All Just a Dream: Difference between revisions

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* 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 he--the one the dream is based on--doesn't already know. The dream falls apart once he pieces everything together, and he wakes up in the middle of a battle with that villain.

** 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.

* 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]]'' [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.

** 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.

* [[Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG]]

{{quote|598. Any adventure that ends up with my character being worshiped as an orc god was just a dream. Retroactively if need be.

* 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.

* {{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.

* ''[[Re Boot]]'' episode "Number 7". A [[Mind Screw]] episode which directly parodies ''[[The Prisoner]]'', including a version of that shows opening sequence. Given what happens during the [[Mind Screw]], this trope is a [[Tropes Are Not Bad|welcome sight]].