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Dying Dream: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''I find it kinda funny''
''I find it kinda sad''
''The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.''|'''[[Tears for Fears]]''', "Mad World"}}
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Note that stories don't count if we know all along that the character is dead/dying, or if the dying dream bit only comes in at the end.
Compare [[Dead All Along]] and [[Dead to Begin With]]. May overlap with [[
{{deathtrope}}
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* In the third season of ''[[Hell Girl]]'', Yuzuki has actually been dead the whole time and the past few years have been an illusion, which she only discovers when evidence of her "life" starts disappearing. Oh, and Ai tells her.
* Near the end of ''[[Gun X Sword]]'', Ray is mortally wounded when the Claw's men gun him down. He wakes up in a rocking chair, on the porch of a house by the sea. His wife - long since killed by the Claw - asks him what he was dreaming about. They talk for a while before he joins her, and "Calling You" starts playing... [[Tear Jerker|There's no shame in crying.]]
** Subverted in that this isn't how the show ends - It's [[All Just a Dream]] Ray has as he dies.
* This is one of ''the'' most popular [[Wild Mass Guessing|crazy theories]] in the ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' universe. Fans have speculated that Ash has been in a coma since ''the first episode'' after being struck by lightning.
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== [[Comic Books]] ==
* ''[[The Invisibles]]'' has an issue called "Best Man Fall," which tells a man's life story in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness structure. Only at the end of the story does the reader discover that the protagonist is an [[Mooks|enemy soldier who is shot in the face by the hero]] in the first issue, and that everything we have seen is him having a flashback in the seconds before he dies.
* One issue of ''[[
* The second-to-last arc of Adam Warren's run on ''[[Gen 13]]'' appears to be a [[Breather Episode]] after the [[Cliff Hanger]] ending of their last storyline (which was resolved off-screen). However, as more and more examples of "[[All Just a Dream|dream logic]]" appear, heroine Caitlin Fairchild eventually realizes that she's retreated to a fantasy version of her life in the last few microseconds before the [[Earthshattering Kaboom]] from the aforementioned cliffhanger vaporizes her and her friends, [[Dying to Be Replaced|making way for]] [[Chris Claremont]]'s [[Dork Age|short-lived]] [[revamp]] of the series.
* This was the original ending for DC Comic's short-lived ''Kinetic'' series, where a hemophiliac gains superpowers after being hit by a truck. The original ending was, described by the writer in a Wizard Magazine article later as, a [[Downer Ending]] because the original idea was the boy was killed by being hit by the truck and the whole series was his Dying Dream.
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* ''Room 6''
* ''Stay''
* ''November'' has Courtney Cox's character reliving the same things over and over in order to get her to give up her worldly cares.
* ''The Life Before Her Eyes'' (well what did you expect with [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|that title]]?)
* One interpretation of the ending of ''[[28 Days Later]]'' is that the final scenes are one of these for the main character. [[Epileptic Trees|Another interpretation]] is that the ''entire movie'' is one of these for the main character.
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* Lucille Fletcher's short story, "The Hitch-Hiker". Adapted into three different radio plays for three different shows, each written and starring Orson Welles. ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' adaptation changed the protagonist's gender to a woman.
** The fact the character was originally a man goes a long way in explaining why no one in ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' episode would help a [[Damsel in Distress]].
* This trope's lightly touched on in the last chapter of ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'', as the narrator finds himself haunted by the idea that the Martian defeat and humanity's recovery is his own hallucination, and that the city around him is really still in ruins. That most of the happy ending only started after the narrator had gone [[Heroic BSOD|temporarily insane]] makes this [[Downer Ending]] interpretation eerily plausible.
* In [[Connie Willis]]'s ''[[Passage]]'' large portions consist of a
* Some interpreted ''[[Hans Christian Andersen|The Little Match Girl]]'''s vision of her Grandmother as this instead of a Ghostly Visitor.
* An unusual version of this is found in [[Greg Egan]]'s ''Transition Dreams''. A man's brain is scanned and transferred to a computer. The end result is an exact copy, as though the man's mind had been instantaneously transferred from brain to computer. But the mind is conscious of the transfer, and realizes that all its dreamlike experiences of the process must be annihilated before it can be identical to the original brain scan. The real twist, though, is that the end of the story calls into question whether he even really ''is'' being transferred to a computer, or if he's just plain dying and the whole brain-scan thing is a hallucination born of denial.
* Pretty much all of the ''[[Chronicles of Thomas Covenant]]'' may or may not be this - the First Chronicle involves three separate serious accidents for Covenant, each of which he survives; the second, he dies, and in the Last Chronicle, it appears that Linden has been shot and killed on Earth.
* Uh, [[Philip K. Dick]], anyone? ''Ubik'' is all about this (twice, with the second one showing up at the very
* The final scene of Lois Lowry's ''[[The Giver]]'' has provoked speculation that Jonas is having one while he freezes to death. However, the clues are intentionally vague.
* The end of [[Ernest Hemingway]]'s short story ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro''.
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* ''[[An Elegy for the Still-living]]'' explodes into full dream state by the end of the first chapter, but it isn't until later on that the second half of the trope gets fulfilled.
* A variation appears in the short story ''The Black Coat'' by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. A girl wakes up in the wilderness, [[Amnesia Danger|not knowing who she is]]. A scary trucker gives her a lift to a dank apartment where a woman drops ominous hints about where they are. She eventually pieces together that it's an in-between state caused by her committing suicide. As it happens she's still in the process, and manages to save herself.
* ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe|Star Wars Adventure Journal 11]]''<ref>later reprinted in the anthology ''Tales from the New Republic''</ref> featured a short story called "The Longest Fall" that imitated [[Ambrose Bierce|"An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge"]] in a [[Broad Strokes]] fashion. It opens with an Imperial captain who expects to be on the receiving end of a [[You Have Failed Me...]] by [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Antinnis_Tremayne High Inquisitor Tremayne]. At first it looks like Tremayne had Force-choked him nonfatally, then let him go. He makes it all the way back to the bridge of his Star Destroyer ... before collapsing on the floor of Tremayne's office with his neck broken.
* Essentially the entire plot of [[James Patterson]]'s novel ''You Have Been Warned'', crossed with [[Out of Body Experience]] and heavy doses of [[How We Got Here]] and [[Mind Screw]].
* [[John Ringo]] said that at one point he was tempted to make the entirety of the ''[[Paladin of Shadows]]'' series be the dying dream of the protagonist as he died of hypothermia and anoxia while hidden in the nose wheel well of the airplane he snuck aboard in ''Ghost''. He joked that what made him not take that route was that many of his readers (especially of this series) tend to be well armed.
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* ''[[Life On Mars]]'' was revealed in the end to be the dream of Sam Tyler as he lies in a coma. In the final episode he finally wakes up, but realises that he preferred his imaginary world to the real one and jumps off a building. In the final seconds before he hits the ground, he re-enters the dream world, where he apparently remains indefinitely (NB, this is a bit of a borderline case, since he apparently wakes up from the dream world for a bit. Still, eh?)
** In ''[[Ashes to Ashes]]'', Alex finds out that Sam died in a car crash shortly before she arrived. She hypothesizes that the time he spent in the "dream world" was actually the amount to time it took for him to die after he hit the ground in the real world, and that her time in the same world could be a few seconds in the real world between her getting shot and actually dying.
* The ''Comic Strip Presents'' episode "Les Dogs" has a man crashing his car at the very start of the episode; he then goes to a surreal wedding where he seduces the bride. Just as they are about to have sex, her eyes turn into headlights - there is a screeching sound and the film cuts to black.
* The episode "The Hitchhiker" of ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''.
* Used for this delightful exchange in ''[[I, Claudius]]'':
{{quote|
'''Claudius''': I've cheated them again. They think I'm dead.
'''The Sybil''': But you ''are'' dead, you fool. You're as dead as anyone can be. }}
* The season 7 finale of ''[[Magnum, P.I.]]'', "Limbo", was supposed to be a dying dream of Magnum's, but then they were renewed for another season, so he got better.
* In the final season of ''Six Feet Under'' Nathaniel Fisher Jr. dreamt he was driving to the beach with his brother and father, before finally submerging in the ocean, never resurfacing.
* Londo gets one in the ''[[Babylon 5]]'' episode ''The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari'' while he's in a coma, trying to recover from a heart attack. He must soothe his own guilty concience in a [[Battle in the Center of the Mind]] to regain [[Your Mind Makes It Real|his will to live]].
* The [[All Just a Dream]] episode of ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' is along the lines of this trope, except for the actual
* Max's happy ending in the first season finale of ''[[Dark Angel]]'' turned out to be a
* The ''[[Freddy's Nightmares]]'' episode "It's a Miserable Life". Half the episode is from one character's point of view, the other half from another's.
* Despite popular culture's [[Shallow Parody|recurring belief]], this does '''not''' occur on ''[[Lost]]''. The [[Series Finale]] ''does'' reveal that the season 6 "flashsideways timeline" is actually an afterlife created when all of the survivors died; they subsequently proceed to remember everything that happened to them while alive and then "move on" together. However, everything that happened during the course of the show ACTUALLY HAPPENED, a massive point missed by many casual viewers and even some critics.
* In the short-lived 1997 TV series ''Gun'', the first episode had one of these on the part of the main character.
* The horror anthology ''The Hunger'' opened its second season with one in "Sanctuary". Eddie Falco is on the run for the murder of [[Mad Artist]] Julian Priest's agent and asks the reclusive Julian ([[David Bowie]]) for help; Priest decides to make him the subject of an especially grisly piece of performance art. [[The Reveal]] is that this is '''Julian''''s deathdream. Eddie is actually a manifestation of Julian's regret over living long enough to have lost his touch as a artist, modeled on a rival who committed suicide back in [[The Seventies]] and [[Dead Artists Are Better|thus cemented his reputation without risking the career downturn]] Julian did. In truth,
* A somewhat [[Mind Screw|complicated one]] in the ''[[Voyager]]'' episode "Barge of the Dead". It initially seems that B'elana Torres brings a cursed Klingon artifact in the wake of her shuttle after passing through a nebula. The episode progresses in this way for about twenty minutes until things turn really weird and B'elanna wakes up on the Barge of the Dead - a mythological ship which ferries the dishonoured dead to the Klingon version of hell, and is told that she in fact died in the nebula and she had witnessed only "the dream before dying." Except she eventually wakes up on ''Voyager'' to find that, although her shuttle was damaged, she had survived and both dreams were just hallucinations brought on oxygen deprivation. Except, she becomes convinced that she really was on the barge of the dead, and that she needs to go back to rescue her mother (which she does by inducing yet another
* The ''[[Heroes]]'' episode "Cold Snap": Matt uses his telepathy to give Daphne a "storybook ending" in Paris as she lay dying in a hospital bed. Episode writer Bryan Fuller said this was an homage to the Twilight Zone episode ''An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'' (based on the Ambrose Bierce short story of the same name).
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* The video for Cage the Elephant's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v27TRan1SBI "Shake Me Down"] features a man living through memories of his childhood. The end reveals that the man has died in his sleep, and his memories were his final dream.
* The country and western song Green Green Grass of Home. The protagonist is waken up to be taken to be executed.
* [[Iamamiwhoami]]'s video for "20101104" depicts a double suicide, who some believe to be the "real world" bodies of the mandragora and the "bearded" man from the previous videos. Another theory is that they represent Jonna Lee and Claes Björklund, the artists behind the [[Anonymous Band]], "killing" or leaving behind their past careers to become fully immersed in only their [[Iamamiwhoami]] project.
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* The entire game of ''[[Velvet Assassin]]'' is the
* One ending of ''[[Silent Hill 1]]'' - a game that is truly as open to multiple interpretations as any novel or film - has a clip after the credits showing the protagonist in his crashed car, apparently dead - suggesting that the whole thing is a dying dream.
** ''[[Silent Hill: Shattered Memories]]'' seems to follow the same ending. Albeit, with an unforeseen twist. {{spoiler|In every ending, Harry is having a dying dream... 18 years after he actually died. And despite it being a dying dream, he's apparently really able to interact with real, living people. And it was all in Cheryl's mind. We'll just leave the [[Wild Mass Guessing]] to you.}}
* ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' is set in a fantasy world created in the mind of the composer Chopin, who is dying.
* A particularly dirty example in the game ''[[Tech Romancer]]'': in the "Wise Duck" storyline (about [[The Squad]] in a [[Humongous Mecha]],) the [[New Meat]] Arvin discovers that his unit has been given orders to destroy a nearby village, and is not happy about it. The player is given the choice to have Arvin follow his commander's orders, or continue to to protest. If he protests, the entire unit finds itself in a bizarre Planet Of The Apes-type world where they have to save the remnants of Humanity from rampaging [[Super Robot
* Reversed in the visual novel ''[[Little Busters!|Little Busters]]'' by KEY (of Clannad fame)-- but no less bitter, at that.
* The scenario of the PC game ''[[Weird Dreams]]''. Work your way through various fantastic scenarios trying to prevent them from just being part of a
* ''[[Primal]]'': The heroine is the spirit of a girl lying critically injured in a hospital ICU. Averted in that her injuries were caused by an obviously demonic form in the real world. While it still all may be a dying dream, there's some evidence for a supernatural explanation.
* Serves as the final twist in the text-based adventure game ''Shade''. No, you're not about to leave your apartment for a trip to a rave in the desert; you've already wandered away from the rave in a drug-induced haze, and are dying of heatstroke and dehydration. '''Then''' it gets [[Mind Screw|really weird.]]
* Saber's (a.k.a. [[King Arthur]]'s story in ''[[Fate/stay night]]'' (her only ending): while dying after the Battle of Camlann, she makes a pact with the world to allow her to atone for her perceived failure as a king. As a Heroic Spirit, she gets to participate in at least two Holy Grail Wars, finally returning to her time after their conclusion. Of course, her "afterlife" really did take place in a distant future but for her time, it was but a beautiful
* Shiki in ''[[Tsukihime]]'' experiences a long
* Also all of the 'sequel' ''Kagetsu Tohya''. Subverted in that it's not Shiki's
* One theory is the the whole of Utsuki's phase from ''[[Kuon]]'' was just a
* Of all things, ''[[Drawn to Life]]'', though Mike eventually wakes back up to see his sister, the only family he has left after the car accident that killed his parents and put him in a coma [[Heroic Sacrifice|when the Raposa willingly sacrifice themselves]] [[Dream Apocalypse|and their world]] [[Up the Real Rabbit Hole|to save his real self]]. Dammit, 5th Cell. Why even the need for that? Will Maxwell die at the end of ''[[Scribblenauts]] 2'', next?
* ''Dark Fall: Lost Souls''
* Revealed in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'', ''Wings of the Goddess'' : The Vana'diel you know ? Turns out to be a lie : the good guys never actually win the Crystal War, and the war is still ongoing. Oh, and this reality is trying to consume the ''dream'' you live in, because if it don't, it will disappear.
* The flash game Alight (in dreams) is this, potentially. Depending on the ending, of course; it actually takes effort to reach the [[Downer Ending]], but it's also the way to the happiest--[[Bittersweet Ending|but still a little sad]]
* Possibly the upcoming ''[[Driver]]: San Francisco'', which takes place with Tanner in a coma.
* Possibly the ending of Mass Effect 3, as the game starts to go a bit strange and make alot less sense the second Shephard is shot by Harbinger right by the end. This could imply the final events are merely a series of thoughts flying through the dying commander's mind as s/he dies.
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