The movie made about as much sense as the trailer does. I was slightly confused for much of it, but things tied together throughout. The 90 minute Satoshi Kon film from Japan is about a device that allows you to record dreams as you're having them... it was developed to help in treating psychological disorders /issues. It fell into the wrong hands and dreams were starting to blur with reality. Everybody's dreams that had been hooked up to the machine started to meld together as well, slowly becoming a living nightmare.
I didn't realize until afterwards (from some special features) that a third to half of the movie had CGI in it. I suspected a little, but didn't know it was that much. They paid such attention to detail in this movie. There is a scene where a car is driving into a tunnel at night in the rain, and you can see the reflection of the car on the wet asphalt for a split second, before it goes in.
Those blue butterflies seemed to be present whenever evil stuff was happening, which was a little dissonant because they were so pretty. I bet Kon did that on purpose. Other strange things in this movie included a large Japanese doll that terrorized the protagonists, two bartenders that when combined would have looked just like Hitler, a parade of strange objects including a bendy refrigerator containing a boom box dancing around in it, solid objects that fell away like blankets, people taking in gibberish right before throwing themselves out of windows, you get the picture. Well, maybe you don't. I don't think anything will be able to describe this movie accurately, so please see it.
