Gene tries to lucid dream so he can remember the perfect song he wrote in his sleep; Louise and Tina try to catch a cricket that's keeping Linda up at night with its chirping.
Tropes:
- All for Nothing: After struggling to re-experience his original dream exactly and finally recalling the complete song, Gene plays it in the real world only to discover it's not very good.
- Based on a Dream: In-Universe example. Gene dreams that he wrote the perfect song, but forgot it after waking up. He spends the episode trying to recreate the dream so he can retrieve it and enter it in a contest.
- Damned by Faint Praise: The Belchers have a hard time convincing Gene his dream song's as good as he thought it was.
- Distracted by the Sexy: Louise and Tina's final plan to catch the cricket is to trick it into getting lured by a fake female cricket doll (that's 3 times larger than it is) in a bottle. By the last day, they do end up catching it...in a different trap, but they wanted to put it with the doll trap just for posterity's sake.
- Laborious Laziness: Bob reasons that Gene could simply write a new song instead of spending so much time trying to reclaim his dream song. Gene is offended by the very idea because the dream song was supposedly a masterpiece, which we later find out it was not.
- Me's a Crowd: In one of Gene's dreams, the water bus is full of multiple Lindas singing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round."
- Pest Episode: The B-plot involves a cricket inside the apartment that is driving Linda crazy with its chirping. Louise and Tina set out to catch it in exchange for money.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The episode title is a reference to the Tom Petty song "Running Down a Dream".
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Gene succeeds in remembering the song in his dream, but find that it's not as good as he thought. The experience of trying to find the song ends up inspiring him to write a much better song, but rather than enter it in the contest, he keeps it for himself, hoping to record it when he's older (and so no one in the music business copyrights it and takes it away from him).
- Shout-Out:
- The store next door is Puttin' on the Mitts Oven Mitts.
- The exterminator van is Gnat-ural Born Killers.
