History Main / DelusionConclusion

* Despite the overwhelming evidence for the supernatural in ''Series/TheHauntingOfHillHouse'', some viewers suggest that the ghosts and other supernatural activity within the house are just hallucinations after all. However, rather than insisting on a diagnosis of mental illness as [[TheScully Steve]] does, some propose that the visions were actually brought about by exposure to the [[FesteringFungus black mold]] infesting the house.

* ''Film/TwentyEightDaysLater'' canonically ends with Jim surviving long enough to be rescued from post-apocalyptic Britain along with Selena and Hannah; however, the presence of a deleted ending in which Jim dies from the gunshot wound inflicted in the finale has led some viewers to theorize that the happy canonical ending is just a DyingDream or perhaps even an afterlife.

* Invoked by Creator/GrantMorrison themself in the 15th Anniversary Edition of ''ComicBook/ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth'' is a nightmare a sleeping Bruce has after a night of crimefighting that leads to purging Bruce of his more negative traits, after which he wakes up and become the more-heroic Batman who appears in Morrison's ''ComicBook/JLA1997''[='=]s run and ''ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison''.

* Invoked by Creator/GrantMorrison themself in the 15th Anniversary Edition of ''ComicBook/ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth'' is a nightmare a sleeping Bruce has after a night of crimefighting that leads to purging Bruce of his more negative traits, after which he wakes up to become the more-heroic Batman who appears in Morrison's ''ComicBook/JLA1997''[='=]s run and ''ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison''.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII'' has the infamous "Squall is Dead" theory. At the end of Disc 1, [[TheHero Squall]] gets impaled by an icicle fired by the Sorceress Edea and falls off a ledge, seemingly to his death; Disc 2 starts with him waking up with his seemingly-fatal wounds completely healed, and the plot starts veering into MindScrew territory from there on. Some fans interpret this as the rest of the game being a DyingDream. However, the theory was {{Jossed}} by Yoshinori Kitase during [[https://kotaku.com/is-squall-really-dead-final-fantasy-producer-addresses-1800007113 an interview]].

** Though not widely accepted, one theory suggests that the events of the book are just the revenge fantasies of the concentration camp inmate who [[spoiler: becomes V.]]
** Another theory holds that the events of the series are real, but V is imaginary - his background either an elaborate fiction or borrowed from someone else. In other words, [[spoiler: Evey was V all along and her interactions with "V" were just hallucinations keeping her from noticing her own disassociative identity as he gradually molded her into a replacement.]]

* ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}''

* In ''[[https://www.fimfiction.net/story/65/1/somewhere-only-we-know/chapter-1 Somewhere Only We Know]]'', the reality of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' exists only in the imagination of Dash, an elderly mare abused by her human owners. Rarity is a fancy carriage horse forced to wear a painful bearing rein and Applejack is an overworked cart horse. The fates of Pinkie, Fluttershy and Twilight are unknown, although Pinkie's fate is implied to be less bad, since she was sold to a family with children.

* ''Literature/ThePendragonAdventure'': Because of how sudden and contradictory the ending is, many people believe [[spoiler:Bobby]] was put in Lifelight to [[spoiler:live out the perfect, normal life he wanted to be able to return to before having to return to Solara,]] and that as Press originally said, [[spoiler:the rest of the cast have to stay where they ended up and rebuild the worlds that Saint Dane destroyed.]]

* This is the crux of the now-infamous [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkoGBOs5ecM&t=69m17s Apple Tree Yard theory]]: with the fourth and final season of ''Series/{{Sherlock}}'' being [[AudienceAlienatingEra highly contested at best]], a small group of hardcore fans came to believe that the events within couldn't possibly be real, given that it features such things as [[spoiler: Sherlock having a heretofore-unknown sister who turns out to be the ultimate villain]]. So, using the hallucinatory episode "[[Recap/SherlockSpecialTheAbominableBride The Abominable Bride]]" as a basis, the theory claimed that Watson had been left comatose by a gunshot to the head in the penultimate episode and the events of "[[Recap/SherlockS04E03TheFinalProblem The Final Problem]]" were all just dreams experienced by Watson over the course of his coma. All well and good, up until the theorists began to believe that there was actually [[https://sherlockshome.net/2017/01/22/is-sherlock-over/ a hidden fourth episode]] in which Watson would wake up, the reality of the situation would be revealed, he and Sherlock would end up in love, and the two would live happily ever after... and through a trail of "evidence" too nonsensical to describe in a single paragraph, they came to believe that [[FullyAbsorbedFinale this hidden fourth episode was the first episode of]] the BBC thriller series ''Series/AppleTreeYard.'' Suffice it to say that actually ''watching'' this episode debunked the theory quite soundly.

* In ''VideoGame/AliceMadnessReturns'', the line between the real world and the imaginary realm of Wonderland begins to blur towards the end of the story as the Infernal Train takes a toll on Alice's sanity; as such, some players speculate that the villain of the story unveiled in the final chapters [[spoiler: namely Doctor Angus Bumby, Alice's psychiatrist]] is actually innocent of the crimes Alice remembers him committing, and she merely imagined the scene where he gloats over [[spoiler: raping her sister and killing her family.]]

* ''VideoGame/HeavyRain,'' also written by David Cage, ended up becoming a victim of this trope as well. Because no explanation is given concerning Agent Norman Jayden's [[AugmentedReality ARI glasses]], players like LetsPlay/GeekRemix have speculated that they're a figment of his imagination - partly because Jayden is ''canonically portrayed'' as a drug addict who hallucinates in several scenes, but mostly because this explanation makes as much sense as [[RandomEventsPlot anything else in the game]]. It's been confirmed that a lot of explanatory scenes were arbitrarily cut from the game, so the explanation behind the shades may have ended up becoming a casualty as well.

* Though mostly restricted to the first three seasons, several ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'' theories said that the lone human protagonist Finn only imagined the Land of Ooo, and him being a famous hero in it, due to everything from coma to schizophrenia to a coping mechanism for domestic abuse. It's rather HilariousInHindsight then that the official canon world is a far darker CrapsaccharineWorld [[spoiler:devastated and reborn in eldritch nuclear fire]] and humans [[spoiler:living under Big Brother in a self-imposed exile.]]

* One prominent ''WesternAnimation/EdEddNEddy'' [[https://fantheories.fandom.com/wiki/Ed,_Edd_n_Eddy theory ]] claims that the cul-de-sac the children live on is actually a purgatory, and that every child there died sometime after 1900. It was based mostly on the lack of adults seen (though extremely rare, arms and silhouettes of adults were present). Furthermore, the theory was expanded for [[WesternAnimation/EdEddNEddysBigPictureShow the movie]] and claimed that [[spoiler:the theme park where Eddy's brother worked ]] and their journey there was actually a journey into Hell.

* Since J.G. Quintel created and voiced the main character in both ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'' (in which he voices Mordecai) and ''WesternAnimation/CloseEnough'' (in which he voices Josh), a common joke is that ''Regular Show'' was just a long drug trip Josh had in which he imagined himself as a blue jay. Funnily enough, Mordecai actually originated as how a man imagined himself while on acid in WebAnimation/TwoInTheAMPM, though his name was [[TheDanza Quintel]].

* Some readers of ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'' theorize the main character may be suffering from schizophrenia or a related mental illness, seeing as Hobbes appears as real for him, but everyone else sees him as a stuffed tiger - plus he has quite the imagination. It's [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane never made clear]] if Hobbes is real or simply Calvin's fantasy, since some aspects are difficult to explain, while series author Creator/BillWatterson has famously refused to clarify one way or another- the closest he's come to doing was in the 20th Anniversary book, where he said that Hobbes is neither a doll that magically comes to life when Calvin is around nor strictly a product of Calvin's overactive imagination... [[ExactWords which does nothing]] [[FalseReassurance to disprove that he’s a delusion]].

** In one arc, the title cat kept snapping back and forth between hallucinations where the house had been abandoned and hallucinations that Jon had come back with food only to switch back to the "abandoned" one. While the entire thing was AllJustADream, it's since spawned a popular theory that every strip since then is Garfield's DyingDream as he slowly starves to death.

* Given the film's notoriously trippy ending, it's not surprising that some viewers have interpreted the final act of ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' as some kind of delusion experienced by David Bowman; some even claim that it's actually due to Bowman running out of oxygen and [[DyingDream hallucinating as he slowly dies of asphyxiation in space]]. Both [[Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries the novel]] and [[Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact the film sequel]] eventually explain that David has actually transcended physical existence to become the godlike Star Child, though these are not universally accepted.

* ''Film/ReturnToOz'' actually begins with Dorothy being packed off to a mental hospital for primitive electroshock therapy, so it's no surprise that some viewers interpret her adventure across the ruined Land of Oz as being imaginary, as was the case with [[Film/TheWizardOfOz the original movie]].
* It's not uncommon for some viewers of ''Film/TheShining'' to interpret the haunting at the Overlook Hotel as a combination of Danny's imagination and Jack's escalating madness... though this doesn't explain the [[{{Telepathy}} Shining]] exhibited by Mr Halloran. The sequel ''Film/DoctorSleep'' completely {{josse|d}}s this idea, unambiguously presenting the supernatural as real.

** A more extreme version of this theory holds that Rose not only made up Jack Dawson, but that she was never even on the ''Titanic'' in the first! The entire 1912 sequence which makes up the majority of the film is told by an Old Rose to Brock Lovett and his crew in the FramingDevice, with even Rose's granddaughter initially doubting her claim to be the woman in the picture. Thus, some viewers conclude that Rose Calvert is just a senile 100-year old woman with an overactive imagination and Rose [=DeWitt=]-Bukater is a different person who actually died on the ship.

* A particularly persistent theory of ''Anime/CaptainTsubasa'' is that the main character fell off the moving truck in the first episode and has been in a coma since. Some people even claim that the "real" ending of the anime has him waking up and finding he has no legs.

* In ''[[https://www.fimfiction.net/story/65/1/somewhere-only-we-know/chapter-1 Somewhere Only We Know]]'', the reality of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' exists only in the imagination of Dash, an elderly mare abused by her human owners. Rarity is a fancy carriage horse forced to wear a painful bearing rein and Applejack is an overworked cart horse. The fates of Pinkie, Fluttershy and Twilight are unknown.

* ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'' games -- particularly those since the release of the [[VideoGame/SuperMarioBros 1985 platformer]] -- are often theorised (probably jokingly) to be Mario's drug-fueled hallucinations or DyingDream, with common arguments being based on the [[CommonKnowledge popular misconceptions]] that he smashes bricks with his head when jumping and eats mushrooms to grow in size. These theories almost always hinge on the EarlyInstallmentWeirdness present before the 1985 entry; the earlier arcade games such as ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong'', ''VideoGame/MarioBros'', and ''VideoGame/WreckingCrew'' all took place in more grounded urban settings with Mario and Luigi appearing as blue-collar workers, but everything after the aforementioned ''Super Mario Bros.'' would take place in more zanier ones with magical [[PowerUp Power-Ups]], mushroom people, anthropomorphic turtles, and other fantastical elements. This led many to argue that the arcade games are the only "real" events of the series during which the brothers were presumably still alive, sober, and sane, best illustrated by ''WebAnimation/{{Mashed}}'s'' "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO0ZXo3ORqc Luigi's Nightmare]]" animation.

A SubTrope of EpilepticTrees, and a common type of {{Stock Parody Joke|s}}.

* Some fans of ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' speculate that [[Fanfic/AshsComa Ash Ketchum has been in a coma]] ever since Pikachu electrocuted him in the first episode (or struck by lightning at the end of the same episode), and that every adventure he's experienced since then was AllJustADream -- as "evidenced" by the fact that [[NotAllowedToGrowUp Ash has never been seen to age in the years since then]].

* Due to ''Film/{{Joker|2019}}'' not attempting to differentiate between [[AmbiguousDisorder Arthur]]'s imagination and reality (such as [[spoiler:TheReveal that his relationship with his neighbor Sophie was all in his head]]), some viewers have interpreted many of the later scenes (or even the entire movie) as similarly being a fantasy he dreamed up where [[spoiler:nearly everyone that wronged him is dead and he finally gets the cheering audience he always wanted]]. It certainly fits in with ComicBook/{{the Joker}}'s common portrayal of an [[MultipleChoicePast ambiguous and inconsistent backstory]].

* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'': There’s one theory that suggests that Peter has completely lost all of his sanity and that the entire show takes place in his head. The theory goes that his family was once happy and healthy, but one day, Meg and Chris died in a car crash. Unable to cope with the loss, Lois committed suicide while she was still pregnant with Stewie. Unable to deal with the stress of his day-to-day life, he slowly lost his mind. This explains why he’s able to commit so many crimes and get away with them scot free. He takes out all of his anger on Meg, since he blames her for causing the whole mess, and Stewie hates Lois because she never gave him the chance to live a proper life.

* A post doing the rounds on social media suggested that ''Series/{{Friends}}'' "should have" ended with the reveal that Pheobe was actually still living on the streets, and had been watching these people through the window of Central Perk, but had no idea who they actually were.

* It's been a running joke in the ''Series/DoctorWho'' fandom that dissatisfied fans decide to write off developments they dislike by positing that all events after some point take place only in the Doctor's imagination: For example, that the Sixth Doctor never left the Matrix in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS23E4TheUltimateFoe The Ultimate Foe]]", or the Fourth never left the Matrix in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E3TheDeadlyAssassin The Deadly Assassin]]", or the Second never left the Land of Fiction in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E2TheMindRobber The Mind Robber]]".

* It's an interesting coincidence that most of the crazier sci-fi things on ''Series/RedDwarf'' -- Backwards universes, shapeshifters, teleporters, time machines, [[TheOtherDarrin Kryten's new personality]] -- all happened after the crew entered that total immersion video game, "Better Than Life". Since then, their lives had been fun and interesting, with the universe as their sandbox. Did they ever actually leave it? According to Elderly Lister's tattoo back in the second episode, they probably didn't. (Either that, or this was part of an AbortedArc that was scrapped when the show got a better budget and could do cooler things.)