AllMovie

The Flying House is another of Winsor McCay's surrealistic dream sequences. It opens with a man and woman in bed and discussing the delicious rarebit they had for dinner, which the woman is afraid will give her nightmares. Sure enough, as soon as she is asleep, she dreams that her husband has gone upstairs, where he has installed an engine in the attic and a propeller to the front of the house. Because the bank is threatening to foreclose on their mortgage, he intends to turn the house into a flying machine and escape. The house flies away over the city and crosses a river with great swoops and swirls. They pass over a street corner temperance rally in which the speaker calls for water, not whiskey, and the husband uses the house to cause a water tower to spill on them. They land on top of a factory smokestack, dive into a lake and float upon a rough sea. Escaping a dense fog, they crash into the glass dome of a botanical building, then escape a raging storm by flying high into the heavens, eventually landing on the moon. All of a sudden, a giant appears and attempts to flatten the house with a fly swatter. They quickly leave, but discover as they are floating through space that they are out of gas. Meanwhile, on Earth a scientist is launching a rocket to the moon, which impacts with the house. The house destroyed, the wife and her husband tumble to Earth, causing the wife to awaken from her nightmare.