Ryan Ferguson was 20 years old when he was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Ryan’s father Bill refused to accept this verdict, so from the moment Ryan was convicted, Bill fought tirelessly to prove his son's innocence. It all began when in 2001. Kent Heitholt, a sports editor at The Columbia Daily Tribune was found strangled to death next to his car in the newspaper’s office parking lot. The case went unsolved for two years until police got an anonymous call. The anonymous caller gave the police information that led them to a man named Charles Erickson, a friend of Ryan’s. At first Erickson claimed his memory from the night was totally blank, but after a botched police interrogation full of gerrymandering, Erickson ends up giving the police the misleading information that they've been tormenting him all along to give: that Ryan was the mastermind of the murder and the one that strangled Heitholt to death.

Director Andrew Jenks began making Dream/Killer as a way to prove that Ryan Ferguson was innocent, but near the end of filming, Ryan’s conviction was overturned. He was vacated from prison and freed, so Jenks turned to showing the integral role of Bill Ferguson, the father whose resilience to failure and setback is astounding. Broken down, year by year in chronological order, we follow Bill through his fight. The film's most thunderous pronouncement though is just how horrible an injustice has taken place in the Ryan Ferguson case, and how it was the egregious actions of the state prosecutor Kevin Crane that caused such an injustice to take place. Despite a total lack of evidence against Ryan, Crane proceeded to prosecute him with full force, and even worse, refused to file for a new trial for Ryan even when new evidence was introduced that proved that Ryan was not guilty. Dream/Killer is obviously on Ferguson's side, Jenks doesn’t wait for the viewer to decide for themselves which side is right or wrong, he provides so much material to prove his case—that state officials abused their power sending an innocent young man to prison for nine years—that to disagree with Jenks would be nonsense.