Dream Within a Dream: Difference between revisions

{{quote|"''Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?''"|'''[[Edgar Allan Poe]]'''}}

 

 

If taken out far enough, and if all the many-layered dreams are substantially the same, what you can get is a [[Groundhog Day Loop]].

Sometimes will pull a twist by having a character wake up from a dream, then something else bizarre happens, and an altogether ''different'' character will wake up from that dream.

 

 

This trope is largely [[Truth in Television]] and is [[wikipedia:False awakening|a fairly common phenomenon]].

== Anime & Manga ==

 

* ''Pyuu to Fuku! Jaguar'' : One chapter of the manga ends with Piyohiko waking from a dream and becoming inspired to take up playing the recorder. Then it turns out this was a dream Jaguar was having.

* ''[[Paprika]]'': Dr. Chiba wakes up from a dream that was going wrong and goes with her colleague to confront the villain at his house, but realizes she's still dreaming when the bad guy shows up with [[Combat Tentacles|tree roots for a lower body]].

* ''[[Urusei Yatsura]]'': An episode centering around Mrs. Moroboshi involved her continually waking up, discovering that everything up until that moment had been a dream. There is even a suggestion that the events of the series are a dream, and the book The War of The Worlds is the actual reality. (Though she does wake up in another reality where both are true) The episode ends with the characters ringed around Mrs. Moroboshi and singing a children's song which is very chilling when you consider it's lyrics ("Oh little bird, when will you escape the bird-cage?")

* ''[[School Rumble]]'': The final episode of the first season involves a manga within a dream, within a dream, within another dream. ... [[Mind Screw|Maybe]].

 

== Comic Books ==

== Film ==

 

* ''[[Nightmare On Elm Street]]'' series: This is a common staple of the movies, where the villain Freddy Krueger killed people in their dreams. He's chasing someone, and they wake up! They're safe! Oops, no, they aren't, waking up was a dream too!

* ''[[The Matrix]]'': Subverted in the beginning, where the main character later finds out that all the "nested dreams" were real after all. Well, real inside the virtual reality he inhabits, at least.

* ''[[An American Werewolf in London]]'': In this horror movie, the protagonist dreams of a group of werewolves wearing Nazi uniforms and carrying machine guns breaking into his home and ruthlessly gunning down his family, before one of them slits his throat. When he wakes up in the hospital he's staying at, he's comforted by the nurse he's infatuated with, but she is shortly attacked by one of the aforementioned Nazi werewolves, brutally stabbing her to death. The guy wakes up for real afterwards.

* In the Korean film ''A Tale of Two Sisters'', Su-Mi is dreaming of a strange, confusing and creepy encounter in the forest with her dead mother, in which she reaches out and grabs her mother's arm, which suddenly starts to bleed profusely, staining her dress. She is startled awake. A few seconds later, however, she hears a faint scratching sound at the foot of her bed. As she slowly sits up and looks, she sees a ghostly woman with long black hair and deathly pale skin crawling along her floor {{spoiler|(who also seems to bear a close resemblance to the girls' late mother)}}, who suddenly rears up and begins to slowly make her way towards Su-Mi, who is paralyzed with fear. When the ghost is standing directly above her, her leg starts to bleed as a hand suddenly emerges from between her legs. Su-Mi then wakes up for real.

* ''[[The Deaths of Ian Stone]]'' begins with the hockey player Ian Stone having a bad night due to a biased referee. On the way home, he gets run over by a train, and wakes up and realizes he's the office worker Ian Stone. He lasts a day before getting {{spoiler|stabbed by his girlfriend}}, and wakes up just in time to avoid crashing the taxi he's driving. And it only continues from there...

* ''[[Waking Life]]'', naturally for a film about dreaming, has the main character repeatedly waking up from a dream, while still dreaming. Hence, the film begins with a [[Recursive Reality|dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream]], or perhaps even further down the line.

* ''Body Double'': At least one entire theater full of moviegoers left in frustration when [[Brian De Palma]]'s ended with multiple instances of this.

* ''[[Sucker Punch]]'' has women in an insane asylum imagining that they are in a mob brothel. From there, they then imagine they are ass-whomping ninjas or commandos in fantasyscapes.

* "[Leprechaun:InTheHood\]": Postmaster P. awakes from a dream about the Leprechaun maiming his grandmother. He then gets up to answer the door and finds his dead friend covered in blood, waking him up the second time.

 

== Literature ==

* In ''The Tragedy Of Man'' Adam in his dream impersonates Kepler. Then falls asleep, dreams about being Danton in the French Revolution and when he was executed, he woke up and found himself back in Prague as Kepler.

* In John Crowley's ''Little, Big'', Sophie makes a deliberate practice of spinning baroquely nested dreams, until at times she (and on at least one occasion Daily Alice) is not certain whether she is asleep or awake.

* An episode of ''[[Mad About You]]'' was based entirely around this phenomenon.

* Done several times on the opening for the <s>2007 Emmys</s> [[Academy Award|78th Academy Awards]] (aka The Oscars), with Jon Stewart waking up next to several beautiful women in succession. Finally he wakes up, sees no one next to him, and rolls over to see George Clooney, who tells him that it's not a dream. Stewart doesn't seem too displeased with this. Hey it's ''[[Even the Guys Want Him|George Clooney]]''!

* ''[[Full House]]'' did this with Michelle being self-conscious about the size of her feet.

** In "The Gift", Teyla has a nightmare of a [[Our Vampires Are Different|wraith]] standing over her bed as she sleeps. She wakes with a start and [[Catapult Nightmare|rushes]] over to John's rooms, only to find that he's been [[Life Energy|life-sucked]] in his sleep. She wakes again, for real this time and lies stunned for a while.

** In Season Four episode "Doppelganger" {{spoiler|Sheppard willingly shares [[Mс Kay]]'s nightmare induced by alien entity who's trying to kill him. The nightmare ends badly and Sheppard wakes up to learn [[Mс Kay]]'s dead. It turns out later on in the scene that the alien entity went into Sheppard's brain and sequence about [[Mс Kay]]'s death was his nightmare.}}

* An episode of ''[[Dallas]]'' saw Sue Ellen awake from a surreal nightmare in which she was chased by a shadowy JR in his car. Several episodes later Pam wakes up, revealing the entire season to have been a dream - including Sue Ellen's nightmare. A whole skit was made around it in [http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=224715 this] Saturday Night Live Digital Short.

* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'': An episode of the '85-'97 ''Twilight Zone'' revival featured a prison where the inmates were stuck in a never-ending dream-within-a-dream sequence.

** The tag on an episode was finding out that they were still trapped in the [[Lotus Eater Machine]]. Because {{spoiler|Good stuff ''never'' happens to Rimmer in real life.}}

** A variation on this trope occurs in "Back To Reality" in which the Boys from the Dwarf believe that, in reality, they have all been playing a total immersion virtual reality game for the previous four years. It turns out that {{spoiler|they have only been under the influence of the Despair Squid's Ink; and they are nearly successful in killing themselves (the ultimate effect of the ink) when none wants to return to his "real" world existence.}}

* In one episode of ''[[The Big Bang Theory]]'', the roommates get a replica time machine from an online auction. Sheldon dreams that it actually worked, taking him to the year [[The Time Machine|802701]], where he is promptly attacked by Morlocks. Waking up, he finds himself back in the present...where he is again attacked by Morlocks, who have been hired to move the time machine out of the apartment. Then he wakes up ''again''...

* An episode of ''[[Scrubs]]'' opens with JD going through a short chain of daydreams, each one being an almost-kiss that "ends right before the really sexy part." First it's Molly and Carla, then Molly and JD, then Turk and JD, and at that point he breaks the daydream chain, insisting he "doesn't have gay jungle fever."

* BBC sketch show, ''Armstrong And Miller'' had one of these in which a man wakes up from a nightmare where his wife's face was melting and goes to get water, only to see her appear behind him with a hideous melted face. Each time the dream lasts longer before the vision of his wife appears. On the fifth or sixth repetition, he quits his job and insults his boss, only this time to be told it isn't a dream. Cue his relief when his wife's face starts to melt again.

* The [[Christmas Episode]] of ''Danis House'' had Max wake up from a Christmas Carol-esque dream and tells Danni to buy the largest turkey with his pocket money and he's going to hold dinner for everyone, and then wakes up for real, freaked that he became completely sentimental. He does become less of a jerk though.

* In the ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' episode "The Bicycle Trip", Mister Pither is tossed into a Soviet prison cell to await execution. He ponders his fate as he drifts off to sleep, and wakes up at home in the backyard. He cheerfully cries "Mother! So it was all a dream!" She replies "No, dear, ''this'' is the dream; you're still in prison!" and he wakes up.

* A ''[[Dick Van Dyke Show]]'' episode had Rob obsessing over some hair loss to the point that he went to bed with a towel wrapped around his head. He dreams that his hair is all gone the next morning and wakes up freaking out. Laura comforts him, and then faints in horror when she sees he ''has'' lost all his hair - then ''she'' wakes up from ''her'' nightmare.

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Amy's Choice", the Doctor, Amy and Rory were trapped in two separate and equally dangerous scenarios (one on board a powerless and freezing TARDIS and one in a small English village overrun by alien-possessed people) by the Dream Lord, who declared that one was real and the other was a dream, and if they died in the dream they would awaken in reality, but if they died in reality...well, as he said, "That's why it's called reality!" {{spoiler|After they 'died' in the village scenario and awakened in the TARDIS, the Doctor set the TARDIS to self-destruct, realizing that the Dream Lord was his [[Enemy Within]] and could only affect dreams, so ''both'' scenarios were dreams. He was right, of course.}}

* A Halloween episode of ''[[Family Matters]]'' had Carl suffer a dream-within-a-dream about the evil ventriloquist dummy. He spends most of the episode fighting it, only to discover it was all a dream...only to discover the dummy right next to him. Then he wakes up for real.'

** In "The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati", Mulder dreams of a little boy on a deserted beach building a UFO out of sand while dreaming/hallucinating a world in which he is married to Diana Fowley, his sister is alive with children, the Smoking Man is good, and there is no Truth, no X-Files, and no Scully. It has been speculated that the little boy in the dream is either Mulder's inner child or that it was a prophetic dream foretelling the bith of Baby William, his and Scully's son. William is not yet conceived in this episode, but is by the end of the season.

** An even earlier episode, "Field Trip" had Mulder and Scully {{spoiler|trapped and devoured alive by a man-eating fungal colony whose digestive fluids induced realistic hallucinations}}. And every time they realized that and woke up, they just ended up in a dream even more realistic than the previous one.

* The final episode of Newhart reveals that the entire series was all a dream of Bob Newharts character Bob Hartley from his previous show The Bob Newhart Show, this is a dream within a dream because a character from The Bob Newhart Show once appeared on St. Elsewhere wherein that entire show was revealed to be all part of Tommy Westphalls imagination in its final episode.

* ''[[Ashes to Ashes]]'' has a 'coma within a coma' version; Alex gets shot in present day and goes into a coma. In the coma she lives in the 1980s for a couple of years before [[Born Unlucky|being shot there too]]. The shock of being shot apparently wakes her up and she goes back to her life in the "real world" for a few months. Then she discovers that she ''never actually woke up'' and in the real real world is still lying in an intensive care unit in hospital. [[Mind Screw|Being shot in 1982 had put her into a coma in that world for three months in which she dreamt that she had woken up]]. Once she realises this she wakes up from her coma-within-a-coma and returns to her 1980s dream. {{spoiler|She never does wake up from the original coma, learning later that waking up from her inner coma [[Dead All Along|had coincided with her death in the real real world]].}}

* Italian comedic band Elio e le Storie Tese are masters of this trope in their videos: just see the ending of the clip for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AVykXVL_xw "Ignudi tra i nudisti"] (multiple dreams within other people's dreams, ending with two airline pilots having fallen asleep!).

** Also, one of their song, "Abate cruento esaminatore" (litterally, "Bloody abbot examiner" - the guys declared they picked up three random words out from a dictionary and ''wrote a song about them'') is a perfect example of this trope. The protagonist dreams of being examinated by an abbot (for some unknown reasons), just to wake up and crash into another dream, and so on. Eventually, he even dreams of being a woman and ''sodomize his husband''.

* ''The Dream Song'' by Joan Baez is about one of these, though the imagery in the song makes clear that the song's narrator is still asleep.

* ''Dream Within A Dream'' by Propaganda starts with the Edgar Allan Poe quotation.

...And it's not over yet!" }}

 

== Video Games ==

 

* After falling asleep in ''[[Yume Nikki]]'', Madotsuki can fall asleep again in the dream world. Fan speculation states {{spoiler|that even her [[All Just a Dream|normal dreams]] are this.}}

 

== Web Comics ==

 

* This ''[[Questionable Content]]'' [http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1169 comic] provides a particularly disturbing example.

* [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1849#comic This] strip of ''[[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]]''.

* In ''[[Bittersweet Candy Bowl]]'', Lucy wakes from [http://www.bittersweetcandybowl.com/c49/p1.html In The End] into [http://www.bittersweetcandybowl.com/c50/p1.html Wonderland]. Rather unsurprisingly given its title, the events of "Wonderland" are just another dream.

 

== Web Original ==

 

* Used to an absolutely ludicrous degree in ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z4pv7Lm28E Death Hat]''.

 

== Western Animation ==

 

* Happened in the end of ''[[South Park]]'''s twisted [[Clip Show]] episode, "Schoolbus on the Edge of Forever".

** Another "Treehouse of Horror" episode shows Lisa and Bart parodying [[Sherlock Holmes]] and Doctor Watson to be part of a Dream within a Dream of Ralphie Wiggum.

** One of the Christmas episodes shows Groundskeeper Willie enjoying a Christmas dinner surrounded by loved ones, which turns out to be a dream he is having while passed out drunk in his shack, which turns out to be a dream he is having while passed out drunk outside in the snow.

** Not strictly a dream within a dream, this trope is parodied when Lisa loses a tryout for the school band's first chair saxophone to the new kid Alison. She loses consciousness twice in succession, the second time out of exasperation at losing, and experiences a deja-vu moment after the second time regaining consciousness.

'''Lisa''': (screams, fade to commercial break) }}

* An episode of ''[[The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron]]'' ended with a chain of "dream within someone else's dream"s, ending with a monster pizza and his wife. [[It Makes Sense in Context|No, really]].

* In the ''[[Futurama]]'' episode "The Sting", Leela goes into a coma after being stung by a space bee, although at this point both she and the audience are unaware of this. She keeps having many Dreams Within A Dream, which convince her she's going insane, before awakening at the end of the episode.

** Bender has a similar experience in "Obsoletely Fabulous".

* In ''[[Shrek]] the Third'', Shrek wakes up from his baby nightmare only to see Donkey and Puss with baby ogre heads. Then he wakes up for real.

* At the end of one ''[[Taz-Mania]]'' episode, Francis wakes up from a nightmare and a tonne weight lands on his head. Then he wakes up and the weight lands on his head again...and again...and again...

* In ''[[Rocko's Modern Life]]'', the episode "To Heck and Back" begins with Karen (a chicken) interviewing for a job. She gets the job, but it turns out that the job is being processed and packed to be sold at a grocery. The episode continues with Heffer and Rocko at the Chokey Chicken, where Heffer dies after choking on a chicken bone. When he arrives in hell, he is "oriented" by Peaches, a devil, and shows him clips of his sins. Eventually, Rocko manages to save Heffer, and he comes back to life. After a few minutes, Rocko reveals himself to be Peaches, and Heffer wakes up in his room. After calming down, Heffer's house turns into the giant head of Peaches, and Heffer finally wakes up at Rocko's front lawn. He goes to Rocko and meets Karen, the chicken at the beginning of the episode, who is headed to the Chokey Chicken corporation for an interview.

** "Tickled Pinky" did this too, where Rocko dreams that he's in a room full of organs in jars begging not to be cut out, then wakes into another dream where he and Pinky (his appendix) go to a carnival and other things, before waking up from the surgery for real.

* In the British cartoon series ''Captain Zed and the Zee Zone'', one episode has the eponymous character assigned to help a particular kid who was getting nightmares. The thing is, he has to leave a kid's dream before the kid he's helping wakes up, or he will be teleported to the real world with said kid and no way to get back to the dream dimension (the eponymous Zee Zone, where the minds of humans get teleported to magically every night when they sleep). Said kid does apparently wake up and it appears that Captain Zed and his partner were also sent to the real world with no way of getting back, but it turns out to be a dream within a dream. It took a while before Captain Zed realizes it and uses it to his advantage and save both the kid's dream and himself.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Dream Tropes]]

[[Category:Truth in Television]]