All Just a Dream: Difference between revisions

* ''[[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.)

* 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..

* In ''[[The Shining]]'', it sometimes got difficult to tell what was real and what were projections of the family's minds. [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060618/REVIEWS08/606180302 Roger Ebert's review] talks at length on the subject.

* 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.

** It's also more likely they exist (although not a certainty) in the original cut, where the ending of the US cut turns out to be All Just A Dream and the film ends with Sarah about to be killed by a horde of the crawlers while she's too wrapped up in hallucinations to even realize they're there. For obvious reasons, the sequel is based on the [[Revised Ending]] instead.

* Related to this is the film ''[[Atonement]]'' in which {{spoiler|1=the entire conclusion of the plot (involving Briony taking back her evidence and [[Keira Knightley]] getting back together with her boyfriend) from the wedding of the rape victim and her rapist onwards is from the imagination of Briony. She reveals that James McAvoy's character in fact died while at Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed in the (real-life) flooding of Balham tube station by a German bomb.}}