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* 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.
* ''[[XXX HolicXxxHolic]]'' actually even refers to the above quote and it is an allegory of a central theme in the series.
* In ''[[Get BackersGetBackers]]'', 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'.
* In ''[[Ghost in Thethe Shell]] 2: Innocence,'' Batou and Togusa meet a cyborg hacker with the ability to completely alter the perception of people with any kinds of brain implants. When they notice they are trapped in an illusion, they manage to break out, only to realize they are just in another illusion, before they finally manage to break free for real. Of course, they wonder if perhaps they never actually left the false realities, and if they might unknowingly live out the rest of their lives in an illusion. Scary!
* [[.hack Sign|.hack//SIGNSign]] ends with {{spoiler|Helba forcibly deleting Net Slum in a desperate effort to stop Skeith, causing everyone to be ejected from the game as the server crashes. This results in Tsukasa finally logging out of the game for the first time in the entire series and having a heartwarming meeting with Subaru in the real world...but when their hands touch, a distinctly cyberspace-y hexagon grid appears, and it then cuts to a scene of what appears to be the ruins of Net Slum (which is very similar to the very start of the first episode), with a mysterious monologue from Morganna. It doesn't help either that the "real world" segment of Tsukasa leaving the hospital and meeting Subaru has a somewhat surreal tone to it, what with the whole silent movie style and all. Ultimately, it's not really clear until later installments in the .hack series whether or not Tsukasa actually ever managed to log out.}}
* {{spoiler|Aizen}}'s zanpakutou ability in ''[[Bleach]]'' Its very essence is to [[Master of Illusion|warp a victim's perception of reality]].
* [[Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure (Manga)|Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure]]: Gold Experience Requiem's powers is like this, specifically the endless chain of "waking" only to be in another fabricated scenario. The victim catches on after about three times that he's no longer alive, but that doesn't change the fact that he'll [[Fate Worse Than Death|never die, either.]]
* Never really happens in [[El Hazard]], but at one point Makoto wakes up after having a weird dream. Since he's not entirely sure that [[El Hazard]] itself isn't a dream, he gets a bit confused on the subject.
{{quote| '''Makoto:''' What a weird dream. Within a dream. Or is this the dream?}}
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== Film ==
* The Nexus from ''[[Star Trek]]: Generations''. In fact, see the [[Star Trek (Franchise)/WMG|Trek]] [[Wild Mass Guessing]] page for one interpretation of this.
* ''[[Taxi Driver]]'' shows our sociopathic "hero" getting great praise for his shoot out, right after being probably gunned down. Even if he really did live, you can bet he's still crazy.
** A large chunk of another [[Martin Scorsese|Scorsese]]-[[Robert De Niro|De Niro]] film, ''[[The King Of Comedy]]'', can be interpreted as a product of its protagonist's imagination.
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** Particularly at the end of the second movie when Neo was able to stop a machine with his mind in what was supposed to be the real world when nobody had shown powers in the real world before, fans speculated that the "real world" might just have been another layer of the matrix used to control rebellious minds.
** One of the comics also references the [[Trope Namer]] in a short comic where a monk or something beats up some agents.
* The deleted scenes of ''[[X -Men]] 2'' show that Jason didn't just make Xavier think he was back at the institute, he made him think that he succeeded in convincing Jason to let him escape from the [[Lotus Eater Machine]].
* As ''[[Brazil (Filmfilm)|Brazil]]'' unfolds, the line between the real world and Sam's dreams gets progressively blurrier. The final scene reveals that Sam's escape {{spoiler|was a delusion, likely brought on by the trauma of being tortured by his friend Jack.}}
* ''[[eXistenZ (Film)|eXistenZ]]'' embodies this trope. How many levels of this virtual reality are there? And how do you know when you're in real life?
* ''[[Minority Report]]'': {{spoiler|Did John Anderton clear his name or was the ending of the film just a dream he was having in his containment cell?}}
* [[Fourteen Oh Eight1408]]: The whole movie plays with this concept a lot but especially when {{spoiler|the main character (as well as the viewing audience) is tricked into thinking that he escapes the hotel room and has returned to a normal life before he realizes that it was all a vicious illusion. This arguably comes to an end when he burns the place down and escapes, but there's still the feeling that too could possibly be an illusion.}}
* The final [[Mind Screw]] of ''[[American Psycho]]'' is that {{spoiler|[[Unreliable Narrator|Bateman himself is unsure how many of his experiences are real or imagined.]] }}
* The big [[Mind Screw|brain hump]] of ''[[Mulholland Drive]]'' is you don't know which is real; the last half hour, or everything preceding it?
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{{quote| '''Seth''': I'm saying I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake.}}
* ''[[Mystic River]]'' itself isn't an example, but at the end one of the characters proposes this as a possibility: The recent events are too bizarre for it to be reality, so what if it's all a dream that he is/they are having to shut out a darker reality: {{spoiler|that all three of them were kidnapped and still being molested}}.
* This is the entire premise of ''[[JacobsJacob's Ladder]]'', too. The main character keeps bouncing back and forth between two realities, each of which shares some people and places in common, but both of which seem to have demons in them as well. {{spoiler|It's finally shown that he had died in Vietnam, and this was all just an in-your-head Purgatory.}}
* This is a concern in ''[[Inception]]'', so those involved take precautions.
** {{spoiler|it's also the cliffhanger ending}}
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** He also had it skewered by Susan Sto Helit, who asked if a poet who had came up with this wrote his poems with a brush or by leaving information-rich patterns on cabbage leaves. Upon being told it was the former, she concludes he was probably a man.
* ''[[House of Leaves]]'' has tons of this. There are multiple layers of narration; Johnny is editing a text written by Zampano about ''The Navidson Record'', which is a movie made by Navidson about the {{color|blue|h}}. Throughout the book, there are hints that Zampano or Johnny are altering or completely fabricating things, or that Zampano made up the film, or that Johnny made up both Zampano and the film, or that ''Johnny himself'' is also made up.
* ''The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'' by [[Philip K. Dick]] involves a plot to [[Take Over the World]] through hallucinogens that in theory could take a thousand years to wear off. Every main character takes the drugs at one point or another, more than once [[Dream Within a Dream|a seeming recovery is merely hallucinated]]. By the end, it's [[Mind Screw|virtually impossible to decide what's "real" and what's not]].
** The complete mind screw ending of ''The Man in the High Castle'' which seems to somehow end in our world.
** In ''Ubik'', the line between the living and the dead existing in "half-life" becomes blurred in the end, after having been seemingly resolved.
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{{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.
* This is basically the entire premise of a Jostein Gaarder novel ''[[SophiesSophie's World]]''.
* Pedro Calderón de la Barca's ''Life is a Dream,'' a 17th-century Spanish play, deals with [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin|the conception of life as a dream]] particularly in the first act.
* The book Liar is told from the point of view of a chronic liar. The make it worse, every now and then,she tells you shes lied about something and promises not to do it again, then a few chapters later she's confess to lying again. By the end of the book, you're really unsure if any of it actually took place.
* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", the mirrors nearly trap [[Kull]] in another world.
{{quote| ''For there are worlds beyond worlds, as Kull knows, and whether the wizard bewitched him by words or by mesmerism, vistas did open to the kings gaze beyond that strange door, and Kull is less sure of reality since he gazed into the mirrors of Tuzun Thune.''}}
* Polaris by HPL is based on this entirely.
* The ''[[Goosebumps]]'' book ''I Live In Your Basement'', to the point of being a [[Mind Screw]].
* Stanislaw Lem did this in his novel ''The Futurological Congress''. With hallucinogens being used as a war weapon, neither the protagonist or the reader is really sure when or if things get back to reality.
* Some [[Choose Your Own Adventure]] books had the results of really bad screw-ups followed by "it was all a dream". An [[All Thethe Tropes Wiki Drinking Game|egregious]] exanple is ''Space and Beyond''; one ending has it be [[All Just a Dream]]; the rest of the endings say that it is not.
* Several times during the course of ''[[The Circle Series]]'', Thomas Hunter actually asks himself whether he's dreaming or not. {{spoiler|He never does figure out which he's actually living in.}}
* [[Stephen King|Stephen King's]] ''[[Pet Sematary]]'' includes a heart-wrenching scene in which the protagonist has exactly this kind of dream.
* The second series of Hawkmoon novels by Michael Moorcock start with the hero trying to be happy with his wife and young family but being haunted by the ghosts of his friends who died at the climax of the first series. It then switches around to him being comforted by those friends having recovered from a delusion caused by the death of his new wife instead.
* In [[Michael Flynn]]'s ''[[Spiral Arm (Literature)|The January Dancer]]'', the [[Compelling Voice]] can make you forgot things. As a consequence, you can't be sure that anything you know really is true. Perhaps the person with the Dancer has taken over the galazy and you just don't realize because you've been ordered not to.
 
 
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*** The season 7 episode "Extreme Measures" does this exact thing with O'Brien and Bashir, when Sloan's mind tricks them into believing they've returned to reality (when in actuality they are still inside his mind, slowly dying with him).
** A similar concept would also be used in the 6th season episode "Far Beyond the Stars" in which Sisko hallucinates that he is Benny Russell, a pulp fiction writer, whose latest story stars none other than Sisko. It gets even more extreme in that Benny Russell has hallucinations about being Sisko. At the end of the episode Sisko is telling his father that for all he knows he is a figment of his own (alter-ego Benny Russell's) imagination.
** [[The Powers That Be]] apparently toyed with the idea of having the entire series (and therefore the entire [[TrekverseTrek Verse]]?) being ''all'' Benny Russell's book.
*** This appears to describe an episode of ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Voyager]]'' involving a species which spend their entire life dreaming. Only [[Magical Native American|Native American spirit magic]] can free the crew... or something.
** In another episode of Voyager, the crew falls prey to a gigantic space pitcher plant. It makes the crew see what they want to see (a worm hole to Earth) but they would actually be flying into it's stomach. Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman are the only ones immune because Seven was a Borg since childhood and Naomi was born on the ship; [[You Can't Go Home Again|the whole "getting home" thing]] is not either's ultimate ambition. However, at one point Seven believes the ship has escaped. It turns out that it is just the creature showing her what she wants to see (that is Voyager outside the creature, because not getting eaten is ''very much'' something Seven and Naomi both desire.
** In the ''[[Star Trek the Next Generation|Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' episode "Ship in a Bottle", {{spoiler|a holographic Moriarty thinks he escaped from the computer-- but he is actually "exploring" a 24th-century screen saver. At the end, Picard speculates about his crew being someone else's entertainment in a little box... ''oooh, meta.''}}
*** Earlier in the episode Picard and Data were in the holographic simulation of the Enterprise, thinking they had exited the program, trying to fulfill Moriarty's request to be let out. They were still in the Holodeck, and Moriarty was actually holding them hostage. They eventually catch on.
** Another ''[[Star Trek the Next Generation|Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' episode, "Frame of Mind", both explores and inverts this trope, nearly driving Commander Riker insane.
* ''[[The X -Files]]'' episode "Field Trip" dealt with this trope.
{{quote| "Name me one hallucinogen that loses its effectiveness because you know you've taken it. ''We're still there.'' "}}
* This also appears in one episode of ''[[Red Dwarf (TV)|Red Dwarf]]'' (season 5, episode 6) where the crew dies, only to see the "Game Over" text appear and shortly afterwards wake up in VR-game chairs... The series continued after that episode, of course.
** Probably a reference to [[Lotus Eater Machine|Better Than Life]] from Season 2, and at least one novel. By the end of the series, it's impossible to tell whether they've really escaped the game, or the game just lets them ''think'' they have. (It does explain a lot of the [[Lampshade Hanging|self-admitted]] [[Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness|implausible science]].)
*** 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.
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*** 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!"
* A [[Cruel Twist Ending]] from the ''[[Outer Limits]]'' [[Revival]] episode "Tempests": did the hero escape early in the episode, or at the end? Neither--he's still hallucinating.
** 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.
* Played with at the end of a [[Lotus Eater Machine]] episode of ''[[Stargate SG 1|Stargate SG-1]]''--the protagonists are certain they're in the real world. The guy who trapped them in virtual reality wouldn't be freaking out over the other people they've led to escape ruining his beloved garden if it were virtual.
* 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 (TV)|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.
** Interesting to note in this case is that typically, when this trope occurs in an episode/issue of a running series, the possibility of still being trapped in the illusion is almost NEVER brought up in later episodes. ''[[Farscape (TV)|Farscape]]'' features an aversion in that, at the start of the next episode, Crichton and Noranti pull up to Moya in a transport pod, only to find that there's no response, exactly as it had happened in the game's simulation of the real world. John momentarily wonders if they had not actually escaped at all... only to realise that Moya's been invaded by a gang of bounty hunters.
* ''[[Supernatural]]'s'' version of the genie works that way : he grants you your wish by making you hallucinate he did, while feeding on you till you die. Because ''Supernatural'' is [[Sarcasm Mode|optimistic.]]
* There was a ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episode in which the entire story consisted of a woman's repeatedly waking up from nightmares, only to find each time that [[Dream Within a Dream|she was still dreaming]].
* Played with in [[Chuck]] but only for a moment. After an episode putting Chuck's mental health in question the end of the episode shows that Chuck is not crazy. However, then he wakes up back in the mental ward. However, the mental ward scene is only for a moment before it becomes clear that it is another vivid dream, and not!crazy Chuck is in fact reality.
* ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]'' plays with this in the episode ''Amy's Choice'', when the "Dream Lord" traps the Doctor and his two companions in two deadly situations which they switch between by falling asleep every five minutes or so, claiming one of them to be real and one of them to be a dream, and that if you die in the dream you wake up in reality, while if you die in reality, "[[Deadpan Snarker|you die, stupid, that's why it's called reality]]". {{spoiler|In the end, the Doctor, in a twist of genius, realises that the Dream Lord gave them a choice between two dreams, because he "conceded defeat" and revived the dead TARDIS, while the Dream Lord is supposed to have no power over reality. He subsequently blows up the TARDIS to [[Kill'Em All|kill them all]], and they all get returned to reality, where they were brought into a collective hallucination by a few grammes of psychotropic dust, and the Dream Lord is just an inner demon within the Doctor.}}
* ''[[Lost]]'': Hurley spent an episode believing that the Island was a hallucination and that he was still back at Santa Rosa Hospital. Desmond seems to have these reality doubts sometimes too.
* ''[[Angel]]'' has a mini-version of this in a Season 4 episode. {{spoiler|1=Angel is seen to defeat the demon and (finally) go to bed with Cordelia. Then we realize it was a dream designed to make Angel lose his soul in a moment of perfect happiness (understandably, sleeping with Charisma Carpenter = perfect happiness).}} It intersects with [[Your Mind Makes It Real]]; it qualifies here because the audience doesn't realize it's a dream until it's over, and this event blurs the lines between (in-show) reality and dream.
* The basic premise of ''[[Awake (TV series)|Awake]]'', in which Detective Michael Britten has one life in which his son died and his wife is still alive, another where it's vice versa. Both are equally real to him.
* The simplest version of [[Life On Mars]] and [[Ashes to Ashes]] is that it is all in the mind of the main characters. Other interpretations are available.
 
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== Video Games ==
* The day before Vincent's final climb, he wakes up to find [[Catherine (Video Game)|Catherine]] in his bed and Katherine banging on his door. There's a tense scene between the three until the [[The Other Darrin|K/]] [[One Steve Limit|Catherine]]s start to fight. Katherine backs up to a sink, looking for a knife that Catherine already has. The two women fight and Catherine ends up getting stabbed before Vincent and Katherine are pulled into the dream world and have to climb to escape a monster {{spoiler|demon form of Catherine}}. At the top, Katherine [[Driven to Suicide|tries to throw herself off]] but Vincent saves her, and going through the top door....wakes him up. He realizes it was all a dream when Katherine shows up and he openly admits to her about Catherine in an attempt to explain the dream and she admits to having already known about Vincent's other woman.
* Maribel Han in the [[All There in the Manual]] material for ''[[Touhou]]'' has a dual existence in a grayer Earth and in Gensokyo. It's menitoned that she visits the rest of the cast often, however we have never seen her directly in Gensokyo. It is [[Wild Mass Guessing|speculated by some]] that she has a [[Reality Warper|different identity]] when dreaming.
* Zhuangzi's poem is the source of all the butterfly symbolism in the ''[[Persona (Videovideo Gamegame)|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]]'''}}
* On a similar note, [[Persona 3|Persona 3 Portable]] is implied to be this, because though one can choose either a female or male protagonist, the story is the same ([[Schrodinger's Player Character|save for one or changes in social links]]).
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* 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.
* The whole point of ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' is the question of whether Frédéric Chopin is [[Dying Dream|just having an extremely lucid fever dream]], or if he really is in another world.
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: LinksLink's Awakening]]'' - The island is nothing but one big dream, and the point of gathering the 8 dungeon items this time around is to wake both you and the Wind Fish up. Link is oblivious to this since you aren't directly told that it's a dream until late in the game, but the owl and boss monsters don't really try to hide this fact from you.
** It should also be noted that at one point you end up in a dream sequence ''inside'' the dream world in order to get the Ocarina.
** This makes it a hell of a [[Downer Ending]], though: The Wind Fish is who is ''having'' the dream. Waking it up ''erases the entire island and everyone you've met,'' though the [[Golden Ending]] ''seems'' to mean Marin got her wish of being a seagull.
* Referenced in [[Multiple Endings|one of the endings]] to ''[[Yo -Jin -Bo]]''. Sayori wakes up at home, alone, in her own bed, and assumes her adventure in 19th century Japan was just a dream. And yet, she says she can't shake the feeling that that time was the "real" time, and today's present is only a dream that her 19th century self is having.
* Occurs in a particularly soul-crushing way at the end of [[Realms Of The Haunting]].
* Parodied in [[Chrono Trigger (Video Game)|Chrono Trigger]] in the Kingdom of Zeal.
{{quote| Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of sashimi?}}
* In [[Mass Effect 3]], Joker discusses this trope after [[Player Character|Shepard]] {{spoiler|takes a virtual trip through the geth consensus}}, wondering if you really came back out or if you're still in there and everything you're seeing now is an illusion. It becomes [[Hilarious in Hindsight]] when you consider some of the [[Epileptic Trees|fan theories]] that came out about the ending of the game.
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