Dream Within a Dream/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character's dream involves another dream within even that.

  • Straight: A character wakes up from one dream to think he/she is awake, only to wake up from THAT dream.
  • Exaggerated: A dream within a dream within a dream within a dream... which perhaps itself may be within another dream.
  • Downplayed: ???
  • Justified: Waking up from dreams is a concept the character thinks a lot about, so it's no surprise his/her dreams would incorporate it.
  • Inverted: Our universe is a pocket dimension inside another universe, which is inside yet another universe, and each higher universe is considered "more real" than the previous one.
  • Subverted: The character wakes from one dream into what seems to be another because of it's strangeness, only for a prior explanation of such strange things to be used to demonstrate the point that such strangeness does not imply a dream.
  • Double-Subverted: ... and then said prior explanation turns out to have been from a previous dream.
  • Parodied: After Bob tries to look in to Alice's dreams, he finds that he keeps waking up without the dream ending. After morning hits and Alice wakes up, she tells him to wake up. He fell asleep.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: The character wakes up from his dream directly into reality.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: "Man, I hate double dreams!"
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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