All Just a Dream/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* When applied to a story as a whole, or everything after a certain point, just what is the point? For individual scenes/episodes it may be a cop-out but at least there is some meaningful sense in which that bit wasn't real but everything else was. For entire stories on the other hand, it seems to be saying "Ha! You thought you were watching a show about fictional characters written by some writers, but really you were watching a show about a dream about those same fictional characters, written by the same writers in exactly the same way as if they were doing that first thing! Fooled you there!" [[Wild Mass Guessing]] ''loves'' this one.

** ''[[Perfect Blue]]'' kind of revitalized it, IMHO; Mima goes through wake up/psych! moments over and over again because she's going insane. The point of its use in the film is to make the audience go "WTF?" in sympathy, and to that end it's quite effective.

*** Similar with [[Waking Life]]. He keeps waking up and waking up and waking up. Has he really woken up yet? Is he still asleep? Then near the end comes another possibility or two: {{spoiler|He might be dead. Or maybe it's a [[Dying Dream]]?}} You have to admit that's kind of interesting.

** The horrible movie ''[[North]]'' was like this. For those who don't know, a kid is fed up with his parents and wants to divorce them and find new parents. Anyway North, a lovable kid, was dreaming about all kinds of racial and ethnic stereotypes in his quest to find new parents. At the end, he wakes up and runs home to his lousy, real parents. Meaning that nothing got resolved, but that we learned the main character is a racist.

**** So the kid has a racist dream because of the media... Could there perhaps be a [[Fridge Brilliance|hidden]] [[Parody Retcon|message]]?

* What about the scenes where the dreamer is not present? Are we to assume that the dreamer saw them as some kind of disembodied observer?

** Short version: If you read a lot, the words might not change in dreams. If you like to pay particularly close attention to digital clocks, they might actually be accurate in dreams. It all depends on the current assumptions and learned behaviors of your mind.

*** Long version: It all depends on the particular things that are already imprinted in your own mind. For example, right now, picture yourself standing on the side of a pool, and drop a bowling ball in. Once it reaches the bottom, try using telekinesis to lift the bowling ball back up. Even though it's all imaginary, it still ''feels'' heavy, right? That's because your mind has a kind of physics engine it uses to judge real-world behaviors of objects, and this is the exact same physics engine your dreams use. When you're awake, you can defy the physics engine consciously, but since your consciousness is turned off during a dream, you risk waking up immediately if you try to do it, so you are stuck with whatever rules your mind is currently using. The same goes for memory: if there's a house on your neighborhood you haven't payed close attention to lately, that house might be missing or inaccurate in your dream. Whatever comes naturally to your imagination in normal daydreams will come naturally in dreams. Whatever you have to force will be inaccurate. Hence, these "indicators" will vary from person to person.

** Indeed. [[Rule of Funny]], for instance, can definitely excuse this trope if they make a good enough gag out of it. Who can forget {{spoiler|the series finale of [[Newhart]]}}? Or the hilarious parody of that scene Jimmy Kimmel and the [[Lost]] cast and crew did?

** I just hope you don't believe this is the case ''in the real world''...

** Or, hey, [[Eternal Sonata]]. There are a few clues that, while it may be a dream as far as Chopin is concerned, it's actually another reality. (For example, certain proper names are impossible for him to have come up with if we're to believe they're all musical terms.)

* What bugs the hell out of me about it was all just a dream stories is that it sort of eliminates the validity of all the character development that happens within the story. Sure you can argue that the dreams of this sort are all about the dreamer learning from the dream and applying it to real life once they wake up, but it bothers me that he or she has to go through all the things they did in the dream all over again and the way they apply the lesson in real life isn't always of the same quality as it was applied in the dream.

** Well, I fixed all the instances of "I has", whether or not it was serious or just some joke…

** It's the result of some jerkoff using Control-F to Find-And-Replace every instance of "This Troper" with "I". Just fix it where you see it, and hope whoever is responsible eventually stops.

** No, because those shows have different characters on them. But if the Dean Cain version of Clark Kent showed up on a few episodes of Veronica Mars or something, that would be different. You're criticizing the Westphall hypothesis for violating rules you made up that don't apply to it anyway.

** The above argument still can be used to criticize one the basic concepts behind the Westphall hypothesis. It can be argued, for instance, that the John Munch who appears in ''The X-Files'' is an alternate universe version of the John Munch who appears in ''Law and Order: Special Victims Unit''. This would make sense considering the lack of anything explicitly speculative fiction-related in the L&O universe.

** Coherent and rational dreams do happen, though, even to people who ordinarily have wacky, random dreams. My dreams are typically weird and disjointed, but I once had a dream that felt '''exactly''' like reality: I actually assumed it was a real memory for years afterwards, until I tried to reminisce with family members who had been in the dream and they all [[Paranoia Fuel|looked at me like I was crazy and insisted it never happened]].

* This atrocious cop-out bugs me because it breaks the fundamental deal a writer of fiction makes with their audience. At some level a fictional work charges the audience to supply suspension of disbelief. In return the author agrees to supply a fictional world, treated as real during the work. [[All Just a Dream]] takes that investment and trashes it before the audience's eyes. It is the ultimate tacky [[Retcon]]: we never engaged you in a story in the first place, suckers.

** Isn't there a world of difference between revealing at the 11th hour that a narrative had taken place in a dream all along and being pretty open about it the whole time, like Lewis Carroll?

* For your consideration: ''Prisoner 13'', a film from 1933 made in Mexico about a drunken general who is promoted far beyond his confidence and ends up sentencing a series of young revolutionaries to the firing square. One of them, he learns, is his long lost son. As he races to try to stop the firing squad in time... it turns out that the entire movie (and apparently the entire Revolutionary!) took place in his drunken dream. So a serious examination of a the country's recent history is thrown away in favour of a simplistic and moralistic take against alcohol. Seems odd to you? That is because the frame narrative was imposed by censors. Originally, the general was supposed to fail in his attempts and witness his son's execution. But... and it's a big but... any audience member would surely catch on to that fact (censorship traditionally draws emphasis to the thing it's censoring) and the dream world premise ends up offering a space in which things can be talked about that couldn't be in other sorts of narratives. Isn't this the best use of [[All Just a Dream]] (if only under duress)... the freedom to speak about important matters in a place that superficially is weightless and consequence free?

 

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[[Category:Tropes/Headscratchers]]

[[Category:Headscratchers]]

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