Described by its director Mikhail Romm as a "study of human destinies influenced by Tolstoy and Balzac," Dream explores the dull and barren lives of a group of people living in a boarding house run by the tyrannical Madame Rosa (Faina Ranevskaya). Rosa terrorizes her son, an unemployed engineer, and her naive and uneducated chambermaid (Elena Kusmina). Dream is set in a Ukranian town that was at the time owned by Poland, and, by the film's end, has been "liberated" and made a part of the Soviet Union.
~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide