All Just a Dream: Difference between revisions

* The current 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!"<br />Noteworthy in that the sensory deprivation experiment was not a [[Retcon]], but was ''itself'' a framing device in an actual Silver Age story. An alternative explanation provided for some of these episodes is the insinuation that they were hallucinations brought about by exposure to Joker toxin, Scarecrow's fear gas, etc.

* 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..

* 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!}}<br />They didn't even try to play it straight. When he wakes up on the pavement, {{spoiler|the cut he received in his "dream" is still there.}}

* ''[[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.<br />Played straighter by the end, where you could interpret the entire thing as a dream, then subverted ''again'' when {{spoiler|the creatures show up in her room and everyone has a dance party while Jareth watches in owl form outside the window.}}

* [[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.<br />Unless, of course, it ''was'' all just a dream, and Covenant merely hallucinated the Creator offering to help save him. In that, his "miraculous recovery" in the hospital would simply have been due to the fact that he had essentially regained his will to live (as established in his conversation with the Creator). This is even more implicit when you realize that Covenant is a writer (and thus, is a Creator himself), so both the Creator and the Despiser may simply be embodiments of his own personality. The Hile Troy and Mhoram POVs don't necessarily negate this, since Covenant never manages to prove that Troy was "real", and it's possible to passively dream things happening that the dreamer wouldn't necessarily be aware of. But as Covenant himself suggests, it doesn't matter whether it's a dream or not, because either way, it's ''important''. The later books tend to make a much better argument for everything being real, but the original trilogy does a very good job, even right up to the very end, of keeping the paradox.