Schrödinger's Butterfly: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

{{quote|''Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with myself and doing as I pleased. I didn't know I was myself. Suddenly I woke up and there I was, solid and unmistakably myself. But I didn't know if I was myself who had dreamt I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was me.''|'''[[Zhuangzi]]'''}}

 

 

This serves as a source of mystery and speculation in a story. Did the heroes really break the spell cast by the [[Master of Illusion]], or are they all imagining it? Did they escape the [[Convenient Coma]] that trapped them in a [[Happy Place]]... or merely trade a perfect illusory world for a more realist one? These doubts may never be resolved until a [[Sequel]] comes out or [[Word of God]] clarifies it. Sometimes, the ambiguity works in favor of the story, leaving it [[Leave the Plot Threads Hanging|open to interpretation.]]

 

 

 

Compare: [[Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory]] and [[Dream Apocalypse]]. Compare also [[Opening a Can of Clones]], which has this effect regarding a character's 'originality'. Contrast [[Or Was It a Dream?]]. See also: [[Cuckoo Nest]], [[Dying Dream]], [[Through the Eyes of Madness]], [[Masquerade]], and [[Brainwashed]].

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Naruto]]'', brothers Sasuke and Itachi Uchiha practice ''genjutsu,'' techniques centering around illusions. Thus, during the Sasuke vs Itachi fight, the first major stage of the battle consists of Sasuke and Itachi standing perfectly still while both add layer upon layer of illusions. The readers, of course, are ignorant of what is an illusion and what isn't until after the illusion breaks. As a result, there are several points in which the fight seems over, only for the illusion to break and reveal that the brothers ''hadn't actually started fighting yet.''

** Practically lampshaded when Sasuke breaks Tsukuyomi (Itachi's strongest genjutsu), and [[Combat Commentator|Zetsu]] pretty much lets the reader know the rest of this ''isn't'' genjutsu.

* In ''[[GetBackers]]'', in one of the episodes, an elderly homeless man asks the Get Backers to save his daughter from the mafia. {{spoiler|When they arrive the girl doesn't want to go with them, and they leave her there. Upon seeing the old man being loaded onto an ambulance, Ban catches both the old man's and Ginji's eyes before the daughter runs up to tell her father that she loves and forgives him. It is never revealed whether the daughter truly showed up, or if Ban was showing both men a pleasant illusion.}} The viewer is often confused as to what is the illusion and what is reality, only being sure when Ban reveals his trick.

** It's a dream. In the original Manga, Ginji asks him if he used the Evil Eye, and Ban replies with a dejected 'yeah'.

While in Gaea she has several dreams where she is back with her friends in Japan. }}

* Are we all (as in, all of objective reality, not just the reality within the series) but a dream of [[Haruhi Suzumiya]]? At least Koizumi sets this as one of the possible theories.

 

== Comic Books ==

* This is basically the plot of ''The Red King'', the second novel in the ''[[Star Trek: Titan]]'' series. The novel features an eponymous intelligence, which resides within a protouniverse overlapping with our own. As a result of this overlap, its expansion threatens several worlds with destruction. The legends of many local races' speak of the protouniverse, or at least the associated intelligence. They describe it as a sleeping dreamer, the surrounding region of space being the content of the dream. The expansion and its resultant destruction is therefore supposedly the [[Dream Apocalypse|dream coming to an end as the being begins to wake]]. Frane, a native of the Neyel (whose world is part of the threatened region), describes the myth to Titan's crew:

{{quote|"And when it wakes, it ceases to dream. But all the worlds that surround it are part of that dream. Like Newaerth, the first world to vanish as the Sleeper begins stirring from its long ages of slumber". }}

* This is basically the entire premise of a Jostein Gaarder novel ''[[Sophie's World]]''.

* Pedro Calderón de la Barca's ''Life is a Dream,'' a 17th-century Spanish play, deals with [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|the conception of life as a dream]] particularly in the first act.

*** Better Than Life was the Season 2 version, played almost entirely for laughs. Back to Reality is the Season 5 finale that played a similar concept very seriously. Not only did this sort of go hand in hand with the series "growing up" over time, it also helped create multiple levels of mindscrew.

*** It should be noticed that the book version was much darker. The show version was basically the Holodeck driven by whatever your surface wish was; no mistaking it for reality. The book lets us go a good while thinking the cast has fully made it home. Over much of the rest of the book they manage to escape, and find that things were still a ''little'' too good to be true. When they escape for ''real,'' a message left by the creator of the game appears to congratulate them, and they finally return to the real world. Hopefully. Apparently, they ''wanted'' to do it this way all along in the show but budget or something didn't allow - in "Future Echoes," elderly Lister has "U=BTL" etched into his arm. No attention is called to it at the time (or ever, in the show. In the book, we see this happen in book 1 and Lister notices. Better than Life is book 2.)

** Another notable instance occurs in season 8, episode 3, when they {{spoiler|return to the reconstructed Red Dwarf, courtesy of the Nanites,}} and are placed in the brig after signing agreements to participate in a trial involving psychotropic drugs that will cause them to hallucinate.

*** They engineer a daring escape before the trial and make it out into space, at which point they realize that the entire escape attempt has been a hallucination.

*** They enlist the aid of the reconstructed Rimmer and break out again... and realize that, once again, they've all been duped.

*** When they finally make it out of their hallucinated trial, Rimmer asks, "Is this reality? But how can we be sure?" Cat poignantly states, "Why do we care? Nothing makes any sense no matter where we are!"

** Happens [[In-Universe]] as part of a condemned criminal's sentence: he's doomed to have nightmares of being murdered by his victim over and over again, "waking up" from one nightmare to the next.

* In the American version of ''[[Touching Evil]]'', Creegan befriends Cyril, a homeless man who believes that he's dreaming the show's reality, and that when he goes to sleep, he's really waking up in the "real" world, the space colony Alpha 9.

* An episode of ''[[Farscape]]'' has Chiana introducing John to a buggy VR program based on his memories. John manages to find an exit, only to end up getting captured when [[Magnificent Bastard|Scorpius]] escapes from confinement and takes everyone hostage. After a great deal of [[Couldn't Find a Pen|bloodshed]], John finally breaks out of his cell... only to realise that he's still playing the game when he finds one of the hint-vouchers in his pocket.

 

 

 

 

* Zhuangzi's poem is the source of all the butterfly symbolism in the ''[[Persona (video game)|Persona]]'' games, as referenced by ''Megami Ibunroku Persona's'' intro. The remake even references this in the opening lyrics.

{{quote|''Dream of butterfly / Or is life a dream? / Don't wanna wake up / [[Spoiler Opening|Cause I'm happy here]]'''}}

* ''[[Silent Hill 1]]'s'' Bad Ending shows us the protagonist dying in his broken car; apparently all the game was just [[Dying Dream|a dream he had between the car crash and his death]]. Other endings are less unhappy, though... except for the one where he kills his daughter and he and an [[Innocent Bystander]] get roasted alive in a collapsing [[Dark World|hell-dimension]]. Oh, and there are four sequels; he's revealed to have survived in the third {{spoiler|[[Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome|only to be killed off-screen]]}}.

* Part of the ending of the Ciel route in ''[[Tsukihime]]'' involves Shiki in a mental dream world where there are no vampires, Ciel is just a normal girl and he doesn't have his [[Evil Eye|Eyes of Death Perception.]] He catches on pretty quick and has a little chat with his Nanaya side over whether he wants to leave or not, because leaving most likely means death.

== Web Comics ==

* In [http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart218.html this] ''[http://www.jsayers.com/thingpart/thingpart.html thingpart]'', is the boy hallucinating on a subway, is he hallucinating that he's playing with psychologist dolls, is he hallucinating that he's hallucinating on a subway, is he hallucinating that he's hallucinating on a subway from the other direction, is he not hallucinating at all and either the whole thing is a [[Mind Screw]] or the second through fourth panels or first through third panels are hypothetical, or doe the rabbit hole go even deeper in unseen panels?

** A more straightforward example: [http://www.bobandgeorge.com/archives/011223c Waking up from the Megaman universe] is [http://www.bobandgeorge.com/archives/011224c just a dream]

* ''[[The Dreamer]]'' relies heavily on this trope, as Beatrice and the audience is unsure whether or not her dreams are simply that, or an [[Alternate Universe]].

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:This Might Be an Index]]

[[Category:Plots]]

[[Category:Useful Notes/Schrodinger's Cat]]