Spellbound’s dream scene takes place about two thirds of the way through the film. The two protagonists, Dr. Peterson (played by Ingrid Bergman) and her love interest, the amnesiac John Ballantyne (played by Gregory Peck), are on the run from the police. Ballantyne is suspected of murdering and then assuming the identity of Dr. Edwards, the man who is supposed to take over as director of the Green Manors mental hospital in Vermont, where Peterson works. Ballantyne can’t remember his name or what happened between him and Edwards, though he feels a crushing sense of guilt that convinces him he has committed the murder. Peterson, desperate to break through to Ballantyne’s true self and prove his innocence, takes him to her former mentor, the Freudian analyst Dr. Alexander Brulov. Though they lie to Brulov about Ballantyne’s true identity, the quirky savvy analyst sees right through it. During the night, Ballantyne falls into a state of paranoid delusion and grasps hold of a straight edge razor – clearly intent on either killing himself or harming the sleeping Peterson or the old doctor. Brulov cleverly offers the psychotic Ballantyne a glass of milk that he has laced with bromides. The sedative works and Ballantyne falls into a deep sleep – during which he has the dream which he recounts to Dr. Peterson and Dr. Brulov on the following morning.

The dream begins with a psychedelic tapestry of disembodied eyes painted on a black background. For about ten or fifteen seconds the dream is focused up close on these eyes – creating an uncanny or hallucinatory sensation. The eyes are wide open, often bulging, the pupils dilated. The eye, of course, is the tool of vision – which is the primary sense exercised in the dream state. The eye is the symbolic gateway into the mind and as such the opening part of the sequence indicates to the viewer that we are now operating in a world of internal images and symbols, ones conjured by the mind and not those impressed on the mind from without. The eyes tell us that the following scene, the dream sequence, is the product of the active processes of the self or ego at work, not the passive processes of ordering normal external stimuli. Like Job’s dream in Blake’s illustration 11, Ballantyne’s dream in "Spellbound" contains hidden knowledge.

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