About Nightmares and Daydreams
Joko Anwar's Nightmares and Daydreams is a 2024 Indonesian anthology series of seven loosely linked stories set across the working-class neighborhoods of Jakarta. A taxi driver, a struggling couple, a novelist, a lonely small-town man and other ordinary people are stretched thin by money, family and the daily grind, and each of them stumbles into something they cannot explain. The strange arrives quietly at first, in the form of a flying saucer glimpsed at night, a stranger who wears your own face, or a child whose presence seems to bend luck itself.
Created by Joko Anwar and co-directed with Ray Farandy Pakpahan, Tommy Dewo and Randolph Zaini, the series uses speculative premises to dig into very grounded concerns. Stories about doppelgangers, reincarnation and visitors from beyond become ways to talk about poverty, faith, desperation and the small compromises people make to protect the ones they love. The uncanny is kept restrained and atmospheric, putting the emphasis on the characters and their choices rather than on spectacle.
What begins as a set of self-contained episodes gradually reveals shared threads, with motifs and figures recurring across the stories until they point toward a single connected mystery. The result is part science fiction, part social commentary and part puzzle, asking how much of an ordinary life is truly ordinary, and what might be waiting just out of sight.
