Plot
An obnoxious radio host, Barry Sherman, opens his broadcast with a story about a factory worker turning violent. A postal worker named Frankie dreams he is buried under an avalanche of mail while his manager, a demon, looms over him and a giant envelope monster attacks. The whole thing is a nightmare. A floating worm is attached to his forehead by a tentacle, and when his wife wakes from the noise the worm detaches and flies out the open window. She finds lesions across his body and panics.
Frankie is taken to Memorial Hospital, where his wife calls in the Extreme Ghostbusters. Roland Jackson takes P.K.E. readings and gets nothing. Kylie Griffin learns Frankie did nothing unusual before bed except listen to Barry Sherman's show, which she openly dislikes. A doctor reports that Frankie's fractures came from abnormally strong muscle contractions during a nocturnal seizure, an unusual case he has been seeing more of lately. With no sign of supernatural activity, Eduardo Rivera assigns Kylie and Garrett Miller the graveyard shift.
Back at the firehouse, Garrett's stray paper airplane switches on a boom box playing Sherman's show. Garrett falls asleep and dreams of playing in the NBA, scoring 103 points before the same demon, now a referee, shoves him down and leaves all the players in wheelchairs. Slimer spots a worm hovering over Garrett and chases it out the window. Garrett wakes with the same lesions on his arm but downplays the bad dream.
The team answers an alarm at a church being used as a shelter for homeless men. The sleepers are all attached to floating worms while Sherman's show plays. The Proton Streams have no effect and the worms register zero psychokinetic energy. A drowsy Garrett fires wildly and accidentally hits the radio, which makes the worms melt and the men wake. The ceiling collapses, and the Ghostbusters evacuate everyone while Roland grabs a sample of melted worm. One of the rescued men describes the nightmares, the bruises, and a demon.
Egon Spengler confirms the sample has no P.K.E. and decides to widen the bandwidth for a full spectral analysis. With Garrett dangerously short on sleep, Egon takes him off active duty, and Kylie stays behind with him. Going through a book, Garrett identifies the demon as Morpheus, who inhabits the dream world but has never entered the physical plane. Kylie connects every victim through the Barry Sherman show and theorizes Morpheus is using Sherman's voice as a conduit into sleeping minds. Slimer plugs the radio back in, and elsewhere in the firehouse Egon and Janine Melnitz drift off.
Garrett and Kylie borrow Roland's Mustang and leave just as Ecto-1 returns from a false alarm. Roland and Eduardo nap in the rec room and the dreams take hold. Eduardo dreams of Kylie, who shoves him away and reveals her boyfriend is Morpheus before Eduardo watches his hair fall out. Roland dreams of being presented to the scientific community as Dr. Roland Jackson, only to gush water uncontrollably until the room floods. Egon has a classic "naked in public" dream and is fascinated rather than embarrassed, noting its distinctly Freudian overtones. Janine wakes in her dream alone in an empty city, where Morpheus appears laughing on storefront televisions.
Several worms combine into one large creature above Eduardo and Roland. Egon recognizes the worms are not fully ectoplasmic but embryonic, growing into something else, so a Trap would not hold them. The big worm flies off, and Eduardo and Roland pursue it in Ecto-1 while Egon tends to a weakened Janine. At the WKYR radio building, Kylie and Garrett confront Sherman, who rants that people blame the supernatural for their own problems. Kylie reads an extremely high level off him. Garrett shoots his equipment, Sherman watches the worms gather on the roof, and then he vanishes.
The worms merge into a giant construct, and Morpheus, now possessing Sherman, prepares his triumph. Proton Streams flow harmlessly around him as he animates a ventilation system and the radio tower to attack. Roland realizes Sherman is now giving off off-the-scale P.K.E. and stops Garrett from firing, because he wants Morpheus to fully cross over. Once Morpheus emerges, declaring he will master the physical plane as he mastered dreams, he is finally ectoplasmic and trappable. The Ghostbusters confine and capture him. Eduardo's hair returns, and a confused Sherman comes to believing he was sleepwalking again.
Ghosts and entities
Morpheus is the episode's central antagonist: a dream demon who has inhabited the dream world without ever manifesting on the physical plane. He uses the broadcast voice of radio host Barry Sherman as a conduit into the minds of sleeping listeners, inserting himself into their dreams as a taunting, threatening demon figure. His direct presence in a dream causes powerful muscle contractions in the physical body, leaving the sleeping victim with real fractures and lesions. Because he is not fully ectoplasmic while operating through the radio signal, Proton Streams and Traps have no effect. Roland's strategy is to let Morpheus fully cross over into the physical plane, at which point he becomes ectoplasmic and can be captured normally.
Somniwyrms are the worm-like embryonic entities Morpheus uses as dream-to-body anchors. One attaches itself to a sleeping victim's forehead via a tendril, bridging the dream world and the physical body. They register zero psychokinetic energy in their early form and cannot be trapped. When separated from the radio signal, the worms dissolve into an inert residue. Multiple Somniwyrms combine into larger constructs that serve as the seed of Morpheus's physical manifestation.
Dream Creatures are inanimate objects animated by Morpheus after he takes possession of Barry Sherman's body. In the episode, a ventilation system and the radio tower at the WKYR building are warped into attacking constructs. They serve as obstacles the Ghostbusters must deal with while waiting for Morpheus to fully cross over.
Barry Sherman is an abrasive New York radio personality whose nightly show reaches a large audience of sleeping listeners, making him an ideal unwitting conduit for Morpheus. He has no awareness of what is happening and comes to believing he was merely sleepwalking.
Cast and crew
Regular voices were provided by Tara Charendoff, Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Guest voices were Jeff Altman, Xander Berkeley, Susan Eisenberg, and Michael Pataki. The episode carried production number 125.1
Continuity and references
Garrett's NBA dream echoes his stated wish in "Be Careful What You Wish For" to play professional basketball. Roland's dream of becoming a famous doctor follows up on "Ghost Apocalyptic Future," where he is told he will become a doctor. After the church ceiling collapses, Eduardo quotes "Nice shootin', Tex," a line from the first Ghostbusters film. Egon describes his own dream as having Freudian overtones, a nod to the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Garrett also raises the urban legend that dying in a dream causes real death, which Morpheus's physically injurious nightmares lend credence to.
When Sherman taunts the Ghostbusters about people blaming their problems on the likes of Count Dracula and the Boogieman, both have prior history in the franchise. The original team faced vampires in the Real Ghostbusters episodes "No One Comes to Lupusville" and "Transylvanian Homesick Blues." The Boogieman was a recurring villain across several Real Ghostbusters episodes, most prominently in "The Boogieman Cometh." A Dracula figure also appeared in the Real Ghostbusters Classic Monsters toy sub-line.
Production notes
All production details in this section, including draft comparisons, cut scenes, and specific dialogue differences, are drawn from Steven Melching's scripts for this episode.1
The script went through four drafts in early 1997: a First Draft dated March 24, 1997, a revised First Draft dated April 1, 1997, a Second Draft dated April 4, 1997, and a Final Draft dated April 5, 1997. An early version had Garrett's mother appear in his dream and zap him with a cattle prod, and it also originally had Garrett gain the ability to walk while dreaming. The first draft implied, in-universe, that the Ghostbusters had disbanded four years earlier, around 1993; Egon refers to a NEXIS search turning up hundreds of newspaper articles pairing "Ghostbusters" with "disgrace" over the previous four years. A character named Aaron Curtiz, a photojournalist and friend of Janine brought in to help the team's public relations, was cut from the final episode; in the draft, his plan to build good press backfires when he witnesses the destruction at the homeless shelter.
Several locations and details shifted between drafts. In the final draft, Roland and Eduardo were sent to the Wradley Hotel in Midtown, and the radio station was placed at Rockefeller Center. Barry Sherman's dialogue referenced Mayor McShane, Central Park, and the Statue of Liberty. Janine's nightmare was reworked from being dragged down a corridor by a nun (Morpheus) and locked in a cell, in the first draft, into a simpler scene of her placed in a jail cell in the final draft.
References
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Melching, Steven (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters "In Your Dreams" (Scripts, First Draft March 24, 1997 and Final Draft April 5, 1997).
