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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"I've been having these dreams lately. Like is any of this real, or not?"''
|'''Sora'''|''[[Kingdom Hearts (video game)|Kingdom Hearts]]''}}
Around fifty minutes into the program, really weird stuff starts happening, like little people juggling while riding a tricycle around a bewildered protagonist. Then the protagonist realizes, just as you do, that this has all been a dream, a really bad hallucination, or some other escape from reality.
Sometimes, the character awakes after the dream, realises it was all "just a dream" (often actually saying this to himself, which rarely happens in real life), sighs with relief, and then sees an artifact lying next to him that was ''in'' the dream. This usually will leave protagonist and audience wondering "[[Or Was It a Dream?]]", however it may also be an opening gambit in a [[Dream Within a Dream]] sequence. Sometimes the dream lasts longer than one
If other characters start acting out of character or otherwise just don't seem to be quite themselves during the dream sequence, expect lots of finger-pointing and exclamations of "''[[And You Were There]]!''" when the dreaming character awakens.
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Variant form of the [[Reset Button]]. See also [[Crashing Dreams]], [[Or Was It a Dream?]], [[Pinch Me]], [[Dying Dream]], and [[Catapult Nightmare]]. Compare with [[Nested Story Reveal]], a similar trope that lacks the dream aspect. Often [[Deconstructed]] with the [[Dream Apocalypse]]. If the dream is a quick-hit gag instead of a major element of the narrative, you have a [[Daydream Surprise]]. Not to be confused with [[Cuckoo Nest]].
{{endingtrope}}
{{examples}}
== Advertising ==
* The delightful Kia Sorento commercial "[http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2010/kia-sorento-joy-ride/ Joyride Dream].
* Don't forget the Pepsi Twist commercial when [[Ozzy Osbourne]] notices his kids drinking Pepsis, only for them to actually be Pepsi Twists, and that his kids are actually the ''Osmonds'' in [[Latex Perfection|full rubber bodysuits]]. Ozzy starts screaming, only to wake up and realize that it was just a nightmare, though the Pepsi Twists are still real...
* One of the DVD specials for ''[[Durarara!!]]'' cleverly inverts this trope. The opening scenes show downright absurd scenes, like UFO sightings. As these are shown, Walter muses that most people would call his fantasies a pipe dream. The rest of the episode is narrated chronologically backwards, revealing that the strange occurrences at the beginning of the episode are ''not'' part of Walter's fantasy.▼
▲== Anime & Manga ==
▲* One of the DVD specials for ''[[Durarara]]'' cleverly inverts this trope. The opening scenes show downright absurd scenes, like UFO sightings. As these are shown, Walter muses that most people would call his fantasies a pipe dream. The rest of the episode is narrated chronologically backwards, revealing that the strange occurrences at the beginning of the episode are ''not'' part of Walter's fantasy.
* The Season 2 opening of ''[[Genshiken]]'' starts with Sasahara opening a book... and then goes into an opening for a Mobile Suit Gundam-like series starring the Genshiken characters, including a helmeted Madarame as the antagonist. Then Sasahara wakes up and we see that he was looking at a sketch of the club members.
* The second season of ''[[Shakugan no Shana]]'' starts with Yuji trapped inside a dream (created by the real first villain of the season). Yuji picks up on some deja vu, but when complete scenes and defeated villains from the first season start showing up, then he knows something's wrong. No one will listen to him or tell him anything
* Repeatedly used in several episodes of the anime series ''[[Ergo Proxy]]'', due to {{spoiler|the proxies, god-like beings who can shape-shift and invade human minds with horrifying ease.}} Several characters are subjected to this trope, but none more so than the main character, Vincent Law, to the point that when unexpected things happen in ''reality'' he assumes it's yet ''another'' dream. Half the time he's correct. Other times he's outright ''told'' he's being subjected to a dream, or is it a dream within a dream, [[Or Was It a Dream?|or has it been reality all along?]] It's a wonder this show made any sense at all.
* One episode of ''[[Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch]]'' was a very, very strange New Year's dream in which Lucia uses her [[Idol Singer]] powers to become famous.
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** The entire series turns out to be just a virtual dream in the end.
* Frequently subverted in ''[[Nightmare Inspector]]'', though grandly played straight in the end when the characters learn that {{spoiler|not only is Mizuki's brother Azusa, vessel for the Baku Hiruko before Chitose took over, still alive, he's been concocting the biggest, darkest, and most twisted nightmare ever, hoping that it will consume him and [[Who Wants to Live Forever?|he can finally rest in relative peace]]. Turns out? Chitose was a figment of his imagination. Everything that happened since Chitose took over was all just Azusa's nightmare, that Mizuki and Hifumi were trapped in.}}
* In ''[[Ranma ½
* ''[[Baki the Grappler]]'' has a humorous example: the fight between Oliva and Guevara ends with Guevara the winner, then being introduced to the president of the United States, who begs him for forgiveness, and Yujiro, who tells him he's the strongest warrior in the world. He marvels, at this, saying it all seems like a dream...which, of course, it is. A dream he had after Oliva knocked him out with a punch that embedded him in the ground.
* Episode 287 of ''[[Bleach]]'', but with a twist. We're initially led to think that it's Ichigo's dream {{spoiler|but it turns out to be a [[Dream Within a Dream]] of Isane Kotetsu's.}}
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** Happened straight in the comic that came with UNMASKED. {{spoiler|Ulquiorra dreams up the memories of his past.}}
* Nastily inverted in ''[[Berserk]]''. In the midst of the massacre under the Eclipse, Corkus becomes convinced that the entire plot of the series was just a dream. After all, (present horror excluded) it was much too good to be true. His absolute certainty did not prevent his brutal death.
* The episode "Haruhi in Wonderland" of ''[[Ouran High School Host Club]]'' is all Haruhi's dream, but though the ending of the episode treats it as "
* [[Jerk with a Heart of Gold|Tomoya]] of ''[[Clannad (visual novel)|Clannad]]'s'' first season has a dream that can only be described as trippy, of course to him it all seemed fairly natural. Makes one wonder what it was that Kotori put in the pie he ate before he passed out.
* In the fourth arc of ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro ni]]'', there is a very memorable scene in which Maria kills her mother Rosa repeatedly and grotesquely. From the context, it is to be inferred that the entire scene is a dream. However, it's never stated explicitly, [[Mind Screw|just like a lot in this series]].
* In ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia]]'', [[Moe Anthropomorphism|Japan]] tries to convince himself that the [[Ho Yay|"Private Lesson"]] with close friend [[Chivalrous Pervert|Greece]] was [[Crowning Moment of Funny|All Just A Dream]]. Even when he woke up naked—[[Did They or Didn't They?|or at least shirtless]]—next to him...
* The third-to-last episode of ''[[Gun X Sword]]'' implies the series so far was a dream of [[The Rival]] Ray, with him waking up back home {{spoiler|Actually THAT is a dream he's having as he dies.}}
* The ''[[One Piece]]'' short "Jiginai Time" (or "No Respect Time") apparently takes place entirely within the dream of an incredibly bored, talking moai, much to the main characters' chagrin.
* The {{spoiler|last}} ''[[Daily Lives of High School Boys]]'' {{spoiler|skit in the anime, ''High School Boys and ...'', was pretty much Tadakuni's dream which contained much of the fandom's desires.}} Interestingly enough, this has [[Wild Mass Guessing|generated a fair bit of discussion]] [http://i.imgur.com/a9vqT.jpg?1\], as the punchline to the skit as presented in the anime (incredibly similar to the start of a skit way back in episode 4) makes it seem that ''9 of the 12'' episodes of the anime ''never happened'', invalidating all of the characters introduced since then.
** In the un-animated skit ''High School Girls are Funky -- Tolerance'', {{spoiler|[[Always Second Best|Yanagin]] again dared NAGO to test how long can they stay in the sauna. While most of the skit showed Yanagin won over NAGO... it turned out Yanagin fell unconscious earlier than NAGO, Ikushima and Habara; what we saw for the previous pages were just her dream while she was unscious.}}
== Comic Books ==
* The last issue of ''[[Gen 13]]'', vol. 1 combined this with a [[Downer Ending]]: The
== Comics ==▼
▲* The last issue of ''[[Gen 13]]'', vol. 1 combined this with a [[Downer Ending]]: The team -- along with various other gen-active teens they'd met along the course of the series -- has one last hedonistic, live-like-there's-no-tomorrow-cuz-there-ain't good time before "The End". Turns out this was all in Caitlin Fairchild's head, an extended hallucination brought on by the effects of another gen-active's powers in the split-second before a [[Death Trap]] disintegrated them all (they got better).
* This has happened innumerable times in [[Superhero]] comics as an "out" for a wacky story that doesn't fit into canon. So much so that it was common to include the blurb "Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!" on covers to reassure readers that no such cop-out would be used. Of course, since [[Covers Always Lie]], they'd usually find some ''other'' cop-out that meant the events still weren't what they seemed.
* The current{{when}} high-profile ''[[Batman]]: RIP'' storyline is (among other things) an attempt to bring the wackier [[The Silver Age of Comic Books|Silver Age]] adventures of the Dark Knight in-canon by explaining them as hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation experiments. An original quote from one of those Silver-Age tales is a prominent part of the storyline (and very typical of the trope): "It would be far easier to consider this a dream... but how can I? For in my hand, I hold the Bat-Radia!"
* ''[[Tom Strong]]'' issues 29 & 30 had the eponymous hero awaken from his superheroic life into a gray world with no wonder or adventure where he was just a factory worker with a case of bad self-esteem. Then the clues mount that he really is a superhero - only to discover that he was a failed military experiment and [[Cuckoo Nest|all of his memories of a heroic life were delusions]]. But at the last moment, he breaks out of the hallucination - back into the superheroic world where the [[Big Bad]] of the story had been forcing him to hallucinate. He said later that he knew the world he had been in wasn't real because it was all gray, with no sense of hope or wonder in it. (Of course, a cynical person might just say that he was unable to cope with the truth and retreated into his dream-world ... à la that much-referenced episode of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''.)
* A two-week storyline in ''[[FoxTrot]]'', parodying ''[[The Metamorphosis]]'', has Jason waking up one morning to find he's turned into a miniature version of his sister, Paige. Midway through the story, he [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this trope by saying he's figured out that he's dreaming, because he thinks that if this were real, [[The X-Files|Mulder and Scully]] would've come to investigate. (Dream-Peter then points out that Mulder and Scully [[This Is Reality|are TV characters]] -- and therefore [[Comically Missing the Point|only investigate incidents appropriate for primetime shows]]. Turning into a teenage girl is too horrific.)▼
* ''[[The Sandman]]''. Quite a bit of it really is just a dream, but that doesn't make it any less real. "I give you - [[wikipedia:List of characters in The Sandman#Alex Burgess|eternal waking]]..." Brrrrr...
* Two ''[[Spawn]]'' issues written by [[Neil Gaiman]] and [[Grant Morrison]] has Spawn dying accidentally after a fight with an angel warrior, and goes to a special level of Hell, where he finds all [[Marvel Comics]] and [[DC Comics]] superheroes imprisoned, and with help of [[Lawyer-Friendly Cameo|Superman]], who gave him his power, he sets them all free. Next issue happens back on Earth, with the narrator saying "Let's come back to reality. Spawn has a bad dream last days."
* From ''[[Bloom County]]'', after a long-awaited wedding, Opus is knocked out when his nose collided with Lola's when they kiss. While unconscious, Opus dreams about Lola leaving him twenty years later with twenty-three tube-grown kids.<br />At another point, Opus ends up wandering lost in the desert. Suddenly, he's back home in Bloom County. He announces how happy he is it was all just a dream. Milo then says "No. ''This'' is the dream. You're still in the desert." And sure enough..▼
* ''[[Little Nemo|Little Nemo in Slumberland]]'' ends every strip with Nemo waking up in bed. There were continuous storylines despite this. And when Nemo gets into trouble it does not feel as safe as a dream. No no no.▼
* ''[[Drabble]]'' pulled this twice, then subverted it ''hilariously''. The first time, Ralph dreams that his job as a mall cop is more like [[Batman]]. The second time, Norman goes to a piercing salon with Wendy and ends up with multiple ear, nose, and other rings. The third time, Norman and Wendy run off to Vegas and get married on a dare. Norman is about to invoke this trope when the next panel reveals the cartoonist has already used up his chances to use it. The plot gets resolved another way.▼
* Sometimes used as a [[Cold Opening]] in ''[[Quantum and Woody]]''. For example, issue #5 starts with Woody, Quantum, and Amy working together as a tightly-coordinated counter-terrorism team to stop a criminal called Othello. In reality, it's a dream induced after Quantum was accidentally blasted off of a building in the previous issue.
* A story of ''[[The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers]]'' from the early '70s has the trio staging a violent assault on a prison to free an incarcerated friend. Fat Freddy ends up cut off and bludgeoned to death by a horde of cops - but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating him with a rolled-up newspaper for eating a whole batch of hash cookies. Then, some seven years later, an extended story where they take a cross-country trip in a vintage RV ends in a full-scale riot at a Greenwich Village Halloween parade - but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating Freddy with a rolled-up newspaper...implying ''everything'' that happened between the two stories was Fat Freddy dreaming!
* There's a ''[[The Punisher|Punisher]]'' story where Frank goes back in time to the 30s thanks to Reed Richards and Nick Fury. He quickly infiltrates [[Al Capone]]'s gang and kills every last mobster in Chicago along with Al, the idea being that by breaking the mafia's hold early on, there'll be no gang shooting in Central Park in the late twentieth century, saving Frank's family and preventing his [[Start of Darkness]]. Then he wakes up.
== Fan Works ==
* In ''[[
** Forget about that, {{spoiler|the
* [[Inverted Trope]] in ''[[Kyon: Big Damn Hero]]'', where Kanae was having a recurrent dream with parts... off. It was until after {{spoiler|she kissed Kyon}} that she realized she was awake.
* In a parody fanfiction about ''[[Dragon Ball GT]]'', right after Goku's [[Heroic BSOD]] and [[Big No]] when learning that {{spoiler|after his 100 years with Shenron, his family and friends are dead.}}, we return to {{spoiler|Goku and Chichi's bedroom and he explains to her the ''entire events of GT'' as a nightmare!!}} Then, it becomes a [[Dream Within a Dream]] as Goku has a run in with {{spoiler|''[[
* The ''[[Star Trek:
* ''[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/545/Equestria Equestria]'' is a ''[[My Little Pony:
* [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6515261/7/Dalton Chapter 7] of ''[[Dalton]]'' starts out like this.
* One "episode" of ''[[Calvin at Camp]]'' features Calvin falling asleep and dreaming that he is in an [[Affectionate Parody]] of [[Lost]]. The readers are aware the entire time that it is a dream.
== Film ==
* Some have suggested that the events of ''[[The Polar Express]]'' were all just a dream, though others feel that the presence of the bell from Santa's sleigh as a present for the Hero Boy signifies that they were really real.
* Poor poor ''[[An American Tail|Fievel Goes West]]'', written off as a dream Fievel had in the third ''An American Tail'' movie. Which is a headbanger [[Retcon]] as there was an entire TV series with the Wild West theme that aired prior to the third movie. What, was Fievel in a coma or something? The dream lasted a whole TV series!
* ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' is the most famous film example, of course, though there is a ''wee'' bit of room for alternate interpretation. It should be noted that in the book it is definite that Oz '''was''' real and Dorothy returns there several times in other books; Oz was changed to an elaborate dream in the film because producers [[Viewers are Morons|felt that the 1930s audience was too sophisticated to accept a straight on fantasy like that]].
* Two of Laurel and Hardy's short films used this example: ''The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case'' and ''Oliver the Eighth''.
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** Bonus points for {{spoiler|the film having run long enough to make you think it might be ending.}}
* Reality and dreams are blurred in ''[[The Science of Sleep]]''.
* ''Stay (1996)''
* Throughout ''[[Pan's Labyrinth|Pans Labyrinth]]'', there are strong suggestions that certain aspects of the plot may be All Just a Dream. [[Word of God]] [https://web.archive.org/web/20090228234339/http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008507.html debunks that possibility], though that same god also explicitly tells you not to listen to him so in the end it looks like nobody's happy.
* In ''[[The Shining]]'', it sometimes got difficult to tell what was real and what were projections of the family's minds. [https://web.archive.org/web/20110104151920/http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
* Subverted in ''[[The Butterfly Effect]]''. At one point near the end of the film it looks like the story is gonna go out with a [[Twist Ending]]. As Evan's doctor explains that there are no journals, he asserts that everything that we've apparantly seen so far is a delusion that Evan created to cope with the guilt of killing Kayleigh, describing alternate universes with colleges, prisons, and paraplegia. Then it turns out that the mental time travel ''was'' real when Evan goes back one last time.
* ''[[The Descent (film)|The Descent]]''. Did the crawlers exist, or was Sarah unable to handle the claustrophobia and stress of the already bad situation, causing her to imagine them and kill all her friends? All that can actually be said is that there was dreaming going on; where it started or ended is never made clear. (Their existence is confirmed in the sequel.)
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* Ripley's nightmare of having an alien rip out of her chest near the beginning of ''[[Alien (franchise)|Aliens]]''. This is especially misleading since some of the marketing material played-up that the aliens would be attacking Earth... well, a space station around Earth... well, a dream sequence on a space station near a planet which could maybe possibly be Earth.
* In ''[[Hackers]]'', the two main characters (played by Jonny Lee Miller and [[Angelina Jolie]]) each have erotic dreams about the other at the same time.
* In ''[[Brazil (film)|Brazil]]'', a dystopian sci-fi film, {{spoiler|the entire, increasingly weird, ending of the film is revealed to be a fantasy in the mind of protagonist to "escape" from being [[Cold-Blooded Torture|tortured]] in a scene near the end of the film.}}
** This was edited out in the "Love Conquers All" edition; the "reveal" is removed, moving the events from fantasy to reality.
* Played very non-comedically in ''Happiness'', where one of the characters apparently goes on a rampage through his neighbourhood with a machine gun, only to wake up. He's a... troubled guy. {{spoiler|We later find out he's a paedophile.}}
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* ''[[The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari]]'' gives a [[Unreliable Narrator|particularly]] [[Through the Eyes of Madness|jarring]] [[Cuckoos Nest|version]]. Notably this was because of the [[Executive Meddling]], which the creators despised, as the whole point was to show an evil, monstrous authority figure, but the censors of Weimar's Germany didn't like it. They apparently even made an ''extra'' twist for an alternative version where it ''wasn't'' dream after all, despite of all the attempts to convince otherwise.
* In ''[[Mirror Mask]]'', (boy, [[Neil Gaiman]] sure loves dreams) Helena figures out pretty early on that the entire [[Magical Land]] is all a dream, populated by [[And You Were There|characters based on people she knows]]. However, the possibility is certainly left open that it isn't ''just'' a dream, when she meets someone who was in her dream, but she'd never met before in her day-to-day life.
* Happily subverted in ''[[The Forbidden Kingdom]]''. He's back in his own world, but has mysteriously gained self-confidence, and is a better fighter. Was it all a dream?... oh, wait, {{spoiler|the old shop-keeper is actually the now-immortal [[Jackie Chan]] character!}}
* ''[[Time Bandits]]'' seems to use this at first, with Kevin returning from being enveloped by smoke from one of the remnants of Evil by seemingly waking up in his room during a house fire... but it doesn't just settle for an [[Or Was It a Dream?]] and goes for a full-on subversion. {{spoiler|The film ends with Kevin finding the photos he took on his journey, and discovering that the fire was started by the final fragment of Evil getting lodged in the toaster oven -- which his parents promptly touch despite his warning and ''explode''. Also, it's implied that the fireman that rescued him actually ''is'' King Agamemnon, not just another case of the film using the same actors for multiple characters.}}
* One of the few relatively certain things about the [[Mind Screw|plot]] of ''[[Mulholland Drive]]'' is that it includes some element of this. One interpretation is the whole movie is a sinister creeping inversion: it is a dream where the ''dream gradually wakes up'' and walks away, rendering the original dreamer fictional.
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* Open to interpretation in ''[[Click]]''. Just as the main character {{spoiler|is about to die, he wakes up at the Bed, Bath, and Beyond he laid down for a short while at the beginning}}. However, {{spoiler|Morty and the magical remote turn out to be real. It could be that this was more of his imagination. Given the prevalence of time travel in this film, it could also be that Morty simply reversed time to the exact point at which he laid down in the bed.}}
* Tacked on at the end of 2002 Hong Kong flick ''Undiscovered Tomb''.
* ''[[The Matrix]]''. The entire world the film starts in is
** Some have suggested that even Zion is just another level of the Matrix, satisfying many beyond the official interpretation as it explains the liberties taken in the third movie.
* ''[[Labyrinth]]''. Invoked and then subverted: Sarah, after hours of weirdness, finds herself in a place that looks exactly like her room. She cries out in delight, jumps on the bed and wraps the pillow around her head... then looks up in wonder and realizes the whole thing was just a big dream! She goes to open the door to the hallway... and is greeted by a goblin, while the other side of the door is a junk heap at night-time.
* At the ending of ''[[Jacob's Ladder|Jacobs Ladder]]'', we discover that {{spoiler|the lead character is experiencing the entire events of the movie as a hallucination as he lies on a cot dying in a military action.}}
* Some have argued that an alternate interpretation of ''[[The Sixth Sense]]'' is that the entire movie is a dream, from the time of the shooting to the end where we "rewind" back to the shooting, and thus the little boy who "sees dead people" doesn't even exist.
* Each sequence of ''[[Film/Living In Oblivion|Living In Oblivion]]'' is revealed to be
* ''Lunatics: A Love Story'' uses a lot of this for humor. "''[[Crowning Moment of Funny|You're having a nervous meltdown!]]''"
* Subverted and then unsubverted in ''The 13th Floor''.
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* ''[[The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T]]'', with one or two hints that it wasn't.
* ''[[I Married an Angel]]''
* Happens three times in ''13 Seconds''. First, the main character is attacked by demons, and wakes up in bed. Later, a demon [[Groin Attack|grabs his groin]] and drags him under the bed; he wakes up again. As for the third time,
* Everything but the last couple of minutes in ''Nightmare City'' is in the main character's dream, and the movie ends with the beginning of his dream playing out in real life, with an end card reading "The nightmare becomes reality..."
* At the end of the Italian Horror movie ''Shadow'', we learn that {{spoiler|the main character has never left Iraq, and was under anesthesia as the camp doctor (the evil creature in the dream) and nurse (who is the girl he met in the dream) worked on him. He survives, but loses his legs and his left eye. The two hicks who the evil creature tortured and killed are revealed to be fellow wounded soldiers who died of their wounds}}.
* The first twenty minutes of the ''[[Halloween (film)|Halloween]] II'' remake ends up being nothing more than a nightmare that the main character was having.
* The last third of ''[[Repo Men]]'' - {{spoiler|in the last two minutes or so, it's revealed that Remy suffered brain damage from getting hit in the face by a hook, and Jake then had Remy hooked up to the M5 Neural Net to live the rest of his life in happiness - everything that happens between the hook to the face and the reveal is part of the happy illusion Remy is living because of the neural net.}}
*
== Literature ==
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* Towards the end, [[Neil Gaiman]]'s ''[[Coraline (novel)|Coraline]]'' very briefly appears to pull this... however, it's almost instantly subverted; not only was it not just a dream, but Coraline's adventure isn't quite over, after all.
* In ''The Queen and I'' by Sue Townsend, the election of the British People's Republican Party and subsequent banishing of the Royal family to a council estate turns out to be an election night nightmare by the Queen.
* [[Subverted Trope]] in the original ''[[Chronicles of Thomas Covenant]]''; Covenant ''starts out'' by believing that everything happening to him is a dream, and is then made to doubt this over the course of the trilogy. The question is deliberately left unresolved, although {{spoiler|the Creator's intervention to save Covenant's life at the end}} strongly implies that the Land was real, as do the passages from the points of view of Hile Troy and Lord Mhoram.
* [[Subverted Trope]] in ''[[Maximum Ride]]''. A group of scientists unsuccessfully attempt to convince the protagonist that the events of the entire past three books were all a dream.
* In the short story ''An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'', the protagonist (a [[The American Civil War|Confederate]] sympathizer) makes a daring escape from inevitable death by hanging when the rope breaks! He evades pursuit from Union soldiers, runs 30-odd miles to his home, finally embraces his beloved family -- {{spoiler|and the story ends abruptly when his neck snaps. It wasn't technically a dream because he wasn't asleep, but it is an excellent example of a [[Dying Dream]] nonetheless}}.
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** Speaking of Dickens, this is also one interpretation of ''[[A Christmas Carol]],'' though Scrooge doesn't think so.
* An in-story example occurs in one of the ''Henry Huggins'' books where Henry has to play the lead in the school Christmas program about a boy going to the North Pole to visit Santa. He hates the role- a six-year-old boy, the costume- footy pajamas, and the ending- where it turns out he dreamed the whole thing. [[Beverly Cleary]] didn't seem to like this trope, either.
* [[G. K.
* [[Mark Twain]]'s ''[[The Mysterious Stranger]]'' [[Nietzsche Wannabe|plays with this]].
* Chris van Allsburg's ''Just a Dream'', obviously. Although whether or not the author intended the dreams to be actual premonitions of potential futures is debatable.
* In [[C. S. Lewis|CS Lewis]]' ''[[The Great Divorce]]'', the narrator meets with [[George MacDonald]]
* In [[Julio Cortazar]]'s "La noche boca arriba", this trope is played with. The narrative switches between two characters, one of which is a boy in a hospital, and the other a man about to be sacrificed by Aztecs. {{spoiler|The ending reveals that the boy's life is actually a dream of the man, who keeps falling unconscious.}}
* Happens in-story in ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya|The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya]]''. They're making a movie, and events have unfolded that require the title character to in some way admit that the film is fictional. Koizumi suggests to end the movie with an All Just a Dream ending, thus forcing Haruhi to admit that the movie is impossible.
* Deliberately invoked in [[John Varley]]'s ''Steel Beach'' and Justin Lieber's ''Beyond Rejection'' when both protagonists discover they've been subjected to artificially induced "All Just A Dream" scenarios for therapeutic purposes. Lieber's protagonist is grateful for the intervention but Varley's is not.
* [[Subverted Trope]] in the ''[[Discworld]]'' story ''The Wee Free Men'':
{{quote|
It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story.'' }}
* ''[[Godel Escher Bach]]'' has a dialogue in which the protagonists win a raffle. The prize is a "Subjunc-TV", which has the ability to show them what would happen under various hypothetical circumstances. In the end, it turns out that they never actually won the raffle; the entire dialogue was itself a Subjunc-TV broadcast of what would have happened if they had.
* Chapter 39 of ''[[Atlanta Nights]]'' reveals that the rest of the book was all a dream, and the main character is on death row. Please note that there are 41 chapters, and the last two [[Anachronic Order|follow the same plotline as]] [[Plot Hole|the first 38 chapters]].
* ''[[The Pilgrim's Progress|The Pilgrims Progress]]'' by John Bunyan subverts this: The very first sentence is: "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream." That this is All Just a Dream is reinforced throughout, to the very last sentence, which is: "So I awoke, and behold it was a dream." The book was written in 1675. Dream frames were a common medieval trope to explain that "I made this all up."
* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s ''[[The Tower of the Elephant]]'', [[Conan the Barbarian]] briefly wonders about this:
{{quote|
* In book four of ''Tales from the House of Bunnicula'', Howie attempts to end the story this way after he inadvertently writes the protagonists into a situation they can't get out of. However, Harold tells Howie that ending the story like that is a cop-out, and tells him to try again. So Howie lets Delilah write the final chapter, ending the story on a much happier note.
* Reversed in ''The Lathe Of Heaven''. George Orr has “effective” dreams, meaning, when he wakes up, something that was in his dream is now part of reality. His psychiatrist tries to use this ability to improve life on earth, but when he suggests that George dream of an end to international strife, George dreams of an alien invasion!
* In ''[[Metro 2033]]'', Artyom is put on trial to be hanged by the Fourth Reich {{spoiler|but is saved by Hunter, when the latter literally ''massacres everyone in the station''}}. Aaand then Artyom wakes up only to find himself {{spoiler|leaning against a door in one of the Fourth Reich's cells}}.
* ''[[An Elegy for the Still-living]]'' implies that this is the case without ever openly stating it, and the ending is left rather open ended on the subject.
* Justified in Frederick Pohl's short story "The Hated", in which the protagonist plots to murder a former co-worker, but before he can, he's awakened by a psychiatrist from an induced dream. {{spoiler|The protagonist and his co-workers were astronauts on a lengthy voyage during which they developed a profound, murderous hatred for each other. The psychiatrist was working with all of them to enable them to control their rage. It's made clear at the end that at least in the protagonist's case, it wasn't working.}}
* In ''[[Goosebumps]]'', this is played with in the TV ending to "Awesome Ants". The protagonist’s experience turns suspiciously nightmarish as the town is suddenly abandoned, there is a storm outside, and the ants are growing to enormous proportions. Just before he gets killed by one, he wakes up at home and all seems fine. Then he gradually remembers the reality of the situation: in the real world ants are actually mountain-sized, and keep humans secluded in the human equivalent of ant farms and force them to live on small pellets of blue food. In the book the ants just grew that big rather than always having been so.
** For a true [[Mind Screw]], count how many times this happens in "I Live In Your Basement".
* [[Alexander Pushkin]]'s short story ''The Undertaker'' is an [[Older Than Radio]] example.
* [[The Box of Delights]] ends this way. The action supposedly takes place during Kay Harker's school holidays, but at the end he wakes up still on the train.
== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[The Dick Van Dyke Show
* ''[[The X-Files]]'' is fond of doing this.
** In one episode, Mulder and Scully have [[Lotus Eater Machine|fungus-inspired hallucinations]].
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** Another One involves Al taking a job as a janitor for a Private Eye only to become one himself and solve a diamond case, getting a big fat check as reward. Of course, [[Status Quo Is God]] and it was just a dream of his (this one was the season-erasing resolution).
** Another has Al making a deal with the Devil (Robert Englund) to lead a football team to the Super Bowl. He gets his wish but is killed in a tackle and taken to Hell where his family and friends also end up (as a result of improbable accidents after his death, oddly enough). After three hundred years in Hell, Al can't take it anymore and challenges the Devil to a football match. The Devil picks some of the world's worst historical figures for his team. Al manages to win (even though given an offer to go back with beautiful women and loads of cash which, in a rare moment selflessness, he passes up). Al then wakes up back where he was before the Devil appeared and it appears to be a dream to him... least until he pulls out some Red Hots candy the Devil had given him.
* Sent up by Robert Rankin in ''[[Far
* The last episode of ''[[St. Elsewhere]]'' reveals that the entire series has taken place in the mind of an autistic child. If you accept that crossovers between shows imply that they occupy the same fictional universe, an argument can be made that no fewer than [https://web.archive.org/web/20060824200044/http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html 282 shows] were figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination, including ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''. The aforementioned site seems to have a very low threshold for calling a show a cross-over, however; it includes minor [[Shout-Out
* This trope's application in the ''[[Newhart]]'' episode "The Last Newhart" resulted in what is widely considered one of the best series [[Grand Finale|finales]], ever. In the end it was revealed that the entire show was a nightmare of Robert Hartley, the star of ''[[The Bob Newhart Show]]'', also played by Bob Newhart. Interestingly, ''[[The Bob Newhart Show]]'' received a crossover from ''[[St. Elsewhere]]'', which combined with the previous entry could make ''[[Newhart]]'' a [[Dream Within a Dream]].
** If that's true, explain {{spoiler|the parody at the end of his 1995 episode of ''[[Saturday Night Live]]''.}} Was that a [[Dream Within a Dream]], too?
* In season 4 of ''[[Angel]]'', an entire episode takes places in Angel's head, in which {{spoiler|the events of the dream actually solve all the problems of the season's arc, right down to a soapy heroic happy ending.}} When the episode reveals to the viewers that it was all "just a dream", {{spoiler|it's when the dream climaxes with Angel experiencing a moment of perfect happiness, causing him to lose his soul, waking up as the evil Angelus.}}
* The second failed resurrection of ''Crossroads'',<ref>Buried, as it were, at the crossroads.</ref>
** The closing scenes show a number of characters who made their debut in the first resurrection also working in the supermarket... except the character having the dream didn't appear until the second resurrection. (Maybe the first resurrection was one of the other workers' dreams, explaining why [[Aborted Arc|none of the cliffhangers were resolved]]?) And just as you're getting your head around that, a customer at the supermarket, who looks like another character who's been around since the first resurrection, is identified as "Tracey from ''Crossroads''" by the staff. Um... huh?
* The season 1 finale of ''[[Reno 911!]]'' ended on a [[Cliff Hanger]], which was revealed in the season 2 premiere to be a dream, in what turned out to be a [[Dream Within a Dream|dream sequence itself]] Dangle wakes up from the dream, to discover himself in bed with Kenny Rogers. This turns out to be a dream Garcia is having in the meeting room at the sheriff's station.
* ''[[The Cosby Show]]'' did a number of these, normally precipitated by Cliff's consumption of a large sandwich near bedtime.
* ''[[Smallville]]'': The episode "Slumber" both uses and subverts this trope, as a girl with dream-walking powers can only contacts Clark through dreams. Although occurrences in the episode were fantasy, the dreams do serve a purpose to the plot.
** Used as a bit of a fake-out in season 6's {{spoiler|Lana/Lex wedding. The episode begins with a ridiculously melodramatic wedding/murder/suicide scene, which is immediately revealed to be a dream. The rest of the episode tells the story out of order chronologically, with many of the scenes using the same lurid gothic style, faking the viewers out into thinking these scenes are ''also'' just a dream; unfortunately, ''none'' of them are. Instead, when the episode is over and no-one wakes up from the terrible dream, the viewer is left with the slow, horrible realization that the gothic awfulness ''actually happened''.}}
* An episode of ''[[MacGyver]]'' in which the title character dreams of his [[Identical Grandson|lookalike ancestor]] ends with an [[Or Was It a Dream?]] moment when he woke to find he now possessed his ancestor's distinctive pocketknife.
* ''[[Happy Days]]'' somehow managed to [[Spin-Off]] ''[[Mork and Mindy]]'' from an All Just a Dream episode. Though [[That Was Not a Dream]] as shown by Mork's presence at the end of the episode, where he told his contact on Ork that he tricked "the human (Richie Cunningham)"
** The episode "They Call It Potsie Love" had
▲* ''[[The Dick Van Dyke Show|The Dick Van Dyke Show's]]'' classic ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' parody "It May Look Like a Walnut."
* British surreal comedy series ''[[The Brittas Empire]]'' concluded with the revelation that the entirety of the programme, all 53 episodes, had been a dream. The title character had fallen asleep while on the train to the interview for the job that he'd had throughout the series. The other people in the dream (apart from his wife, who was the same in the dream and in real life) were actually people on the train with him, and he projected them into the dream.
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' as a whole has the "All Just a Holodeck Simulation" version.
* ''[[Star Trek:
** Interestingly used when Chief O'Brien is arrested by aliens and serves out a 20-year prison sentence within a dream that lasts only hours. The rest of the episode shows him dealing with this experience and how it has changed him.
** "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Shadows and Symbols", where a science fiction writer in the 50's dreams about Deep Space Nine. It's also lampshaded in the dream when someone suggests making Benny's story turn out to be a dream to get around complaints about the hero being black. In fact, the producers toyed with the idea of making the entire series a figment of Benny Russel's imagination
** In "Inquisition", the investigator creates an elaborate holo-simulation that tries to trick Bashir into believing that he was a spy for the Dominion. Most of the episode occurs in the simulation
* Similarly, in an episode of ''[[Star Trek: The
** Unlike most of the examples on this page, this is usually considered one of the series' best episodes. Quite probably because we were shown Picard lying on the floor of the bridge dreaming from the start of the episode while the crew struggles to wake him up.
* A slight variation of this happens to Commander Riker in the ''[[Star Trek: The
* ''[[Star Trek:
{{quote|
'''Klingon:''' That was the ''naj'' -- the dream before dying. When we can't accept that we've died, we create the illusion of life to hold on to.
'''B'Elanna:''' ''(seeing the helmsman, Kortar)'' He slaughtered my friends!
'''Klingon:''' No. He slaughtered the dream. He dragged you from the illusion of life. This is where you belong. }}
{{quote|
* ''[[Life On Mars]]'' makes use of this, both as (seemingly) the circumstances of the main character (in a coma, dreaming the entire thing), and side instances where Sam wakes up in bed after being harangued by the [[Creepy Child|Evil Test Card Girl]]. Not to mention the fact that... {{spoiler|in the end Sam's adventures in the past turn out to be just a dream. One Sam ''commits suicide'' to get back to... if you believe that interpretation of the ending instead of [[Epileptic Trees|one of the dozens of others]].}}
** Something very similar occurs in {{spoiler|''[[Ashes to Ashes]]''}}.
** In the finale of the [[Life
* ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'': There's nearly always a quick way to tell that House is dreaming. If he limps, then it's sad reality. If he doesn't, then it's a dream or an hallucination.
** In Season One there's a scene where House told Vogler, whose whole role was making House miserable, that he had cancer and was going to die soon. The fact that Vogler calmly and gratefully accepted the news, even when House made a crack about jumbo-sized coffins, as well as the fact that House was walking without a limp, quickly revealed the scene to be a dream.
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** Another episode has House trying to kill a mosquito, but accidentally knocks off the valve to a propane tank and lights the stove. Cue explosion, cut to House waking up.
* ''[[The Sopranos]]'' has a lot of these as a way to get into Tony's head, although it was made apparent to the audience what they were.
* In the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' season 6 episode "[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Recap/S6
* The first episode of ''[[Terminator]]: [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' starts out this way. Just so you know. Also, in the second season episode "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep", Sarah is taken captive and interrogated by a man she had killed in an earlier episode. It is then revealed that this was in fact a dream, and that Sarah was admitted to a sleep clinic, because of her insomnia. She keeps having this dream, while she suspects something bad is going on at the sleep clinic. {{spoiler|Eventually, we find out the sleep clinic was in fact the dream, induced by the drugs given to her by the man who abducted her, for real - him having survived the earlier episode against the odds.}}
* In the ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' [https://web.archive.org/web/20121103034017/http://cycling.finial.com/stuff/mpcyclingtour.php "Cycling Tour" sketch], a bicyclist (Mr. Pither) ends up in a Soviet prison cell about to be executed. He is suddenly woken up by his mother and says "So, it was all a dream!" His mother says "No dear, this is the dream, you're still in the cell." He then wakes up for real, still in the cell.
* Likewise at the end of ''[[The Young Ones]]'' episode "Interesting" where Neil experiences something similar as he is about to be kicked in the head by skinheads.
* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''
** In TOS episode "Death Ship", an astronaut stranded on another planet dreams that he has returned to Earth and everything's all right. His commanding officer bodily enters his dream and literally drags him back to wakefulness. The [[Karmic Twist Ending]]? He and his commander are actually dead, and his dream was actually the afterlife he should have gone to.
** In another episode, "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3MfyuNspe4 Shadow Play]", a man on Death Row tells everyone they are all figments of his dream based on people from his life, and that when he's killed, he'll dream the same dream again, with everyone in different roles. As it turns out, {{spoiler|he's right}}.
** An even more sadistic episode -- "{{spoiler|The Midnight Sun}}"
* In ''[[Blackadder]]'' (3rd season, 2nd episode) Blackadder dreams that he overslept and Dr. Johnson is arriving, whose dictionary has been burned. Then, Dr. Johnson suddenly confesses that he never liked the dictionary anyways, then things get really surreal... and then he really wakes up. Of course, he has overslept, the book is still burned, and Dr. Johnson is arriving.
* In one episode of ''[[Lost]]'', Locke causes Boone to hallucinate that his step-sister/{{spoiler|lover}} is being mutilated and killed by ''smearing goop on his head''. Allegedly to teach Boone a lesson.
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** In ''Los Amores...'', which was a comedic soap that swung between the [[Affectionate Parody]] and the [[Deconstruction]], the whole thing was played for laughs, with the ghost characters of the people who died during the story lampshading the [[Twist Ending]] and openly decrying it in a full rupture of the [[Fourth Wall]]. However, the series gives not only a whole chapter after the reveal to close the few loose plots and point out the parallelisms between the "dream story" and the "real life", but also gives a happy ending for the heroine and the story: maybe her life isn't as exciting as it was in her "dream", but she is now truly happy with her son and her beloved husband.
** In contrast, in ''Pecados Ajenos'' (who was ''non''-comedic and pretty gloomy for a traditional soap) not content with using this trope to reset the whole story, also used the reset to put the heroine in a worse condition than the one she began with. It also [[Karma Houdini|left unpunished some of the worst villains of the story]] (a big no-no in traditional Hispanic soaps), and leaves the unsavory feeling that all the grisly, tragic and creepy things that happened during the soap [[Groundhog Day Loop|are going to happen in the same way]]. Naturally, none of the viewers were happy with this.
* Or US [[Soap Opera
* Used rather drastically on ''[[Seinfeld]]'' when, after Kramer persuades him to get an illegal cable hookup, Jerry dreams that he is graphically gunned down by the FBI. Then he wakes up and discovers the plane he's on is about to crash, which is real.
{{quote|
* A ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' Digital Short parodied this. [[
* Also done on ''[[Mad TV]]''. It begins with the children of an elderly couple shocked by their parents' dirty dancing and ends with Stephnie Weir waking up from a dream "about a skit that has no ending".
* In ''[[Hannah Montana]]'' Jackson and Lilly end up dating after Miley tries to sabotage it. At the very end, despite it being a fairly normal story line and not all that much changing, it still turns out to be a dream.
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* The Spanish comedy ''Los Serrano'' finished this way, with the main character waking up to discover the entire series has been all just a dream. Fans were not pleased.
** A critic saw it in a slightly different light: if all was just a dream, that means that the atrocious [[Boy Band]] that [[Spin-Off|spun off]] from the series never existed at all.
* A segment on ''[[The Daily Show]]'' featured [[Steve Carell]]'s greatest fears (including [[Stephen Colbert]] [[Hilarious in Hindsight|taking over the show]]), leading to him waking up in
* ''[[The Wild Wild West (TV series)|The Wild Wild West]]'' episode "The Night of the Man-Eating House". Near the beginning, the characters discover and approach the title house. After a series of terrifying events, at the end the characters wake up and discover that the horrific events in the house were All Just a Nightmare. In the last scene, they find themselves [[Or Was It a Dream?|approaching the house again]].
* The [[Halloween Episode]] of ''[[Dark Angel]]'' started fairly normal, then became progressively more wacky until the end revealed it was All Just a Dream.
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** It also appears in another episode. When Frasier meets a supermodel-zoologist on an airplane, he comments that "This is usually the part where I wake up." Cut to Frasier opening his eyes - [[Subverted Trope|and the camera panning out for a]] [[Bedmate Reveal]].
* ''[[Roseanne]]'' essentially ended the series with a version of this.
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica
* At the end of the fourth season of ''[[Oz]]'', Tobias Beecher is up for parole. His lawyer enters the room and tells Beecher the Parole Board have approved his release. Everyone cheers as he returns to Em City, and a last minute assassination attempt by the Aryans is barely averted. Beecher is then shown walking out into the sunshine (showing the exterior of Oswald Prison for the first time) then playing with his daughter and new girlfriend in the park. Then he wakes up in his cell, and we flashback to his lawyer telling him that the Parole Board did ''not'' approve his release.
* One episode of the Charlie Drake [[Britcom]] ''The Worker'' has the title character experiencing an increasingly surreal series of events which culminate in his arrival at a TV studio, where it turns out that he's the leading actor in a TV [[Sitcom]] called ''The Worker''... Drake liked this plot so much he reused it in a later episode. A more conventional use of the trope occurs when the Worker gets hit on the head by a boomerang and has a surreal dream about Aborigines (possibly inspired by Drake's earlier comic song "My Boomerang Won't Come Back". Except this time it did).
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* In an episode of ''[[The 4400]]'', main character Tom dreams of a world where the 4400 abductions never happened. As it turns out at the end, {{spoiler|the "dream" was actually a power of one of the 4400, whose alternate reality powers allowed him to have an eight year relationship with her in an extremely short time, allowing them to know everything about each other despite only meeting once.}}
* ''[[Freddy's Nightmares|Freddys Nightmares]]'' overused this to the point of inverting it. All Just a Dream was so ridiculously commonplace that [[Twist Ending|the real twist]] was when an episode ''didn't'' turn out to be just some random character's dream/hallucination/daydream/DyingDream.
* Several ''[[Round the Twist]]'' episodes ended this way, as a result of being adapted into a continuing series from standalone stories. A particularly odd example is "Santa Claws," which not only has Pete falling asleep in the first scene, thus establishing
* Spoofed in the final episode of ''[[Ace of Cakes]]'' after building a giant cake replica of the BTTF Delorean the final scene has Duff noticing the lights in the flux capacitor are on the fritz so he opens it up and messes with the wires, next scene he wakes up at his job at a factory, turns to Geoff and tells him about the wierd dream he had 'where you and I worked at a cake shop making all sorts of wierd cakes"
* In ''[[Dollhouse]]'', the events in the Attic are
* "For Whom The Bell Trolls" in Season 1 of ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]''. It's left ambiguous as to whether "The Wild Wipeout" in ''[[Power Rangers Ninja Storm]]'' was this or not.
* ''[[Growing Pains]]'' had two episodes featuring this. In "This is Your Life" (season 3, episode 10), Ben is afraid to get a tonsillectomy. So, he sneaks out after getting anesthesia, only to find that he's been replaced, since he didn't get the procedure done. Luckily, this was an anesthesia induced dream. In "Meet the Seavers" (season 6, episode 21), Ben gets in trouble, and wishes that he lived in a TV show, because then he wouldn't be in trouble. He wakes up the next morning to find that he is Jeremy Miller on a show called ''Meet the Seavers''. This is a nightmare for him, as his family isn't a family anymore, and his house isn't his home. He wakes up to find that it was all just a dream.
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* The {{spoiler|''entire premise''}} of ''[[Toku|Choukou Senshi Changerion]]'' is this trope, which sparked a number of angry letters to Toei!
* The ''[[Boy Meets World]]'' episode where the characters get trapped in a slasher movie scenario is actually a dream Shawn has while sleeping through detention.
* The last episode, "Home", of ''[[The Legend of Dick and Dom]]'' starts with
* The series ''[[Awake (TV series)|Awake]]'' mixes this with [[Or Was It a Dream?]], and [[Alternate Reality|dual realities]] as its main premise.
* The pentultimate episode of ''[[Without a Trace]]'''s third season does this, as {{spoiler|Jack Malone}} is trying to deal with his demons.
* ''[[Kamen Rider Ryuki]]'''s Hyper Battle Video ends with this. For good reason too, since the Kamen Riders [[OOC Is Serious Business|were acting like a Sentai team]] and Ryuki wound up crossing over with [[Kamen Rider Agito]] to fight an [[Evil Twin]]. With those outlandish concepts, how could it ''not'' be a dream?
== Music ==
* Aaron Carter's upbeat song "That's How I Beat Shaq" relates the singer's adventures as he beats Shaquille O'Neal in a one-on-one basketball match, and ends with him waking up in bed. ("But if it was a dream, and it wasn't real... [[Or Was It a Dream?|how'd I get a jersey with the name O'Neal?]]")
* [http://www.mesozoicmind.com/ "Mesozoic Mind"], by the Charmers.
{{quote|
* [[Britney Spears]], "Baby One More Time". [[Fetish Fuel|What?]]
* Josh Turner, "Loretta Lynn's Lincoln" begins with the singer buying Loretta Lynn's Lincoln, ends with the singer being woken up from a nap in his pickup truck.
{{quote|
* [[REM]] , "Losing My Religion":
{{quote|
''I thought that I heard you sing
''I think I thought I saw you try
''But that was just a dream
''That was just a dream'' }}
* Porter Wagoner/Tom Jones's song "Green Green Grass of Home" has the subject of the song seemingly returning home after being away for a long time, enjoying his return, only to wake up in prison awaiting his execution, only to return home dead and buried there.
* The Billie Holiday version, and most subsequent English-language versions, of "[[Driven to Suicide|Gloomy]] [[Brown Note|Sunday]]".
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* Converge's music video for "Eagles Become Vultures" probably applies, though it's more of a waking fantasy than a dream.
* The video for [[Three Days Grace]]'s "Animal I Have Become".
* The music video for [[Evanescence]]'s "Bring Me To Life" suggests
* The music video for Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" ends with her on the bed next to someone whom we are to assume is her boyfriend.
** The same thing happens in "Hot & Cold", though that was a daydream.
* Airbourne's "Blonde, Bad and Beautiful" turns out to be this, in a video that was [[Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll|filled with alcohol, stripping and a bit of pole-dancing]].
* The [[Barenaked Ladies]]' video for "Shoebox" is a dream of the girl who sneaks out on her date.
* [[Dokken]]'s video for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee2YFJKYF8Y "Dream Warriors"] winds up being a nightmare that [[A Nightmare on Elm Street|Freddy Krueger]] is having.
* The video for Live's "Run To The Water" turns out to be Ed Kowalczyk's dream.
* The video for [[Miley Cyrus]]' "Start All Over" is established as being a dream in the very beginning; it starts with her going to sleep and waking up in the dream world, and ends with her going to sleep in the dream world and waking up in the real world. [[Or Was It a Dream?|Then pictures she took while in the dream world start coming out of the printer.]]
* The video for [[Maroon 5]]'s "Makes Me Wonder" features this. With gratuitous [[Fan Service]]
== Oral Tradition, folklore, Myths and Legends ==
* Certain branches of Hindu philosophy hold that because truth is unchanging, and the world is constantly changing, then the world is not real. Hence, [[Real Life]] is just a sort of dream state.
▲== Newspaper Comics ==
▲* A two-week storyline in ''[[FoxTrot]]'', parodying ''[[The Metamorphosis]]'', has Jason waking up one morning to find he's turned into a miniature version of his sister, Paige. Midway through the story, he [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this trope by saying he's figured out that he's dreaming, because he thinks that if this were real, [[The X-Files|Mulder and Scully]] would've come to investigate. (Dream-Peter then points out that Mulder and Scully [[This Is Reality|are TV characters]]
▲* From ''[[Bloom County]]'', after a long-awaited wedding, Opus is knocked out when his nose collided with Lola's when they kiss. While unconscious, Opus dreams about Lola leaving him twenty years later with twenty-three tube-grown kids.
▲* ''[[Little Nemo|Little Nemo in Slumberland]]'' ends every strip with Nemo waking up in bed. There were continuous storylines despite this. And when Nemo gets into trouble it does not feel as safe as a dream. No no no.
▲* ''[[Drabble (comics)|Drabble]]'' pulled this twice, then subverted it ''hilariously''. The first time, Ralph dreams that his job as a mall cop is more like [[Batman]]. The second time, Norman goes to a piercing salon with Wendy and ends up with multiple ear, nose, and other rings. The third time, Norman and Wendy run off to Vegas and get married on a dare. Norman is about to invoke this trope when the next panel reveals the cartoonist has already used up his chances to use it. The plot gets resolved another way.
== Puppet Shows ==
* ''[[Captain Scarlet]]'' has an episode where The Mysterons actually come to Cloudbase to attack it, leading to Captain Scarlet's death and the destruction of Cloudbase. We then find out this was all a dream one of the Angels was having after she'd been shot down over the desert earlier in the episode. When repackaged in a [[Compilation Movie]] for the American market, the episode ended up with the [[Reset Button]] treatment.
** Gerry Anderson is all over this one (he was once quoted as saying "I wish somebody would make a film of my dreams"). There are at least two episodes of ''[[Stingray (1985 TV series)|Stingray]]'', one of ''
== Radio ==
* There's an episode of ''[[Adventures in Odyssey]]'' in which one of the children characters goes on an adventure in the Imagination Station (a virtual reality machine) that seems to be the same story over and over again, just set in different genres. At the end of the episode it's revealed the character is actually in a coma, reliving the events that put him in a coma, with the "bad guy" being Death coming for him and the friendly helper in his dream actually being a guardian angel trying to prevent an early death for him.
* Comedian Emo Phillips {{spoiler|inverts this trope when he}} talks about a dream he had. He describes a long series of really bizarre, Emo-Phillipian events, that ends with him getting knocked unconscious. "And that's when I had my dream...."
== Tabletop Games: [[Trading Card Games]] ==▼
▲== Stand-Up Comedy ==
▲* Comedian Emo Phillips {{spoiler|inverts this trope when he}} talks about a dream he had. He describes a long series of really bizarre, Emo-Phillipian events, that ends with him getting knocked unconscious. "And that's when I had my dream...."
▲== [[Trading Card Games]] ==
* ''Hecatomb'' had a literal "It Was Only A Dream" card which can eliminate practically any card your opponent has out, essentially making them have never happened.
== Theater ==
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* In ''[[Avenue Q]]'', Rod overhears Nicky talking in his sleep, but at the end of the song "Fantasies come true" we find out that ''Rod'' was talking in his sleep.
* Shakespeare played with this. Most of the main characters in ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream|A Midsummer Nights Dream]]'' believe this to be the case (or they just decide to pretend it is). Then, in the final lines, Puck advises the ''audience'' to do the same if they disliked the play.
{{quote|
''Think but this, and all is mended,
''That you have but slumber'd here
''While these visions did appear.
''And this weak and idle theme,
''No more yielding but a dream. }}
* Alan Ayckbourn's 1985 play {{spoiler|''Woman in Mind''. The entire play. From start to finish. Really.}}
== Video Games ==
* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Link's
** ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass|Phantom Hourglass]]'' '''looks''' like it pulls this in the ending
* In ''[[Super Mario Bros. 2]]'', upon completing the game, the characters celebrate... and then we see that Mario has been dreaming the entire game. Seems hokey today, but at the time (1988) having ANY sort of twist ending in a game was pretty revolutionary. Most of the enemies themselves and other elements do exist in the ''Mario'' universe, though, indicating that the dream is based on what the titular character has seen through his life. Wart was most likely an actual creation from Mario's imagination, though.
* The ending of ''The Magical Quest'' reveals that [[Mickey Mouse]] has been dreaming the entire adventure all along. Oddly enough one of the bosses in the sequel is a painting of Emperor Pete, the final boss from the first game, with music and all.
* ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'' {{spoiler|turns out to be the conclusion of a three-game long bedtime story being told to a kid by his grandpa about "[[Meaningful Name|The Shepard]] that saved the galaxy," though this doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen, just that it [[Multiple Endings|might not have happened the way he said]].}} Interesting note: {{spoiler|If Shepard chose the "synthesis" option and merged organic and synthetic life, thus ending the cycle, the pair have slightly more robotic tones to their voice.}}
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** Ditto for ''Shattered Memories'', where {{spoiler|the plot is just a fantasy conjured up by Harry's daughter, and Harry died in a car accident 18 years earlier.}}
* Even ''[[Samurai Warriors]] 2'' does this. At the beginning of Nagamasa Azai's last stage in his story mode, the Battle of Kanegasaki, the story up to that point is revealed to be a dream he was having right before the battle. The entire thing being brought on due to how torn he was between helping his friends, the Asakura, and potentially betraying Oichi's love by attacking her brother, Nobunaga. Of course most of 'final chapters' of story mode are events that never happened due to the historical character dying, captured, or otherwise defeated. Or are nostalgic "best times" events that happen earlier in the chronology. This same game also features an entire sequence in Magoichi Sakai''s story mode in which he 'dreams' (or Fuma's ninja trickery) of bandits and chaos overwhelming the country after Nabounaga Oda's death.
* ''[[Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People|Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People]]'' sort of pulls this in the final episode. Having slain Trogdor, whose very existence was causing the entire [[Homestar Runner]] world to fuse with the Videlectrix video game world, Strong Bad wakes up outside the ''Trogdor!'' arcade cabinet with everyone standing by him. He starts telling them about this wild dream he had [[And You Were There|pointing out how everyone standing there was part of it]]
* The whole point to ''[[Tsukihime|Kagetsu Tohya]]''. Shiki figures out more and more often than he's living in a dream right now where days repeat instantly. Yesterday is the same as today and today is the same as tomorrow. {{spoiler|Of course, everyone ''inside'' is actually apparently the same people he knows and even have their own versions of a nightmare ie. Dark Elesia for Ciel. Also, Len, who is making the dream. It's just a dream, but Shiki can't leave until Len dies (he doesn't want that) or he can make a contract with her so she doesn't feel the need to maintain the dream.}} In the original game, Shiki has dreams of himself killing people yet wakes up in the morning right where he was without having left his bed. Only the people he saw die are really dead. {{spoiler|Even worse, the one time he doesn't remember his "dream" he wakes up with his hands and arms absolutely covered with blood, because he really did go out and kill people that night.}}
** There's also the first [[Eroge]] scene in the original game, which turns out to be All Just A Wet Dream.
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* In ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]: Creature from the Krusty Krab'', {{spoiler|1=the entire story is found to be just a dream of SpongeBob's, [[Dream Within a Dream|then just a dream of Patrick's, and then just a dream of Plankton's]]}}, and it goes on and on after that. {{spoiler|Until it turns out it was just Gary dreaming. .}}
* Occasionally, this is the case in the 1999 [[PS 1]] game ''The Adventures of Alundra'' or just ''[[Alundra]]'' among fans. The twist, however, is that the dream is not the protagonist's. Instead, he enters other people's dreams and slay whatever monsters may be invading their dreams, trying to kill them. Most of the unnecessarily complicated dungeons are actually dreams. Stupid villagers not being able to dream of some puzzles that don't necessarily require the player to consult a walkthrough.
** And even crazier: Whatever amounts of money or items Alundra finds inside other people's dreams, he gets to keep when he leaves them.
* A common fan interpretation of ''[[Rule of Rose]]''; the events were real, but messed by the protagonist's subconsciousness: Jennifer was a young child, not a 19-year old teenager during the actual events, the events did not take place on a giant airship and the imps were just creepy dolls and doodles and/or other children wearing masks, not inhuman monsters. {{spoiler|Unfortunately the Stray Dog was real.}}
* In the Konami arcade game ''Devastators'', the entire events of the game were actually parts of a movie somebody was watching.
* The chapter
* The opening to ''[[Dragon Quest VI]]'' starts off as this... {{spoiler|until you learn that what happened in the Hero's dream actually happened, and the world the Hero awakens in is actually a [[Dream Land]].}}
* ''[[
* ''[[Fate/hollow ataraxia]]'' ...Maybe. What's dream and what is real can be difficult to separate.
* ''[[Corpse Party]]'' has this as one of its Wrong Ends. {{spoiler|It turns out to be a case of [[Or Was It a Dream?]] and [[Groundhog Day Loop]].}}
* Conversed in ''[[Escape From St. Mary's
* Happens in ''[[SNK Gals Fighters]]'' for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, specifically in [[Fatal Fury|Mai Shiranui's]] ending. Winning the tournament and the [[Plot Device|K' Talisman]], means somehow that she can now marry Andy, who appears just in time... {{spoiler|to "reveal" that he has been secretly a woman all of these years}}. Shocked, Mai [[Catapult Nightmare|awakes to reality]].
* In a rare example where this is actually a step ''up'' in continuity, part of the [[Continuity Reboot]] for ''[[Soul Series|SoulCalibur 6]]'' makes the events of the forgotten and previously non-canon spinoff ''[[SoulCalibur Legends]]'' into this. Iska, the main antagonist of ''Legends'', reappears in new story chapters added by the last update and serves as a secondary antagonist for a few characters'; one sequence of dialog in Nightmare's story describes one of the dreams that Soul Edge used to corrupt Siegfried into Nightmare which matches the plot of ''Legends''.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* This [
* As does [http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic_plus/series.php?view=archive&chapter=29025#110861 this] ''[[Narbonic]]'' strip.
* The brief [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=030707 "Magic Flap"] arc from ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' ends like this.
* ''[[The Perry Bible Fellowship]]'' sets this up, [http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF044-Falling_Dream.gif then subverts it].
* ''[[8-Bit Theater
* ''[[YU+ME: dream]]'' has a [[Wham! Episode]] (and [[Broken Base]] inducer) in the middle when this happens, leading to a [[Coming Out Story]] having a [[Genre Shift]]; instead of the usual dream revelation being at the end and nothing in the real world having changed, the dream is the turning point of the story and the main character is greatly affected by what happened. The comic was conceived after its author experienced this trope for real: she met a girl and fell in love, only to wake up after what felt like months of being with her.
* ''[[Silent Hill: Promise]]'' uses this in the beginning, before getting to the real horror.
* [http://explosm.net/comics/1590/ This] ''[[Cyanide
* ''[http://www.tru-lifeadventures.com TRU-Life Adventures]'' is currently suggesting everything that happened since the first time travel story has been Bob's dream.
* [http://dizzy.pestermom.com/?p=thcomic55 This] ''[[Touhou Nekokayou]]'' comic turns ''Concealed the Conclusion's'' All Just a Dream into a [[Mind Screw]], simply by switching the "all" and the "dream."
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* Grace of ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'', [http://egscomics.com/?date=2007-05-23 goes through her first day of highschool] then wakes up disappointed that it was a dream but still hopeful the experience would be close.
* This happens twice in ''[[My Milk Toof]]'' with the episode of "villainous ickle" who goes around breaking everything and when they go fishing they fall asleep and dream of catching a fish.
* [[Evil Diva (webcomic)|Evil Diva]]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20111117131934/http://www.evildivacomics.com/?p=282 Victorious and popular, as she isn't]. Apparently you should [[Be Careful What You Wish For]].
* Happens every year in [[Rhapsodies]] with [[Cloudcuckoolander|Kevin]] getting shanghaied into helping with Santa's Christmas rush. This always ends with him waking up... Though occasionally there's a few details lying around to make the audience wonder.
* In ''[[Nip and Tuck]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20120527073040/http://www.rhjunior.com/NT/00519.html hoping things turned out well.]
* In ''[[Minion Comics]]'', there's a [https://web.archive.org/web/20130122160601/http://www.meetmyminion.com/?p=921 short dream sequence] involving Dingus's fantasies about predators, aliens, and the holy grail.
* In [[Greg (webcomic)|Greg]], Greg dreams he's a swashbuckling slayer of beasts and a suave ladies man, too bad the reality is so different, [http://gregcomic.com/2012/02/23/world-of-gregcraft-page-14/ here].
* In ''[[L's Empire|Ls Empire]]'', the [[Zombie Apocalypse]] during the April Fools Day special was actually a movie directed by [[M. Night Shyamalan]].
== Web Original ==
* At the end of some cutscenes in ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Special Edition]]'', people are seen waking up. This has no bearing on gameplay whatsoever.
* More than once this has been used for ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'' characters, usually in imagining a rescue. However, on one occasion it was used to make it appear as if a particular character had died, only for it to be revealed that it had been a dream.
* Most of the second half of ''[[The Tale of the Exile|The Third Night]]'' takes places during Gaven's hallucinagen-fueled [[Mushroom Samba]]. [[
* [[The Nostalgia Critic]]'s review of ''[[Surf Ninjas]]'', in which every stupid scene (but one) was greeted with increasingly fervent cries of "Genius!", was eventually revealed to be a dream.
** The end of the review of ''[[Full House]]'' when the Olsen twins came [[He Knows Too Much|to silence him]] was revealed to be a dream. Then they showed up again, which was revealed to be a dream. And so on.
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* ''[[Project Million]]'' is revealed to be a variant of this; the events that we watched were just a video made by the people starring in it.
* Parodied in the ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' short "HREMAIL 2000". Homestar puts on a regular puppet show for Marzipan using his shoes, which "gets cancelled after the third season":
{{quote|
* ''[[Red vs. Blue]]'' has this in episode 28.5, "The Last Episode Ever". In it, Simmons comes back as a ghost, but is really [[Scooby Doo|Old Man Caboose]], Tucker and Doc are running away to get married and Lopez is speaking French. The end reveals the whole thing was a dream by Church...
{{quote|
'''Lopez:''' Oui, c'était un rêve horrible... OU ÉTAIT-IL?!? [Yes, it was a horrible dream... OR WAS IT?!?] }}
** This was also used for a non-canon alternate ending on the Season Five DVD, where Church had been knocked out instead of killed from Sheila's attack in episode eight and had dreamed up the other ninety-two episodes, except he forgot all about his green-armoured teammate, Jacobs.
** Another of the alternate endings did something very similar except, instead of being a dream, the whole series was an [[Xbox]] Live game played by the characters.
* ''[[The Onion]]'' episode [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qYL_KT06-U Today Now!: Save Money By Taking A Vacation Entirely In Your Mind] deals with using this trope to your advantage.
* An episode of [[Ranma ½: The Abridged Chronicles]] features Akane sleepwalking and causing chaos as she goes through several dreams. After waking her up, they discuss how ridiculous the episode was, until it turns out to be Ranma's dream.
* [[Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG]]
{{quote|
1007. That whole Expedition to the Barrier Peaks? [[Dream Sequence]]. }}
* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s "[http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/why-saved-by-bell-all-dream-conspiracy-theory/ Why 'Saved by the Bell' is All a Dream: A Conspiracy Theory]" explains why ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' has to be an escapist dream of a character in ''Good Morning, Miss Bliss'' (the pilot that was retooled into ''SBTB''), using clues from the [[Expository Theme Tune]].
== Western Animation ==
* Naturally, ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' has parodied this numerous times.
** In the season six episode entitled "Lisa's Rival", Lisa is competing against a new student, Allison, for the first chair saxophone position when she faints in the middle of it. After "regaining consciousness", she's told that Allison got the chair and Lisa screams. The screen then blacks out and she really wakes up... only to be told the exact same thing with the added disclaimer, "And believe me, this is not a dream!"
** In the episode after Mr. Burns is shot, Smithers wakes up in his apartment to find [[Shout-Out|Mr. Burns in the shower]], perfectly fine, and concludes with relief that it was all a dream. Burns then informs Smithers that they are the stars of a 60s detective show called ''Speedway Squad'', at which point Smithers wakes up again and realises, "Wait, ''that'' was all a dream!"
** Even the specific tendency of soap operas to rely on this trope is parodied. In one episode, Moe lands a role on [[Soap Within a Show|a soap called]] ''[[Soap Within a Show|It Never Ends]]'', only to stumble upon a future script in which his character is killed off. He angrily confronts the producer.
{{quote|
'''Moe:''' I thought dreams was on goldenrod.
'''Producer:''' No, goldenrod is for [[Adventures in Coma Land|coma fantasies]]! }}
** Happens in "Treehouse of Horror" episodes which are already [[A Day
* In the ''[[Little Lulu]]'' cartoon "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151675/ Musica-Lulu]", Lulu sneaks out to play baseball instead of practicing her violin, and when knocked out by a foul ball, she wakes up in a land of musical instruments, [[Kangaroo Court|who arrest, try and imprison her]] for her misdeed. When she breaks out of the jail, she is chased and terrorized by the musical instruments. It turns out to be a dream.
* ''[[Futurama]]''
** "The Sting": Fry dives in front of a space bee about to sting Leela, gets impaled and injected with venom, and dies. Leela who comes out of the incident with only a "boo-boo", tops, begins feeling horribly guilty for the loss of Fry, and slowly descends into insanity, going through one [[Dream Within a Dream]] after another. {{spoiler|At the climax, the walls are talking to her, bees are materializing out of nowhere, and Leela tries to steal Fry's corpse to remind herself that he's really dead. There's also a musical number in which the other characters serenade her with the song "Don't Worry, Be(e) Happy." It turns out it was all a coma-induced dream; Fry had come out of the incident relatively unscathed, save for the gaping hole in his chest, which was easily repaired by future-medicine, while Leela got all the venom from the bee and nearly died.}}
** In another episode, Bender is forced to get an upgrade to make him more compatible with Planet Express' advanced new robot. He breaks free and ends up on a deserted island populated by outdated robots, then returns to wage war on technology. {{spoiler|The whole storyline was actually an artificially induced [[Aesop]] caused by the upgrade, resulting in the following exchange:}}
{{quote|
'''Technician:''' ''(shrugging)'' Everyone experiences the upgrade a little differently.
'''Bender:''' Oof. If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure ''anything'' is real? Is is not possible, nay, ''probable'', that my entire life is just a figment of my or someone else's imagination?
'''Technician:''' No. Get out. }}
** In the first "Anthology of Interest" episode it is revealed at the end that the entire episode, consisting of three scenarios generated by the professor's What-If machine, was, in fact, a scenario generated by the professor's What-If machine. Strangely enough, the What-If machine seems to know things that no one else does, like the fact Fry not coming to the future would cause a universe-destroying paradox, because he is [[My Own Grampa|his own grandpa]]. And the second Anthology of Interest featured a segment that really ''was'' a dream, instead of a What-If, as the writers didn't wish to reveal Leela's true heritage at that point of the series. Also, the Professor eventually invents the "Finglonger" in real life. This all seems to imply that the What-Ifs are 'canonical hypotheticals' that would have actually happened that way if the setup was true, making them more [[For Want of a Nail]] than All Just a Dream.
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** In a season episode, Ed has a nightmare about Jonny. But then the episode ends with ''Jonny'' waking up in horror. So Ed had a dream that he was scared of Jonny, but then it's really Jonny having a dream that Ed had a dream that...he's scared of Jonny...uhm.
* ''[[South Park]]''
** First appeared in the episode "Flashbacks", which twisted the conventional [[Clip Show]] by having each clip end with a completely different situation from its original episode, ending every time with [[Running Gag|a reference to ice cream]] among other things. This was all [[Framing Device|framed]] with the kids telling stories while the bus lies on the edge of a cliff. At separate points, they flash back on a [[Happy Days|Fonzie]] stunt they witnessed (which never happened on the show) and an earlier moment in the framing device itself. When the bus finally falls into the chasm, it inexplictibly lands on a giant tub of ice cream. All of this, including an unrelated subplot surrounding Ms. Crabtree, were all part of a dream by Eric Cartman which ended with him eating beetles and ice cream once again being brought up, thus revealing that the entire episode was a dream within a dream conjured by Stan. ("Dude. That's a pretty fucked up dream." "Yeah, I must be having some real emotional problems.") After ''that'' was established, however, the episode returns one last time to Ms. Crabtree's subplot, where her love interest Marcus -- [[I Have Many Names|or was it Mitch?]]
** Subverted at the end of the "Imaginationland" series of episodes. Butters wakes up and starts telling his parents about the dream he had that he saved Imaginationland. His parents tell him that it really happened and they read all about it in the morning paper.
** Also subverted earlier on, in the first chapter. Kyle wakes up and assumes that the Muslim terrorist attack on Imaginationland and Butters being left there was all a crazy dream, but when he calls up Stan, he finds out that he had the exact same dream. Then Butters's parents come into Stan's house worrying about Butters. Finally, the Pentagon reports that our imagination was taken over by terrorists, complete with a videotape showing proof. [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|And Cartman still wants his balls sucked by Kyle.]]
** Also subverted in the season 3 episode "Spontaneous Combustion". Cartman was tied to a cross for a crucifixion re-enactment, but his friends forgot about him and left him up there. A couple of days later, Chef finds him and takes him off the cross. The following conversation is from the car ride home.
{{quote|
'''Cartman:''' What?
'''Chef:''' It'll really piss you off.
'''Cartman:''' What, tell me!
'''Chef:''' This is just a dream, you're still up on that cross.
'''Cartman:''' ''(he wakes up, still on the cross)'' Oh, dammit! }}
* An episode of ''[[Batman: The Animated Series|Batman the Animated Series]]'' has Bruce Wayne waking up in a world where he isn't Batman. He eventually realizes that it is a dream (because some people's dreams work in such a way that they can't read anything in a dream) and ends it by jumping off the clock tower. Apart from the reading issue, wish fulfillment dreams don't work on Batman; a world where Bruce Wayne is happy? His subconscious knows that's impossible.
** Another episode has Batgirl getting hit by Scarecrow's fear gas and hallucinating a scenario where [[Bad Future|she dies, and Gordon goes to war against Batman]]. The dream ends when Bane, who had just been electrocuted to near-death, uses his last breath to toss the Bat-signal at Batman and Gordon, knocking them both off the top of Police Headquarters.
* The ''[[Rugrats]]'' episode "Pickles Vs. Pickles" was about Drew dreaming about Angelica suing him for making her eat broccoli.
** The episode "In the Dreamtime" begins with Chuckie waking up from a dream, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91TKa2133vQ ending like this.] His father explains that there is nothing to fear as nothing can hurt you in a dream. In the next scene Chuckie explains his dream to the babies only for that to be revealed to be a dream. When he next talks to them, he decides that he is still in a dream. Yet when he gets hurt, he realizes it isn't a dream. Chaz then puts his son to bed leading to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNmINEsN6U the final scene of the episode.]
* Subverted in the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' cartoon ''Water, Water Every Hare''. At the end of the cartoon, [[Bugs Bunny]] wakes up in his bed and thinks the events of the cartoon were all just a dream. Then Gossamer, who Bugs had made small earlier, comes in on a boat his size and says, "Oh yeah? That's what you think!"
** Played straight in the early Merrie Melody ''Smile, Darn ya, Smile''.
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*** In a final twist, the boy's dog remarks, "In truth, I'm just another little boy having a dream."
** ''Scrap Happy Daffy'' (1943) is a cartoon-short-length dream [[Daffy Duck]] has that he's defending his scrap drive pile against Nazis and proceeds to throttle them with superhuman powers. Or was it a dream?
{{quote|
* Brutally subverted in ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'' When Billy Quizboy wakes from having a dream, he's all ready to launch into a [[And You Were There]] scene when he suddenly realizes the events from the dream were ''true'', screaming '''''you bastards!''''' while assaulting his so-called "friends."
** But played straight several times in the Christmas special episode.
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* The ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' episode "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted" revolves around Candace actually managing to bust Phineas and Ferb, resulting in them being sent to an extremely strict reform school where they are brainwashed. She soon realizes how much she misses them and, along with Jeremy, ventures to break them out. At the end of the escapade, it's revealed that it was a dream Candace was having. She discusses it with the family, which results in them guessing that Perry is a secret agent, causing government agents to bust in and take them away while Perry is told he'll have to be relocated... and ''this'' turns out to be [[Dream Within a Dream|just a bad dream that Perry is having]].
** The actual moment she realises what's going (the first time), is hilarious.
{{quote|
'''Jeremy''': That would explain the talking zebra.
'''Candace''': Oh, no, I see ''him'' [[Running Gag|all the time]]. }}
** Invoked and subverted in the [[Christmas Episode]]: Phineas [[Catapult Nightmare|sits up in bed]] and exclaims, "It was all a bad dream! [[Saving Christmas|Christmas isn't cancelled]] after all!"
* ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'' has an episode where Mrs. Puff goes to jail. At the end, it's revealed that it was all a dream, and Spongebob is going to jail. Except that was all a dream, and she's in the boat with a random person from prison. After that, she just gives up, and the episode ends.
* In the ''[[Invader Zim]]'' episode "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom", Dib receives supernatural powers from the alien race of the Meekrob, to help him stop Zim and the Irken invasion. {{spoiler|The episode portrays Dib's following life being a celebrated Hero and the most successful paranormal investigator in the world, until old age, where in a TV interview he confesses having tossed a muffin at Zim in the school cantine once, upon which the moderator pulls of a mask revealing Zim's face laughing at him. Dib wakes up in Zim's laboratory realizing all of this was just a dream, programmed and simulated by Zim.}}
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* One episode of ''[[Kim Possible]]'', "Rewriting History", repeatedly [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] the increasingly unlikely coincidence that [[Generation Xerox|all the cast's grandparents]] were involved in a plot at the start of the century, with a last minute solution that "seemed like something from a dream" - because that's what it all was. Which is sad, because [[Generation Xerox]] plot seemed pretty cool. Though, oddly, the episode did end with a rather absurd [[Generation Xerox]] being canon.
* ''[[Squidbillies]]'' plays with this trope in the first episode. It first portrays Rusty spending his childhood being [[Raised by Wolves|raised and repeatedly mauled by wolves]], and then blowing them up along with him when he just had enough. That was revealed to be all just a dream, and then shows him as a party-hardy drinker who goes to rock concerts. That is also just a dream, and then shows him still living with Early's sister Lil (which was before all the dreams), who calls him out on his lack of manhood. That, too, was just a dream. Rusty raping some small creature... that really happened.
* ''[[Eek!
** In "Eek Goes to the Hot Spot", while being chased by Sharky, Eek is run over by an oncoming truck and gets killed, and thus he mistakenly gets sent to hell (instead of heaven). There, Eek confronts [[The Devil Is a Loser|its ruler, Fido]], for a long time, who forces him [[Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished|to clean out an infinitely large litterbox for three seconds]]. Then Eek finishes this task, and happily goes to heaven (with two angels flying down and carrying him away), waving goodbye to Fido. But just then, [[Death Is Cheap|Eek wakes up from all this lying in the backyard]], and gets chased by Sharky once again.
* Lampshaded in an episode of ''[[Sheep in The Big City]]'' where two scenes turns out to be dream
* In the "Leave it to Munchy" story of ''[[PB and J Otter]]'', Munchy Beaver prevents all of Lake Hoohaw from being flooded, but it turns out to be just a dream. This becomes very obvious when the characters are shown freely swimming about, talking to each other and even doing the iconic "Noodle Dance" underwater without any special gear.
* In the episode "On the Run" of ''[[Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat]]'', the protagonist and her friend accidentally wondered into a town where cats are illegal by getting on a traveling puppet show cart. After various scary scenes that would've blown several fuses on the brain of toddler-aged viewers to which the show is targeted, the entire prior happenings are revealed to be a dream. The owner of the puppet show noticed them halfway through the journey and had turned around to return the protagonists to their own town.
* [[Once an Episode|Every single episode]] of the French animated short ''Ernest le vampire'' ends with the title vampire waking up from a [[Catapult Nightmare]].
* ''[[Danger Mouse]]'': In the episode "Danger Mouse Saves The World...Again," things kept getting worse until DM was stuck in a room full of bombs and
* The end of Disney [[Wartime Cartoon]] ''[[Der Fuehrer's Face]]''.
* This happens a couple of times on ''[[Pinky and The Brain]]'': first in a surreal episode where Brain creates numerous black-and-white duplicates of himself to form a Celtic dance troupe, and later in "You'll Never Eat Food Pellets in This Town Again," which portrays the two mice as actors playing in their own show, which then slides downhill due to [[Executive Meddling]]. (The latter, though, ends in an [[Or Was It a Dream?|Or Was It?]] moment.)
** Additionally, there was an ''[[Animaniacs]]'' segment where Brain dreams that he is the Rockefeller family baby, but the [[Delivery Stork]] mistakenly brings him to the Hip Hippos instead.
* Happens in an episode of ''[[
* {{spoiler|The better part of episode 20}} in ''[[Wakfu]]'', which thoroughly confused the non-French-speaking people watching it without subtitles, though it could only have been [[Disney Acid Sequence|one other trope]] if not this one.
* ''[[
* ''[[American Dad]]'' has one when Stan accidentally crapped himself in a pool party and concocts a scheme to get [[Barack Obama]] to do the same. It was a dream moments before he actually jumps... and craps himself. It's implied that this was not the first time he's done it too.
* The ''[[Jimmy Two-Shoes]]'' episode "[[Pandaing to the Audience|Panda-Monium]]".
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* Parodied by ''[[G.I. Joe: Renegades]]'': [[The Stinger]] of the final episode cuts to the original 1980s ''[[G.I. Joe]]'' cartoon and reveals that ''Renegades'' was just 80s!Duke's dream.
* One episode of ''[[Young Justice (animation)|Young Justice]]'' had the entire cast killed off one-by-one by an unstoppable [[Alien Invasion]]. It's revealed at the end that the whole thing was a psychic-induced [[Unwinnable Training Simulation]]. There was some actual danger to the cast, however: Miss Martian accidentally used her [[Psychic Powers]] to [[Holodeck Malfunction|turn off the safety features]], forcing [[Martian Manhunter]] to [[Orphean Rescue|enter the dream and free the cast]].
** Unlike many instances of this trope, the events have long lasting effects, as it not only tips other characters off to the strength of Megen's abilities, but the cast are shown to be traumatised by the events, as it still feels as they watched all their family and friends die.
* Subverted in ''[[The Looney Tunes Show]]'', "Parade Float". A series of events involving Daffy using all of Porky's money to buy a yacht ends with him falling off and about to drown. He wakes up and remarks "It was all a dream. That's why I was such a horrible person." Bugs then reminds him that "it wasn't a dream. You really are a horrible person." In fact, Daffy was in a hospital bed, recovering from his near-drowning.
* The events of the 2003 ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003]]'' episode "Bad Day" are simply a form of [[Mind Rape]] conjured by the Foot Mystics.
* The 1988 ''Ninja Turtles'' episode "Shredderville" had the Turtles supposedly taken to an alternate world where [[It's a Wonderful Plot|they never existed and thus Shredder conquered the world]], only for it to have been a dream that all four of them had at the same time.
* The episode "The Binky Show" of ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'' is this. It ends with
== Real Life ==
* Some people believe that "real life" is really all just a simulation using technology that doesn't yet exist in real life/this simulation. This is based on the belief that technology is likely to get to the point of being able to perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life while in the simulation and that since once this technology exists it will result in more virtual worlds than the one real one the odds are that this is a simulation and not real life.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20081204055726/http://www.simulation-argument.com/ The Simulation Argument] postulates that: it is overwhelmingly likely that ''either'' 1) we are living in an "ancestor simulation" created by our descendants ''or'' 2) humanity can never be technologically advanced enough to stage ancestor simulations. Neither conclusion is very palatable.
** "Perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life"? Why are we talking about ''[[The Sims]]''?
** An interesting counterpoint is the idea that [[wikipedia:Simulated reality#Relativity of reality|"real life" is a meaningless term]], since any reality must be absolute from the perspective of its inhabitants (if we are indeed simulated beings, this is still the highest level of nested realities we can exist in).
* The trope may have arisen from a dream those grieving a deceased loved one often experience. In the dream, the griever learns that the loved one is not dead and that the "death" was nothing but a very bad dream. The griever then wakes up, only to realize that the death really took place and the "miraculous survival" was in fact the dream. Although not every griever experiences this dream, it's common enough to be considered a normal part of the grieving process. Children who experience the dream may not be able to differentiate the dream from reality and therefore may suspect that the deceased person didn't really die (a common fallacy among bereaved children). ''Books'' by reputable scientists have been written on this phenomenon.
** Interestingly, it's possible to have an inversion of
* A [[Subverted Trope|Subversion]]: After [[Daniel Radcliffe]] learned that he had gotten the part of [[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]], he woke up in the middle of the following night. He woke up his parents to ask them if he'd really gotten the part or if it was a dream.
* The philosophy of existentialism holds that how one views the world is subjective to one's experiences. Existentialists believe that truth is in the eye of the beholder, as is even the existence of the world around us. It's the basis for the scene in ''[[The Matrix]]'' in which the boy in the Oracle's apartment tells Neo, "There is no spoon."
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[[Category:Dream Tropes]]
[[Category:Script Speak]]
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[[Category:Ind Ex Machina]]
[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]
▲[[Category:All Just a Dream]]
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