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Dying Dream: Difference between revisions
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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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* ''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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* This trope's lightly touched on in the last chapter of ''[[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 [[Dying Dream]].
* 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.
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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]]'':
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* 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, Julian -- driven 'round the bend by outrage and shunning for his increasingly grotesque work -- killed his agent and then turned himself into his last work of art, resulting in a slow death. He becomes a ghost who dwells in the abandoned prison that became his home in life, and the [[Fauxlosophic Narration|narrator]] who introduces and closes each subsequent episode.
* 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 [[Dying Dream]]).
* 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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** ''[[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|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.
* 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 [[Dying Dream]].
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* 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.
* One theory is the the whole of Utsuki's phase from ''[[Kuon]]'' was just a [[Dying Dream]] after she is killed by her sister.
* 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''
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[[Category:Dying Dream]]
[[Category:Charlie the Unicorn/WMG]]
[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]
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