Dream Within a Dream: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|"''Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?''"|'''[[Edgar Allan Poe]]'''}}
The main character dreams that a giant cantaloupe is out to get him, then wakes up with a start. After a moment of [[Catapult Nightmare|sitting up and panting]], he realizes it was [[All Just a Dream]], then gets up and goes to the bathroom for a glass of
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]].
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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.
Compare [[Droste Image]]. See also [[Nested Story]], [[
This trope is largely [[Truth in Television]] and is [[wikipedia:False awakening|a fairly common phenomenon]].
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== Anime & Manga ==
* ''[[Oruchuban Ebichu]]'': In one infamous episode, Ma-kun has a quadruple
* ''[[Galaxy Angel (anime)|Galaxy Angel]] A'': Milfuelle appears to go through a series of dream-within-a-dream [[Alternate Universe|alternate universes]], where her fellow Angels are everything from pirates to robots to giant lizard creatures. Only then is it revealed that a [[Lost Technology]] she was using as a pillow really was transporting her to the various universes - and the other versions of her are appearing back in the show's original one.
* The suspense film ''[[Perfect Blue]]'' use this device multiple times (as well as showing us conversations or scenes that seem like they're really happening, only for a director to yell "cut!"
* ''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]].
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== Film ==
* ''The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie'': Perhaps the best examples come from [[Luis Bunuel]]'s surreal masterpiece.{{context}}
* ''[[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.
{{quote|
* ''[[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 ''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]'', Picard wakes up after dreaming about his assimilation into the Borg Collective some years earlier, during which various robotic parts were grafted onto his body. As he freshens up, one of these (long-removed) components breaks through his cheek from the
* ''[[The Wicker Man]]'': In the 2006 version, Edward dreams of himself swimming towards the lifeless body of his daughter floating in the water. He then wakes up, only to find himself holding her soaked, lifeless body in his arms. He wakes up for real the third time around and curses. The [[Riff Trax]] of the movie had Kevin Murphy shout "''Matchstick Men''!" and "''[[National Treasure]]!''" during [[Nicolas Cage|Cage]]'s startled awakenings.
* 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.
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* ''[[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.
* ''[[In the Mouth of Madness]]'': The protagonist dreams of witnessing a cop beating a graffiti artist in a dark alley, an event he witnessed earlier that night, but now the cop is a deformed monster. He wakes up... and sees the monster-cop sitting next to him, and wakes up again.
* ''[[Inception]]'' really has too much fun with this. The protagonists even attempt to do a dream within a dream within a dream. {{spoiler|And later, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. [[Up to Eleven|Four layers!]]}}
* ''Body Double'': At least one entire theater full of moviegoers left in frustration when [[Brian De Palma]]'s ended with multiple instances of this.
* ''[[Shrek]] the Third'': Shrek experiences a dream within a dream within a dream during the boat ride to Arthur's school.
* Subverted in ''[[The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]]''. The Pevensies are chasing the White Stag at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When they see the Lamp Post, it seems vaguely familiar- as if it were from "a dream within a dream". But it turns out that the Lamp Post was real, and so was the "Spare Oom", and now they were heading back to England- to the exact same moment in time they departed it.
* Played straight in ''[[The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]]''. Lucy is dreaming that she gets up from bed, looks at the mirror, and has transformed into Susan. She wakes up, looks at the mirror, and Aslan talks to her. Then she wakes up again- and is in the real world.
* In ''[[Hugo]]'', the title character is having a nightmare in where the train derails. Then he has a false awakening in where he has turned into an automaton. And then he wakes up for real.
* ''[[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.
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* ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'''s season 2 finale used this device when House gets shot; the episode is both predictable and compelling.
* ''[[Full House]]'' did this with Michelle being self-conscious about the size of her feet.
* ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]''
** 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.}}
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* 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.
* ''[[Red Dwarf]]'' :
** 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.}}
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** 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.
* An episode of ''[[The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air]]'' has Will being hexed by a psychic. The end of the episode has him waking up from the events as if they were a dream to [[Groundhog Day Loop|the morning before]] in which the dialogue from the beginning of the episode is heard.
* 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]].}}
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* Taken to nightmarish extremes in [[Cage]]'s "Among the Sleep".
* [[Pink Floyd|Roger Waters]]' album ''The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking'' consists of interlocking dream sequences.
{{quote|
The bedclothes were all soaked with sweat
She said "You've been having a nightmare
...And it's not over yet!" }}
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* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening|The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening]]'' is [[All Just a Dream]], and within that game there's an area called the Dream Shrine which you access by climbing into a bed and going to sleep.
* ''[[Super Mario Bros. 2]]'': First Mario dreams that he goes to Subcon, the land of dreams, then wakes up and, during a picnic on a mountain, finds a cave and the stairway to Subcon, but in the ending of the game, it is revealed that that was [[All Just a Dream]] too.
* 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 ==
* Happens in [https://web.archive.org/web/20110417173926/http://bukucomics.com/loserz/go/175 this strip] of ''[[Loserz]]''.
* This ''[[Questionable Content]]'' [http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1169 comic] provides a particularly disturbing example.
* In ''[[
* [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.
* Happens on [http://thinkbeforeyouthink.net/?comic=20100813 this page] of ''[[Think Before You Think]]''.
== Web Original ==
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== Western Animation ==
* The "dream within someone else's dream" version happened in the ''[[Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy]]'' episode "Rock-A-Bye Ed", where Ed has a nightmare about his mom punishing (who looked like Johnny), causing Ed to get an extreme phobia for the said boy... then it turns out it was Johnny's nightmare.
* Try ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]''. Candace finally busts her brothers, that ends in disastrous results. In said dream, she sees Perry as an agent, causing her to wonder that whats Perry's been doing at breakfast. Suddenly, agents carried off the family, saying Perry has to relocate, than it turns it out it was just the platypus's dream.
* Happened in the end of ''[[South Park]]'''s twisted [[Clip Show]] episode, "Schoolbus on the Edge of Forever".
* ''[[The Simpsons]]''
** The first episode after the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" [[Cliff Hanger]] made it look like the shooting incident was a dream (an obvious spoof of the infamous [[All Just a Dream]] moment that [[
** An earlier episode of ''The Simpsons'' [[Playing with a Trope|played with]] the trope: The second "Treehouse of Horror" episode had a [[Framing Device]] in which each mini-story is a nightmare being had by one of the Simpsons. At the end, Homer wakes from a nightmare in which Mr Burns's head was grafted onto his
** 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.
{{quote|
'''Mr. Largo''': that was a close one Lisa, but you made it!
'''Lisa''': I got first chair?
'''Mr. Largo''': No, you regained consciousness. Alison got first chair.
'''Lisa''': (screams, screen fades to black, then wakes up). Oh, it was all just a dream!
'''Mr. Largo''': that was a close one Lisa, but you made it!
'''Lisa''': I got first chair?
'''Mr. Largo''': No, you regained consciousness. Alison got first chair. And believe me, THIS IS NOT A DREAM!
'''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".
* ''[[Family Guy]]'' once did an intro in the episode "Brian in Love", which involves a parody of ''[[Mister Rogers' Neighborhood]]''. Mr. Rogers greets the audience and hears Trolley coming by, but it turns out that Stewie is riding Trolley holding his ray gun and he reveals to Mr. Rogers that he wreaked havoc on the Neighborhood of Make Believe. After that, Stewie makes Mr. Rogers kneel and threatens to kill him, but Mr. Rogers is pleading for Stewie not to shoot him. Stewie eventually shoots
** Happened to Mayor West in "Grumpy Old Man". Upon regaining consciousness from a multi-car accident, his egg shattered on his windshield which was his high school project before realizing he's not in high school and he's dreaming. Cuts to West waking up in a desert until that's a dream and wakes up from a car accident with his egg intact and buckled.
* Happened to Mrs. Puff in ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]''. Most of the episode had her in prison after SpongeBob drove a car off an "unfinished bridge" and down into a juice truck. Near the end of the episode she woke up and was back in the car, falling and crashing again. This time Spongebob was arrested. She looked down to see she was in a prison outfit and woke up again, with one of the prisoners in the car instead. She woke up again, giving up, "Oh, forget it."
* In the ''Justice Friends'' segment of ''[[Dexter's Laboratory]]'', an episode had Krunk watching a Puppet Pal marathon, and entering the land of the Puppet Pals after being guided by a zebra. After a mess occurs, he wakes up discovering it was [[All Just a Dream]]... and [[Or Was It a Dream?|the zebra appears]]. It cuts to one of the Puppet Pals waking up from the Dream Within a Dream, complaining "Remind me to never watch the Justice Friends marathon again!".
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* ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'' Christmas special begins with Dr. Venture as Scrooge being shown his own grave. Like Scrooge, he wakes from the dream a changed man, his heart grown three sizes, nose glowing red and flying - he wakes up again, his face on the tv remote as the set clicks from one Christmas special to another. At the end of the show, his Christmas party ends abruptly as the compound erupts in an explosion set up by the Monarch. He wakes up yet again in the family jet, which has crash-landed in Bethlehem.
* 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.
* ''[[Archer]]'': in season 9 episode 4, Archer experiences both 'waking' [[Flashback|flashbacks]] and more extended [[Dream Sequence|'dream' sequences]] of dogfights in the Spanish Civil War, all whilst in his [[Convenient Coma|coma]].
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Dream Tropes]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
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