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"Mr. Sandman, Dream Me a Dream" is the seventh episode of the first season of The Real Ghostbusters. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, it first aired on October 25, 1986. The Sandman decides that humanity might stop its warring if it had a five-hundred-year nap, but his sleep dust causes dreams to come to life, creating havoc for the Ghostbusters.1
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At 248 West 16th in Chelsea, room 418, Marge is annoyed with her husband for staying in to read his comics instead of playing tennis with her. As she prepares to leave, both are attacked by a strange creature.
Peter joins the other Ghostbusters for breakfast, tired after a night spent dreaming about a cloaked man with glowing eyes. Ray tells him his Aunt Lois used to say you can take control of a dream as long as you know it is a dream. A call comes in and Peter is reluctant to leave without his breakfast, but Slimer eats his doughnut and settles the matter. At the attacked couple's apartment, Peter is grabbed by the same creature. After fighting it off, the Ghostbusters find the couple asleep and floating, and notice the creature resembles a drawing in a comic book. Spotting more creatures and more sleeping people around the neighborhood, Egon concludes they are dealing with a Sandman.
A boy with a bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows dreams up a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. After dodging it, the team confronts the Sandman, who explains he is putting the world to sleep for five hundred years to end all wars and force peace. Believing the Ghostbusters are laughing at him, he attacks, escapes, and is tracked to a clock tower. There he turns the harmless dream creatures into vicious nightmares. On the way back to the Ecto-1, the team barely dodges a giant Easter Bunny conjured from someone's dream; Ray is hesitant to shoot it, convinced it might really be the Easter Bunny. The Sandman then ambushes Ray at the car and puts him to sleep.
The team abandons the car after dodging a giant pizza from Ray's dream. Searching another building, Peter is put to sleep and dreams of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer, and an Oscar while riding a gold Rolls-Royce in a ticker-tape parade. Winston and Egon leave to find the Sandman, who is leading a "parade of peace," but he dodges their blasts and puts Egon to sleep. Egon dreams of Albert Einstein, who reminds Winston that you need not be a scientist to solve a problem, just use your mind, before wandering off muttering distortions of relativity, including "Egon = MC Squared."
Winston returns to the Firehouse and uses Ray's advice. He sets a trap with Janine and Slimer. The Sandman bursts in and puts Janine to sleep, but she tells herself it is only a dream, takes control, and conjures a Ghostbuster version of herself to ambush him. The Sandman tries to flee Janine's stream but is pulled back by Winston's beam, and Slimer springs from a drawer to activate the trap. With the Sandman captured, everyone wakes and the dream creatures vanish. Back at headquarters, Janine fills the team in on what happened. Ray, still groggy, asks if anyone smells pizza; Egon attempts to correct the dream Einstein's distorted relativity aloud, earning confused looks from passersby. When the team is ready to celebrate Winston's victory, they find him asleep, with Slimer beside him.
The episode was written by J. Michael Straczynski. Its production number was 75009, and it was recorded on July 2, 1986.2
In the introduction recorded for The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection, Straczynski says he got the idea after hearing Pat Ballard's song "Mr. Sandman" on the radio at home. A track from The Real Ghostbusters soundtrack featuring the song is used in two parts of the episode.
The husband's comic shows "DiC" on its cover as the publisher; DiC Entertainment co-produced The Real Ghostbusters with Columbia Pictures Television, now Sony Pictures Television. The comic's title is misspelled "Wierd Comics" rather than "Weird Comics," and it nods to science-fiction comics of the 1950s.
This is one of seven early-season episodes later re-dubbed with Dave Coulier and Kath Soucie replacing the original voices of Lorenzo Music and Laura Summer. The redub was rebroadcast as part of season four and was not included on the DVD release.
Regular voices include Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, and Arsenio Hall. The original recording featured Lorenzo Music and Laura Summer; the later redub used Dave Coulier and Kath Soucie. Guest voices were Sheryl Bernstein, William E. Martin, and Steven Schatzberg.
A small aside: Frank Welker, who voices the Sandman, has the character dismiss Steven Spielberg ("Never heard of him") when a WUGH-FM radio DJ asks if he works for the director. Welker has since worked on Spielberg-connected projects such as Gremlins and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Peter's opening dream about the cloaked figure plays as a precognitive vision of the Sandman. He has a similar dream about a creature before encountering it in "20,000 Leagues Under the Street."
The episode introduces two recurring family references later expanded in the series: Ray's Aunt Lois, whose advice about controlling dreams drives the climax, and Winston's father, whom he quotes with "we learn by doing."
It also marks several firsts. Janine wears a Ghostbusters jumpsuit and uses a Proton Pack for the first time in the series, and Slimer operates a ghost trap for the first time. The pink tank design seen here was reused in "Attack of the B-Movie Monsters" as tanks battling Lizardo.
The episode's imagery and ideas resurfaced repeatedly in IDW Publishing comics. In Ghostbusters Annual 2015, a Weird Fiction comic from the episode appears in the background art, alongside a miniature of the gold car Peter dreamed of and a nod to his Oscar from the ticker-tape parade. In Ghostbusters Annual 2018, Peter's toy is again modeled on the gold car, and several of the Sandman's dream by-products appear in the artwork. The Sandman himself makes a background cameo in Ghostbusters: Get Real issue 1. In Ghostbusters: Answer The Call issues 4 and 5, the tactics from this episode return: controlling a dream as the key to victory, and an antagonist who underestimates the secretary, who then helps capture him.
The episode aired October 25, 1986, between "The Boogieman Cometh" and "When Halloween Was Forever." It appears on The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection on Volume 1, Disc 2, which includes the Straczynski introduction.