A female doctor is so busy with her work that she has too little time for her fiancé. He falls in love with a waitress and the two have a child. Though considered by some to be a proto-feminist yarn, the film dwells on the consequences that equal rights for women may generate rather than openly champion suffrage. Similar in to Ibsen's The Doll House in many ways, the film provides mannered, solemn melodrama, ably acted by Mosjoukine and Yureneva.

Daydreams is regarded by many as Bauer's surviving masterpiece. Film historian and archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai describes it as "a masterful balance between subject technique and narrative development. The tension in the plot (reminding one of Hitchcock's Vertigo) reaches its climax in the extraordinary tracking shot during which the camera quite literally follows the main character along a deserted street, stops when he stops, then tracks back slowly, while he retraces his route. Necrophilia, mysticism and abstraction are the main ingredients of a tale with an astonishing and eerie finale."