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Schrödinger's Butterfly: Difference between revisions
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Much like the [[Schrodinger's Cast|other]] [[Schrodinger's Gun|Schrodinger]] [[Schrodinger's Suggestion Box|tropes]], this plot point can also serve as an [[Author's Saving Throw]] by retroactively making it [[All Just a Dream]]. Or if the author ''really'' wants to mess with us, end the movie or film on a [[Downer Ending]], with a fading shot of the character's [[Dying Dream|dying]] or still comatose body trapped in the illusion.
The trope name is a reference to a poem by the 4th century BC Chinese philosopher [[Zhuangzi]], a Taoist philosopher who influenced Chinese Buddhism. It refers also to [[
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]].
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** In ''[[Sylvie and Bruno]]'', the narrator explicitly thinks it:
{{quote| ''"So, either I've been dreaming about Sylvie," I said to myself, "and this is the reality. Or else I've really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?"''}}
* 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". }}
* ''[[Godel Escher Bach]]'' uses several of these, nesting several layers of drama. In one story, Achilles and the Tortoise are on an airship and start reading a book about themselves, and inside the book. The bad news is that the story doesn't "pop back" all the way to the last level, and the initial story is still left hanging. The good news is that the Tortoise and Achilles can move up to a previous level using popcorn.
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