Living Dream

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A character that exists in the real world because someone dreamt them to be. The relationship between the dreamer and the Living Dream can work in at least three different ways, with quite a bit of a sliding scale between them.

  1. They are the same person, with the Living Dream being a kind of Alternate Self. The dreamer may be fully aware of this, believe it to be All Just a Dream, or be totally unaware that she has this other identity running around in the real world.
  2. They are not the same person, but the Living Dream is acting under the dreamer's orders or in the dreamer's best interests.
  3. The Living Dream is out of control in a destructive way. This Internal Subtrope of this trope is also a subtrope of Reality Warping Is Not a Toy.

In all these variants, she may very well be unaware of the fact that she is someone else's dream, alternatively be unsure which version of her is the waking one.

Compare Living Memory, where the "person" once actually existed. See also Spontaneous Generation, Puff of Logic and I'm Not Afraid of You.

Examples of Living Dream include:

Anime and Manga

  • Entei in Pokémon 3, by way of the Unowns' ability to warp reality. For that matter the entire plot of the movie is a result of this trope.

Comic Books

  • Marvel Universe has a superhero known as Sleepwalker. When bad things are happening, this hero's mundane alter ego doesn't run into a phone booth to change clothes. Instead, he simply takes a nap, freeing his mind to manifest his superhero self.
    • Sleepwalker and his "alter ego" are not the same being nor was he created by him. Sleepwalker is a alien from a different dimension that is trapped in the human host's mind. He is able to exit the mind into Earth's reality when the human is asleep or unconscious but gets instantly pulled back against his will when the host wakes up.
  • In one Judge Dredd album, the villain seemed to be Judge Death, but at the end turned out to not be him after all: "He" was actually the living dream of a female psionic who (probably subconsciously) used him as an assassin to get rid of her enemies.
  • In City of Dreams, not only can humans enter the dreamworld physically as well as in their dreams - but this works both ways. People they created in their sleep have a life of their own and may walk through the portal into the waking world.
  • Two examples from (Pre Crisis) Superman comics:
    • In one, a group of aliens, stranded on Earth, and convinced they will never be able to leave, transform into normal humans complete with no memories of being aliens. But their subconscious denial is so strong, it causes them to a) refuse to believe aliens are real, not even Superman and b) to subconsciously create a creature with their mental powers to destroy anything that might contradict this belief (eg. spaceships or Superman.) They eventually learn the truth and Superman helps then return home.
    • In a similar but more tragic story, an alien courier bearing an important message to prevent a space war crash-lands on Earth and is buried underground; it manifests a "ghost self" that tries to steal what it needs to fix the ship, which of course draws Superman's attention. He frees the alien from underground but it's too late; turns out the alien had only just woke up from a sleep that lasted centuries, and the war had already happened.

Literature

  • In the fifth book of Narnia, there's an island where dreams come to life. This is not a good thing, because all people sometimes have nightmares.
  • Hogfather is all about weird examples of those suddenly appearing.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. George Orr has effective dreams that can change reality.
    • Type 3. When asked to dream of world peace, he dreams up space aliens who invade the Moon and later attack the Earth.
    • Type 2. George later dreams that the aliens become peaceful. After they do so he has a conversation with an alien that ends up helping him.
  • Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" is all about this, and one of his best. Read it here.
  • Andre Norton did a bunch of books about dreams-within-dreams that had an effect on the higher reality.
  • Labyrinths of Echo has an involuntary/suicidal variety - the phenomenon dubbed "Terror Of Mages". A non-existent entity greatly feared by someone very powerful occasionally materializes nearby and acts according to one's expectations - and if it was something nice, it won't be feared, would it?.. As a phantasm continuously feeding on its creator's power, it's near-impossible to stop for anyone else; conversely, said creator could destroy it pretty much by looking at it funny, but usually is convinced that fighting this thing is hopeless and too busy freaking out to do anything about it, or even understand what's going on.

Live-Action TV

  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has an episode where Sisko falls in love with a mysterious woman who just keep disappearing. Turns out she's a energy lifeform without a mind of her own: She's a telepath's mental projection, existing only as a living dream while the real woman is in a kind of coma-like dream.
  • There were a couple of episodes with similar plots on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In one the monster was a child's nightmare version of his Little League baseball coach.
  • And yet another episode with a similar plot on Stargate Atlantis. In this case the woman was a telepathic projection by an alien time capsule recovered from the ocean floor.

Oral Tradition

  • In one of myths from South America, boy Momiñaru married Adichawo and found out the hard way that her father Sahatuma was a cannibal shaman. He told the boy he have seen in a dream that a fish trap is full, then himself "fell asleep" at home, but appeared as a jaguar elsewhere and tried to devour Momiñaru.

Video Games

  • Everyone from Zanarkand including Tidus from Final Fantasy X.
  • In The Longest Journey, Type 1 is used for interdimensional travel. This is the power of Dreamers (of whom Zoe is the only one known so far): if they sleep particularly soundly, they can not only dream of the Parallel Universe of Arcadia (which all humans can) but also manifest a physical presence there that can interact with objects and people while the Dreamer's actual body sleeps in our world.
  • In League of Legends, the playable character Nocturne is a nightmare taken physical form.

Web Comics

  • In Goblins, this is the explanation for the Lesser Finger Horror: a demon kept a promise to cure a little boy's recurring nightmares, but did so by bringing them into the physical world.
  • Homestuck: The dream selves of Sburb players are a type 1. They exist as physical entities which actually coexist alongside the players in the Incipisphere (though owing to the scale of the game they're generally restricted to operating on Prospit and Derse), can serve as an "extra life" should the player's real self be killed, and become the player's real self in the process of God Tier ascension. To "awaken" one's dream self and thus be able to be it in one's sleep isn't particularly easy and usually involves some sort of trauma. By default they're the same person as their real self, sharing a mind and consciousness, but rare circumstances can cause a dream self to become a autonomous entity, as Jadesprite did.
  • 18th-century Beatrice in The Dreamer (or is she?).

Web Original

  • From the SCP Foundation: SCP-781, "Unwitting Dreamshaper", creates short-lived instances of these in his sleep. Which usually cause him a painful death.

Western Animation

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