Dying Dream: Difference between revisions

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== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* At the end of the [[Hentai]] [[Manga]] ''Alice in Sexland'', it is revealed that Alice broke her neck while fleeing from her oppressors at the very start - the entire realm of Sexland is her afterlife. (And it's explicitly single-occupant - she's the only "real" person there besides the Queen of Hearts, and ''one'' of them needs to be [[Reincarnation|reincarnated]].) Given that the whole story up until then has been a cheerful sexual adventure vaguely mimicing Carroll's classic book, it's a [[Mood Whiplash|rather unsettling]] twist of genre.

* An alternate ending to the manga ''[[Pretty Face]]'' has the entire story be just a dream before Rando dies in a coma. Thankfully it wasn't chosen as the true ending.

* 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.

 

 

* 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.

 

 

== [[Film]] ==

* ''[[Carnival of Souls]]'' predates ''Jacob's Ladder'', however, as does the Oscar-winning French short ''An Occurence at Owl Creek'', based on the short story by [[Ambrose Bierce]].

* ''Dead End'' reveals that the family all died in a car accident and are in some kind of purgatory.

* ''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.

* ''Hellraiser: Inferno'' and ''[[Hellraiser Hellseeker]]'', with the latter being the more straightforward use of the trope.

* One of the interpretations of ''[[Vanilla Sky]]'' is that David really inflicted fatal injuries upon himself and was placed in cryogenic lucid dream for the past 150 years, dreaming of Sofia.

* Likewise, in ''[[Repo Men]]'', something like this happens to Remy himself about halfway through the story.

* The original ending of ''The Descent''.

* Rob Zombie's commentary for ''[[House of 1000 Corpses]]'' suggests that the [[Hope Spot]] finale when the heroine escapes from Doctor Satan's lair by killing his axe-wielding minion and makes it to a road, only to be recaptured by Spaulding and Otis was really just a dying dream.

* ''[[Total Recall]]'' already has enough of the it was all a dream theories going around, but some go as far as to say that the entire film was part of a dying brain embolism Arnold is having while in the "Recall" machine.

* A popular interpretation for the ending of ''[[Taxi Driver]]''. Roger Ebert noted that it was too good of an ending to be true.

* 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.

* 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''.

* ''Laura and the Silver Wolf'' has this as alternate interpretation. (And [[Word of God|canonically]], it is '''also''' this, though not '''only''' this as the heroine lives on in Ice-Land.)

* 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]].

 

 

* 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]]''.

{{quote| '''The Sybil''': Why are you laughing? <br />

'''Claudius''': I've cheated them again. They think I'm dead.<br />

'''The Sybil''': But you ''are'' dead, you fool. You're as dead as anyone can be. }}

* 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.

* Max's happy ending in the first season finale of ''[[Dark Angel]]'' turned out to be a [[Dying Dream]] as a result of her being shot in the heart by her clone. Don't worry, she got better.

* 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.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

 

 

* The entire game of ''[[Velvet Assassin]]'' is the [[Dying Dream]] of Violette Summers, a young British secret agent during WWII who is dying in a hospital. The surreal, disjointed game missions are actually her memories, and there's even a disturbing "morphine mode" where, if Violette becomes too agitated remembering her missions, a nurse will inject her with morphine and time will slow down in the game world, allowing Violette to escape or come to terms with whatever is frightening her.

* 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.

* ''[[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|Super Robots]]. In the end, however, you find out that it's all Arvin's Dying Dream: He was shot by his commanding officer for disobeying orders. Ironically, had you had gone along, the unit would have deserted, eventually turning on their commanders, and taking on the monster responsible for the whole war. Apparently, the choice is a [[Secret Test of Character]], to see if Arvin can be trusted.

* 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 [[Dying Dream]].

* ''[[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.]]

* Shiki in ''[[Tsukihime]]'' experiences a long [[Dying Dream]] in Ciel's True Ending, which serves as a foreshadowing of the Far Side of the Moon routes. Fortunately, he survives, in no small degree thanks to his actions within said dream.

* Also all of the 'sequel' ''Kagetsu Tohya''. Subverted in that it's not Shiki's [[Dying Dream]], but Len's.