Dreaming the Truth/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Sleeping, and dreaming, allows a character to realize something.

  • Straight:
    • Murgatroyd, after many hours wrestling with the machine to break into the enemy fortress, is forced by his friends to go to sleep. When he wakes, he has a brilliant idea on how to fix it.
    • Sophonisba has watched Hortensia acting oddly. When she goes to sleep, she dreams of Hortensia talking to her enemy, and realizes that Hepzibah is a spy.
    • Julian, having met Ivan, an older man who greatly resembles him, dreams of a childhood picnic, except that the man at the picnic table is Ivan, and not the man whom Julian had thought was his father. When he wakes up, he realizes he is Ivan's son.
  • Exaggerated: ???
  • Downplayed: Hepzibah figures out a geometry problem she had been stuck on after she goes to sleep.
  • Justified: Truth in Television
  • Inverted: Hepzibah figures out what to do with a mechanical problem, but has to leave and sleep before she does it. When she gets back to the machine, she has forgotten what she figured out.
  • Subverted:
    • Murgatroyd's attempted solution leaves the machine unchanged after he wakes.
    • Sophonisba, having realized Hortensia was a spy in her dream, sets a trap for her. This gives Hortensia a chance to run away with the man Sophonisba loves.
    • Julian, having dreamed Ivan was his father, ran a blood test. It turns out that Ivan was merely a close relative of his father.
  • Double Subverted:
    • This is because Murgatroyd unplugged it to work on it, and was so caught up that he forgot to plug it back in.
    • Sophonisba finds that Hortensia had given her enemy information in order to get support for her elopement.
    • Ivan had been his father, and they had performed genetic engineering on Julian to hide the fact.
  • Parodied: Mortimer reads his homework, goes to bed, and wakes up to write down the answers.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Everyone works out their problems before they go to sleep.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: Jebediah realizes he's stuck and goes to bed early.
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: "Stop worrying about it and go to bed; the morning is wiser than the evening."
  • Conversed: ???

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