Bobby's still suspicious.

Eventually, Dean pulls the Impala over and decides to take a nap and have Jeremy come to him. Sam plucks a hair off of Dean's head to join him, and the two seemingly wake up some time later... but soon find that, yes, they are in a dream again. The two find... Lisa Braedan, in a flowy white dress and with a picnic laid out as the song the episode is named after plays in the background. After she vanishes, the boys spot Jeremy and take off after him, getting separated in the woods. While Sam continues the chase, Dean finds himself in a hallway and faces someone very, very familiar... himself.

Here, we have some Jensen Ackles playing off of himself and we get to see some of the insecurities that Dean's been burying deep down ever since The Magnificent Seven, and now, he has to confront them. After Dean attempts to banish his other self with a snap of the fingers, the other Dean locking the doors and holding a sawed-off ready to go.

Sam, meanwhile, awakens in the Impala... only to try to wake Dean and finding out that he's Jeremy. Jeremy does his villain monologue, claiming that Dr. Greg got him hooked on the Dreamroot and then took it away, claiming that sleep without dreaming isn't giving him any sort of rest. When Sam refuses to let him be, Jeremy ties him to the ground and proceeds to beat the snot out of him.

The Demon!Dean mocks Dean, telling him that he's pathetic and miserable, having nothing in his life outside of being John's attack dog and watching out for Sam. John didn't care whether he lived or died, so why should he? This is enough to get Dean to lose his mind, beating down the Demon!Dean while screaming that he didn't deserve for John's crap to be put on him and that he doesn't deserve to go to Hell, punctuating it all by blasting him in the chest with the sawed-off.

Finally, after so much time, Sam and Dean are on the same page...

While Jeremy beats Sam into a pulp, the seemingly dead Demon!Dean opens to reveal demonic black eyes, telling Dean: "You're gonna die! This is what you're gonna become!"

Sam summons up Jeremy's father in the dream... and then proceeds to beat Jeremy to death, which translates into the real world and Sam and Dean are freed from the dream. Later on, Bobby asks Sam about the fight in the dream, asking if it had anything to do with his psychic abilities - a question that has clearly been in the back of Bobby's mind since Sin City - but Sam denies it.

Bela has taken off and, when asked about it, Bobby mentions that all that happened at Flagstaff was that he'd gotten her a good deal on an amulet. They put two and two together and check the safe, finding the Colt is gone, stolen by Bela. They pack up to head out and hunt Bela down. Dean asks Sam what he saw in his dream, but Sam did not see what Dean saw and Dean just insists he was looking for Sam the whole time. Dean tells Sam that he doesn't want to die and he doesn't want to go to Hell... Sam reaffirms that they'll try to find a way to save him, seeming to end the episode on a happier note... until we hear the echo of Demon!Dean, and the previous scene where he promises Dean that he's going to die and become a demon. Our final shot before the credits roll is Demon!Dean smirking as he snaps his fingers...

So, I mentioned previously that one of the big draws of this episode was the appearance of a certain hockey mask-clad killer... that, unfortunately, never happened. Eric Kripke had said to hype this episode that Jason Voorhees would be making an appearance, something that would be a precursor to a film that Jared Padalecki would be in two years later. Alas, this was not to be and we got a replacement scene with Lisa Braeden and the picnic. Personally, while it would have been neat to see the boys have to take on the Crystal Lake killer, I'm okay with this change. Lisa swimming around in Dean's subconscious helps inform a bit more of his character, his desires and his regrets as he slouches ever closer to the Pit.

Hell of an effective final shot, pun intended

Jensen Ackles plays the scene against himself very well, all of Dean's pain, fear, doubts, and insecurities coming out in one, explosive moment within his dreams. Honestly, given how closely Dean plays everything to the chest, it's likely that this is the only way it could have come out in any way that the audience would ever see. The fact that it's Dean facing himself, I think, makes his finally breaking down and admitting it to Sam even more wonderful and yet heartbreaking. He wants to avoid his fate, the universe having dealt him an unfair hand and him refusing to accept destiny. At last, Sam and Dean are on the same page for trying to keep Dean out of Hell.

We also get the first hints to Bobby's origin as a hunter, something that will be touched upon again later in the series. As Bobby himself puts it, everybody who gets into hunting gets into it somehow. Given how bloody and dismal that life can be, it's clear that nobody gets into it voluntarily. We've seen it with Sam and Dean, we've heard about it from the late Gordon Walker, and now we see it here in action with Bobby.

We also get another wrinkle in our discussion about hunters and morality that we started in Bloodlust. The subject of humans in the discussion of hunting seems a little bit murky. While Bobby drew a hard line in Sin City that "humans [aren't] [their] job", we do have a few instances of humans being killed (or worse) as a result of the actions of hunters. Without wanting to look back through every single episode of the series up to this point, I believe that Sam's defeat of Jeremy is the first outright killing of a human that either he or Dean has committed that wasn't the result of a possession or a shapeshifter impostor or something of the like. Now, an argument could be made for pragmatism, since Jeremy was like a god within the dream due to the Dreamroot... but then one must also consider that Jeremy has none of those powers outside of the Dream World. 

Without the Dreamroot, he's just a squishy human, albeit one who has murdered once and has attempted murder at least twice following that using a mystical item. Dreamroot definitely falls within the purview of the hunters, being that it's outside of the natural world that most people know. The boys could have potentially found a way to cut off the supply of Dreamroot, neutralizing the threat entirely and just leaving it at that. So was Sam justified in killing Jeremy? Was Jeremy justified in killing Dr. Greg? The episode, alas, doesn't dwell on it long enough to give us any answers. However, given some of Sam's words about becoming more like Dean in the last episode, whether or not he's right there is a dark cloud hanging over the act itself.

As for the episode itself, Dream a Little Dream Of Me is a good one. Season 3 has had a pretty good string of consistently good episodes going through, which makes it all the more the pity that we're so close to the end. Will that continue with the next one? Well it's a Sam episode, it has my favorite supporting character in the entire show in it, and it's Tuesday... again.

Next time: Mystery Spot!

Be there!