History Main / DreamWithinADream

* ''TheSimpsons''

* ''Animation/HappyHeroes'': In Season 5 episode 21, Big M. is told by the commander to hand in his plan to invade Planet Xing by tomorrow and finds that he hasn't written anything down for the plan yet. He then wakes up to find that it was just a dream and that he managed to write one up... only to then wake up from that dream and find that he really hasn't written anything yet.

The main character dreams that a giant cantaloupe is out to get him, then wakes up with a start. After a moment of [[CatapultNightmare sitting up and panting]], he realizes it was AllJustADream, then gets up and goes to the bathroom for a glass of water — [[OrWasItADream only to find the giant cantaloupe there waiting for him]]. He wakes up with a start ''again'', because of course the first waking-up bit was part of the dream. Also available in "Dream Within a Dream Within a Dream", "Dream Within a Dream Within a Dream Within a Dream", and so on, although some discretion is preferred.

* The series finale of ''Series/TheBrittasEmpire'' has at one point Gordon being knocked unconscious by an angry goose. He initially wakes up in Noah's Ark, with several of the female cast of the show stating that they've got to repopulate the world. After this, he then wakes up on his way to the interview for the centre, revealing that the entirety of the series was AllJustADream. Even weirder, he has mentioned having literal dreams earlier on in the series, leading to a possible dream within a dream within a dream scenario.

* ''ComicStrip/{{Crabgrass}}'': Kevin has one in [[https://www.gocomics.com/crabgrass/2019/08/12 this comic]]. First he wakes up and misses the bus to school, wich turns out to be a dream. Not wanting it to become reality, he rushes downstairs, only to be told that it's saturday. That too is a dream. He then wakes up for real.
* Parodied in a ''ComicBook/FoxTrot'' strip; Jason dreams he's one of Franchise/TheAvengers, then he wakes up and dreams [[Film/ANewHope he's on Tatooine]], then he wakes up and dreams he's in [[Film/TheLordOfTheRings Middle-earth]]. Then he actually wakes up, and Andy says it was a mistake to let him see ''Film/{{Inception}}''.

* Parodied in a ''ComicBook/FoxTrot'' strip; Jason dreams he's one of Franchise/TheAvengers, then he wakes up and dreams he's in [[Film/TheLordOfTheRings Middle-earth]], then he wakes up and dreams [[Film/ANewHope he's on Tatooine]]. Then he actually wakes up, and Andy says it was a mistake to let him see ''Film/{{Inception}}''.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''
** Happens in #41: ''The Familiar'' as part of the setup and backstory early in the novel.
** Even more prominently in #48: ''The Return''.
* ''Literature/{{Arthur}}'' used this on one occasion, with the eponymous character remarking "Man, I hate double-dreams."

* Happens to the main character in [[Creator/NikolaiGogol Nikolai Gogol's]] ''The Portrait''.
* Nypre gets trapped in one during the first book of the ''Literature/StoriesOfNypre'' series.

* ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'': Candace finally busts her brothers, that ends in disastrous results. In said dream, she sees Perry as an agent, causing her to wonder that whats Perry's been doing at breakfast. Suddenly, agents carried off the family, saying Perry has to relocate, ''then'' it turns it out it was just the platypus's dream. As explained in the finale recap song:

* As with the ''Jimmy Neutron'' example above, one episode of ''WesternAnimation/BackAtTheBarnyard'' ends with the "dream within someone else's dream" aspect, ending with the animals sleeping together. [[ItMakesSenseInContext With Abraham Lincoln.]] [[OrWasItADream Cue screaming from the animals.]]

* In the ''WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes cartoon "A Waggily Tale", after a boy torments his dog, he ends up having a dream that he was a dog himself and saw what it was like to be on the other side. After waking up he tells his dog that from now on he'll treat him good, only for the dog to [[AsideComment tell the audience,]] "That's okay with me cause I'm not a dog neither. I'm really another little boy having a dream."

* Try ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb''. Candace finally busts her brothers, that ends in disastrous results. In said dream, she sees Perry as an agent, causing her to wonder that whats Perry's been doing at breakfast. Suddenly, agents carried off the family, saying Perry has to relocate, ''then'' it turns it out it was just the platypus's dream. As explained in the finale recap song:
-->'''Candace''': When my brothers got busted, it was only a dream!
-->'''Phineas''': But who had that dream, was it Perry or you?
-->'''Candace'''(''speaking''): Actually, I think my dream was ''inside'' of Perry's dream!
-->'''Buford''': My mind is blown!
* The "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS5E4BloomAndGloom Bloom and Gloom]]" episode of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' has Apple Bloom experience the GroundhogDayLoop version of this trope. Due to her stresses about [[DesperatelyLookingForAPurposeInLife getting her cutie mark]], she dreams about waking up in the morning with different cutie marks, each time with disastrous results. In the end, [[DreamWalker Princess]] [[DreamWeaver Luna]] helps Applebloom get her thoughts in order.

* Try ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb''. Candace finally busts her brothers, that ends in disastrous results. In said dream, she sees Perry as an agent, causing her to wonder that whats Perry's been doing at breakfast. Suddenly, agents carried off the family, saying Perry has to relocate, ''then'' it turns it out it was just the platypus's dream. As explained in the finale recap song:
-->'''Candace''': When my brothers got busted, it was only a dream!
-->'''Phineas''': But who had that dream, was it Perry or you?
-->'''Candace'''(''speaking''): Actually, I think my dream was ''inside'' of Perry's dream!
-->'''Buford''': My mind is blown!

* ''Anime/OruchubanEbichu'': In one infamous episode, Ma-kun has a quadruple DreamWithinADream involving his {{squick}}y sexual fantasies about the title character. Ebichu is a female ''hamster'' by the way.

* ''Literature/{{Paprika}}'': Dr. Chiba wakes up from a dream that was going wrong and goes with her colleague to confront the villain at his house, but realizes she's still dreaming when the bad guy shows up with [[CombatTentacles tree roots for a lower body]].
* In ''Manga/GAGeijutsukaArtDesignClass'', after falling asleep at a lecture on surrealism, Kisaragi ends up going into a bizarre dream. Then wakes up from that into another weird dream. This repeats a few more times until she finally wakes up.
* ''Anime/UruseiYatsura'': An episode centering around Mrs. Moroboshi involved her continually waking up, discovering that everything up until that moment had been a dream. There is even a suggestion that the events of the series are a dream, and the book The War of The Worlds is the actual reality. (Though she does wake up in another reality where both are true) The episode ends with the characters ringed around Mrs. Moroboshi and singing a children's song which is very chilling when you consider it's lyrics ("Oh little bird, when will you escape the bird-cage?")

* ''Mononoke Soushi'' had this for the main character's ally's StalkerWithACrush [[spoiler: combined with DyingDream]].
* ''Anime/HeatHazeDaze'': a boy named Hibiya and a girl named Hiyori go for a walk in a park, as Hiyori cradles a cat it leaps out of her hands and into a nearby road. Hiyori runs into the road after it, the traffic lights suddenly turn red and a truck appears almost out of nowhere and runs her over in front of Hibiya. He then blacks out and later awakes in his bed. he looks at the time which is sometime past 12 in the morning,on the 14th of august.(this was the day before Hiyori was killed),Later him and Hiyori go for a walk in the very same park. As he realizes that the same events that lead to Hiyori's death begin to happen, he says to her "why don't we go home now". And as she steps off of the pathway everyone surrounding them looks up; a large iron pole falls from a building and pierces through hiyori's body...killing her. Hiyiba blacks out again and wakes up on his bed, this cycle continues for decades until Hiyabi pushes Hiyori out of the way, saving her but killing himself.

* ''Anime/JewelpetMagicalChange'': The "Jewelpet: Currently on the Run" segment at the end of episode 28 has Labra catching Ruby... only for it to be a dream. And then it turns out to be Ruby's dream, and then Labra's again, then Ruby's, then Labra's, and so on and so forth. At the end of the segment, Labra wonders whose dream it is.

* Happens in ''Little Ego'' at least once. Ego wakes from a dream where she was trapped in harem only to find one of the harem girls is in bed with her. She awakes a second time as the harem girl starts trying to have her way with her.
* The comic ''Future Shock'' starts with a woman at her home being attacked, only to wake up in her bed. After a short while, we discover that this is also a dream; she is in her psychiatrist's office .... or is she?? At the end of the comic, we discover "said" psychiatrist is actually a patient himself having his own dream. Trippy, isn't it????

* The main focus of ''Film/{{Inception}}''. The protagonists are professional dream-thieves, hired to steal information from inside people's heads. For the plot of the film, they've instead been hired to alter a man's behaviour by altering his dreams; the more subtle manipulation requires multiple recursive levels of dreaming. For this job, they attempt to create a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. [[spoiler: Later, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, hitting a dangerously deep and [[BeyondTheImpossible theoretically impossible]] fourth layer.]] It's become so well known for this that a "[blank] within a [blank]" is often dubbed "[[MemeticMutation [blank]-ception.]]" [[labelnote:*]][[YouKeepUsingThatWord Mistakenly]], since in the movie, the word "inception" only refers to using a dream to plant an idea in someone's mind.[[/labelnote]]
* ''Film/TheDiscreetCharmOfTheBourgeoisie'': The bizarre scene where the group goes to dinner at the colonel's house, only to find that they are in a stage play, is eventually revealed to be a dream of Henri's. Then they go to the colonel's for real, except it's not for real, as that scene is revealed to be a dream of Francois's.
* The ''Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet'' series: This is a common staple of the movies, where the villain Freddy Krueger killed people in their dreams. He's chasing someone, and they wake up! They're safe! Oops, no, they aren't, waking up was a dream too!
* ''Film/TheMatrix'': Subverted in the beginning, where the main character later finds out that all the "nested dreams" were real after all. Well, real inside the virtual reality he inhabits, at least.
-->'''Morpheus:''' You are a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically this is not far from the truth.
* ''Film/TheHungerGamesMockingjay'' part 1 shows Katniss dreaming about a nightmare dream.

* In ''[[Film/MerlinsShopOfMysticalWonders The Devil's Gift]]'', David walks into his kitchen and notices a bloodied arm. He is then attacked by some kind of furry monster (which has nothing to do with the rest of the film). David wakes up from this nightmare in his bedroom, and is again attacked by the monster, waking him a second time, this time from his couch. When ''The Devil's Gift'' was edited into the family-friendly anthology ''Film/MerlinsShopOfMysticalWonders'', this graphic scene was omitted, for obvious reasons.
* In ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'', Picard wakes up after dreaming about his assimilation into the Borg Collective some years earlier, during which various robotic parts were grafted onto his body. As he freshens up, one of these (long-removed) components breaks through his cheek from the inside -- and he then wakes up for real.
* In ''Film/TheWickerMan2006'', Edward Malus dreams of himself swimming towards the lifeless body of his daughter floating in the water. He then wakes up, only to find himself holding her soaked, lifeless body in his arms. He wakes up for real the third time around and curses.
* In the Korean film ''Film/ATaleOfTwoSisters'', Su-Mi is dreaming of a strange, confusing and creepy encounter in the forest with her dead mother, in which she reaches out and grabs her mother's arm, which suddenly starts to bleed profusely, staining her dress. She is startled awake. A few seconds later, however, she hears a faint scratching sound at the foot of her bed. As she slowly sits up and looks, she sees a ghostly woman with long black hair and deathly pale skin crawling along her floor [[spoiler:(who also seems to bear a close resemblance to the girls' late mother)]], who suddenly rears up and begins to slowly make her way towards Su-Mi, who is paralyzed with fear. When the ghost is standing directly above her, her leg starts to bleed as a hand suddenly emerges from between her legs. Su-Mi then wakes up for real.
* ''Film/TheDeathsOfIanStone'' begins with the hockey player Ian Stone having a bad night due to a biased referee. On the way home, he gets run over by a train, and wakes up and realizes he's the office worker Ian Stone. He lasts a day before getting [[spoiler:stabbed by his girlfriend]], and wakes up just in time to avoid crashing the taxi he's driving. And it only continues from there...
* ''Film/InTheMouthOfMadness'': The protagonist dreams of witnessing a cop beating a graffiti artist in a dark alley, an event he witnessed earlier that night, but now the cop is a deformed monster. He wakes up... and sees the monster-cop sitting next to him, and wakes up again.
** Another example has Trent falling asleep on a coach and dreaming Sutter Cane (the author of the book he is investigating) is sitting next to him. Cane says, "did you know my favourite colour is blue?" at which point Trent wakes up to find the whole world bathed in a blue tint. After an ALMIGHTY freakout, he wakes up again.

** Subverted in ''Film/TheLionTheWitchAndTheWardrobe''. The Pevensies are chasing the White Stag at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When they see the Lamp Post, it seems vaguely familiar- as if it were from "a dream within a dream". But it turns out that the Lamp Post was real, and so was the "Spare Oom", and now they were heading back to England- to the exact same moment in time they departed it.

* ''Film/SuckerPunch'' has women in an insane asylum imagining that they are in a mob brothel. From there, they then imagine they are ass-whomping ninjas or commandos in fantasyscapes.

* The story of ''La belle captive'' is a dream within a dream. Or is it?

* ''Film/ChildrenOfTheCorn''
** Father Nolan in [[Film/ChildrenOfTheCornIIIUrbanHarvest the third film]] keeps seeing nightmares about the children, and at one point wakes up into another nightmare of being confronted by Eli before waking up for real.
** Grace in [[Film/ChildrenOfTheCornIVTheGathering the fourth film]] has a nightmare where she sees Margaret suddenly having wounds on her face and begging for help. She then wakes up to another nightmare where she is stabbed by her.
* In ''Film/TheWolfman2010'', during one of Lawrence's hallucinations while in the Asylum and while healing.
* ''Film/{{Aliens}}'' starts off with Ripley having a false awakening which ends in a ChestBurster attack.
* In Korean horror film ''Film/KillerToon'', Ji-yun is relaxing in her indoor pool when she's assaulted by the ghost of her recently murdered publisher. The ghost is about to kill her when Ji-yun wakes up in her pool--whereupon the pool starts to fill with blood. Ji-yun then wakes up for real in her bed.
* ''Film/{{Nightwish}}'': Most of the film is revealed to be [[spoiler:one long nightmare experienced by Kim as she's undergoing sensory deprivation in a laboratory.]] During the dream, while trapped in an alien cave, she falls asleep at least once. And at the end it turns out that [[spoiler:she's still not awake even after she wakes up in the lab room.]]
* In ''Film/WhenEvilCalls'', Samantha has a dream in which she is confronted by the MonsterClown who fixed her phone and granted her wish. She awakens from this only for her to encounter the clown, making her realise that she is still asleep and that everything that has happened since she made her wish is indirectly her fault. When she awakens for real, she does so by [[CatapultNightmare sitting bolt upright in bed]].

* In ''Film/Revenge2017'', Jen has an absolutely vicious one with so many layers that [[Film/{{Inception}} Dom Cobb]] would turn green with envy, courtesy of a [[MushroomSamba really bad peyote trip]].
* In ''Film/ASafePlace1971'', the magician tells Susan a story about dreaming that he woke up, then went back to sleep.

* In ''The Tragedy Of Man'' Adam in his dream impersonates Kepler. Then falls asleep, dreams about being Danton in the French Revolution and when he was executed, he woke up and found himself back in Prague as Kepler.
* In John Crowley's ''Literature/LittleBigOrTheFairiesParliament'', Sophie makes a deliberate practice of spinning baroquely nested dreams, until at times she (and on at least one occasion Daily Alice) is not certain whether she is asleep or awake.

* In ''Literature/{{Tempted}}'', Zoey is shown a vision of Kalona's past in a dream.
* Nypre gets trapped in one during the first book of the ''Literature/StoriesOfNypre'' series.

* Happens several times, to various characters, in Creator/KimNewman's horror novel ''Literature/BadDreams''. At one point, the heroine spends several (short) chapters cycling through the same two dreams, waking from each into the other, until she finds a way to break the cycle.

* An episode of ''Series/{{Dallas}}'' saw Sue Ellen awake from a surreal nightmare in which she was chased by a shadowy JR in his car. Several episodes later Pam wakes up, revealing the entire season to have been a dream - including Sue Ellen's nightmare. A whole skit was made around it in [[http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=224715 this]] Saturday Night Live Digital Short.

** In "The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati", Mulder dreams of a little boy on a deserted beach building a UFO out of sand while dreaming/hallucinating a world in which he is married to Diana Fowley, his sister is alive with children, the Smoking Man is good, and there is no Truth, no X-Files, and no Scully. It has been speculated that the little boy in the dream is either Mulder's inner child or that it was a prophetic dream foretelling the bith of Baby William, his and Scully's son. William is not yet conceived in this episode, but is by the end of the season.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts3DDreamDropDistance'': [[spoiler:Sora is forced into this situation when put into slumber in The World That Never Was, being forced to confront all of the existences linked to his own. It also turns out that Riku, instead of merely entering the dream worlds, entered Sora's dreams of the dream worlds as a Spirit Dream Eater.]]
* If the player fails to meet a loan deadline in ''VideoGame/{{Recettear}}'' and loses Recette's shop/home, Recette, after a brief [[NonStandardGameOver bad]] [[DownerEnding ending]], wakes up on the day that the shop opens to find that it was all just a bad dream. Losing more than once would turn into this trope.
* Happens in ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam'' if you get hit by one of [[BigBad Antasma's]] attacks [[spoiler: when fighting him in the Dream World. Mario ends up falling into a nightmare with Antasma chasing him through a death course. He has to find the right portal to escape and resume the battle]]. This Trope is also mentioned by a certain NPC as something that's very dangerous in general.
* This is the conceit of the indie horror game ''VideoGame/NeverendingNightmares'', as the title would suggest. You play Thomas, a young man trapped in an abandoned house full of monsters and ghosts; if Thomas get caught by one, he wakes up back in the nearest bedroom and you have to start again from there.
* ''VideoGame/DotFlow'' is heavily implied to be this upon beginning the end-game. To initiate the end-game section and have Sabitsuki [[spoiler:turn into [[SplitPersonality Rust]] ]] [[DreamWithinADream you must be in flow while already being in flow]], the lines are further blurred by the bizarre video that plays when you go in flow for the first time after getting all 25 effects, you then are forcefully [[OrWasItADream woken up to reality]]. Not to mention the waking up animation when [[spoiler:your playing as Rust]] is changed into a red static that closes up on your sprite compared to the normal pinched cheeks animation.
* ''Knock Harder'' is an action/horror game where your'e trapped in a series of recursive dreams by a brain-eating alien parasite. In each stage you have to figure out whether you're dreaming or not, then commit suicide or otherwise get yourself killed so you can wake up before the alien consumes your brain. Obviously, you have to make sure you're still dreaming so you don't accidentally die for real.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Superliminal}}'', you sign up for an experimental dream therapy session, only to find yourself trapped in a seemingly endless series of dreams where you have to solve puzzles based on PerspectiveMagic to proceed. [[spoiler: The "orientation accident" turns out to have been staged, as part of a ploy by your therapist to test your determination and ability to overcome obstacles.]]

* ''Webcomic/{{Alice|Webcomic}}'' has an adventure as a [[TheChosenOne dragonslayer]] (starting [[http://alice.alicecomics.com/alicecomics/dragonslayer-1/ here]]), which turns out to be a dream within a DreamWithinADream.
* The dreams in ''Webcomic/{{Builder}}'' are composed of 3 layers, each one wider than the other.

* The "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS5E4BloomAndGloom Bloom and Gloom]]" episode of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' has Apple Bloom experience the GroundhogDayLoop version of this trope. Due to her stresses about [[DesperatelyLookingForAPurposeInLife getting her cutie mark]], she dreams about waking up in the morning with different cutie marks, each time with disastrous results. In the end, [[DreamWalker Princess]] [[DreamWeaver Luna]] helps Applebloom get her thoughts in order.

* After the bizarre events of ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'''s Season 2 episode "City on the Edge of Forever", Cartman [[AllJustADream wakes up from the dream]] only to have his mother feed him insects for breakfast. This is instantaneously followed by Stan waking up and telling Kyle about both this and everything that happened prior.

* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheAdventuresOfJimmyNeutronBoyGenius'' ends with a chain of "dream within someone else's dream"s, ending with a monster pizza and his wife. [[ItMakesSenseInContext No,]] [[GainaxEnding really.]]
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'':
** In the episode "The Sting", Leela goes into a coma after being stung by a space bee, although at this point both she and the audience are unaware of this. She keeps having many Dreams Within A Dream, which convince her she's going insane, before awakening at the end of the episode.
** Bender has a similar experience in "Obsoletely Fabulous".
* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' once did an intro in the episode "Brian in Love", which involves a parody of ''Series/MisterRogersNeighborhood''. Mr. Rogers greets the audience and hears Trolley coming by, but it turns out that Stewie is riding Trolley holding his ray gun and he reveals to Mr. Rogers that he wreaked havoc on the Neighborhood of Make Believe. After that, Stewie makes Mr. Rogers kneel and threatens to kill him, but Mr. Rogers is pleading for Stewie not to shoot him. Stewie eventually shoots him -- but then he wakes up from this looking up to Lois, who tells him that he's just talking asleep. But it turns out that Lois is actually Mr. Rogers in disguise, as he pulls his Lois mask off in a menacing manner. Stewie wakes up again, this time with [[CatapultNightmare a catapult scream]].
** Happened to Mayor West in "Grumpy Old Man". Upon regaining consciousness from a multi-car accident, his egg shattered on his windshield which was his high school project before realizing he's not in high school and he's dreaming. Cuts to West waking up in a desert until that's a dream and wakes up from a car accident with his egg intact and buckled.
** The episode "Big Fat" begins with the Griffins visiting their new neighbours, [[WesternAnimation/AmericanDad The Smith family.]] All goes well until Peter reveals to Quagmire over the phone that the Smiths have been hiding an alien and Stan shoots him dead. Peter then wakes up, relieved that it was all a dream. Then [[WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill Hank Hill]] enters the room, asking Lois "What is that fat man doing in our bed?" Then ''he'' wakes up.
-->'''Hank Hill:''' Damn it! I always wake up before I find out if they can understand the baby.

* In the ''Justice Friends'' segment of ''WesternAnimation/DextersLaboratory'', an episode had Krunk watching a Puppet Pal marathon, and entering the land of the Puppet Pals after being guided by a zebra. After a mess occurs, he wakes up discovering it was AllJustADream... and [[OrWasItADream the zebra appears]]. It cuts to one of the Puppet Pals waking up from the Dream Within a Dream, complaining "Remind me to never watch the Justice Friends marathon again!".

* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheGarfieldShow'', Odie has a dream, of where he has flying abilities much like Superman. He is waken twice by Garfield. After Garfield and Odie talk the second time around, we see Garfield walk downtown, walking unintentionally into cement, a girl poodle tries to help him, but they both get stuck. Odie comes to the rescue with his flying abilities. After a while, we see Garfield wake up frantically. He talks to Odie who is trying to sleep, and as he goes back to sleep, Odie does too once again dreaming of being a super dog.
* Lampshaded in the Disney's run of ''WesternAnimation/{{Doug}}'', when Doug thought Skeeter was vampire, dreaming of himself visiting his friend and finding the proof of Skeeter's vampire nature along with a notepad of people to bite with Patty being next. Doug rushes to her house only to find out Skeeter beat him to it what more it was ''Doug's'' turn to be bitten as vampire Patty points out. Soon his other now undead friends appear and advance on him. Doug then wakes up and relived it was a dream till Sketter and Patty bats suddenly appear. This makes Doug wake up for real moaning "I hate double dreams!"
* In ''WesternAnimation/RockosModernLife'', the episode "To Heck and Back" begins with Karen (a chicken) interviewing for a job. She gets the job, but it turns out that the job is being processed and packed to be sold at a grocery. The episode continues with Heffer and Rocko at the Chokey Chicken, where Heffer dies after choking on a chicken bone. When he arrives in hell, he is "oriented" by Peaches, a devil, and shows him clips of his sins. Eventually, Rocko manages to save Heffer, and he comes back to life. After a few minutes, Rocko reveals himself to be Peaches, and Heffer wakes up in his room. After calming down, Heffer's house turns into the giant head of Peaches, and Heffer finally wakes up at Rocko's front lawn. He goes to Rocko and meets Karen, the chicken at the beginning of the episode, who is headed to the Chokey Chicken corporation for an interview.
** "Tickled Pinky" did this too, where Rocko dreams that he's in a room full of organs in jars begging not to be cut out, then wakes into another dream where he and Pinky (his appendix) go to a carnival and other things, before waking up from the surgery for real.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'' Christmas special begins with Dr. Venture as Scrooge being shown his own grave. Like Scrooge, he wakes from the dream a changed man, his heart grown three sizes, nose glowing red and flying - he wakes up again, his face on the tv remote as the set clicks from one Christmas special to another. At the end of the show, his Christmas party ends abruptly as the compound erupts in an explosion set up by the Monarch. He wakes up yet again in the family jet, which has crash-landed in Bethlehem.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/LoonaticsUnleashed'' episode "Time After Time", Ace Bunny suffers from this due to a GroundhogDayLoop.
* In the British cartoon series ''WesternAnimation/CaptainZedAndTheZeeZone'', one episode has the eponymous character assigned to help a particular kid who was getting nightmares. The thing is, he has to leave a kid's dream before the kid he's helping wakes up, or he will be teleported to the real world with said kid and no way to get back to the dream dimension (the eponymous Zee Zone, where the minds of humans get teleported to magically every night when they sleep). Said kid does apparently wake up and it appears that Captain Zed and his partner were also sent to the real world with no way of getting back, but it turns out to be a dream within a dream. It took a while before Captain Zed realizes it and uses it to his advantage and save both the kid's dream and himself.
* [[PlayingWithTropes Played with]] in the ''[[WesternAnimation/BeavisAndButtHead Beavis and Butt-Head]]'' episode "Cow Tipping" when the duo are watching Music/ViolentFemmes' video for "Nightmares". Beavis mentions that he had a "real scary" nightmare the night before where "everything sucked". Butt-Head replies "But Beavis, everything ''does'' suck!", causing Beavis, after a brief pause cueing a ScareChord, to scream in terror under the "revelation" that he is still in such a dream. The rest of the scene involves Beavis doing this every time Butt-Head ''or'' Beavis himself mentions that something "sucks".
* ''WesternAnimation/ScoobyDooMysteryIncorporated'': Scooby experiences one at the start of "Stand and Deliver". He dreams he is sharing a romantic dinner with Nova when it is attacked by killer robots. He then wakes up in Nova's hospital room, which is then attacked by the same killer robots. He then wakes up for real and blames the dream on eating too many doughnuts before going to sleep.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheGrimAdventuresOfBillyAndMandy'''s movie Big Boogie Adventure, Mandy gets trapped in the Boogey Man's dream world where she keeps "waking up" from progressively stranger dreams as a way of breaking her will. Irwin saves her with a kiss, which she dismisses as the next dream and asks to move along. When she finds out this is reality, she runs to vomit.
* As with the ''Jimmy Neutron'' example above, one episode of ''WesternAnimation/BackAtTheBarnyard'' ends with the "dream within someone else's dream" aspect, ending with the animals sleeping together. [[ItMakesSenseInContext With Abraham Lincoln.]] [[OrWasItADream Cue screaming from the animals.]]
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Chaotic}}'': In "Chaotic Crisis", Kaz has a dream that all the creatures of Perim have invaded Chaotic and are ready to invade the real world, and wakes up when he averts the crisis, only to see his teacher about to start the invasion all over again, waking up once more. Thinking he's awake for real this time, he gets a call on his scanner from a girl he was crushing on, and begins to realize he's ''still'' dreaming.
* In ''WesternAnimation/PoetAndersonTheDreamWalker'', Poet's teleportation power is a "dream within a dream transport", albeit one he can't control until later. For example, Jonas' attempt to escape the Center for Sleep Science leads to him being confronted on a subway car by his Night Terror, which leads to him using his glowy eye power to teleport into a dirty, disheveled bathroom as Poet. The film cuts to Sam looking over him, showing that within that entire chain of events, he was sleeping the entire time.
* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheLoudHouse'' where Lincoln wonders what it would be like if he had [[Rule63 ten brothers instead of ten sisters,]] [[BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor but later gets sick of it after seeing what it would apparently be like.]] However, when trying to get back to his original world, he ends up in a dimension where, while more or less exactly the same as his original world, the sexes of Lincoln and his sisters are the exact opposites--meaning that '''[[GenderBender Linka]]''' [[GenderBender Loud]] [[AlternateSelf (Lincoln's female counterpart)]] is the middle child and only ''daughter'' of the eleven Loud children. [[AllJustADream Oh, and then it turns out that the events of the episode were just some really weird nightmare that Lincoln was having.]]
* The ''WesternAnimation/SheepInTheBigCity'' episode "To Sheep, Perchance to Dream", much to the narrator's annoyance, revolved around bizarre events being explained away as [[AllJustADream actually being dreams the characters were having]]. At one point, Lady Richington wakes up from a nightmare about her poodle Swanky marrying Sheep and finds to her horror that Swanky has a wedding ring on her paw. After that, she wakes up again to see that discovering the wedding ring was also a dream.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes cartoon "A Waggily Tale", after a boy torments his dog, he ends up having a dream that he was a dog himself and saw what it was like to be on the other side. After waking up he tells his dog that from now on he'll treat him good, only for the dog to [[AsideComment tell the audience,]] "That's okay with me cause I'm not a dog neither. I'm really another little boy having a dream."
* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Rugrats}}'' episode, "[[Recap/RugratsS3E18InTheDreamtimeTheUnfairPair In the Dreamtime]]", Chuckie has a dream that takes place in a dream of his, and in the end, it all turns out to be Chas' dream.

[[quoteright:281:[[Webcomic/RoosterTeethComics https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rtjasonzzz.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:281:[[https://roosterteethcomics.com/comic/great-minds-sleep-alike/ Great minds dream alike.]]]]

[[caption-width-right:281:Great minds dream alike.]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'': In ''Literature/SkinGame'' Harry gets knocked out and get berated by his subconsciousness and then seems to wake to find Murphy flirting with him and then joining him in bed, just as it seems they finally [[WillTheyAreWontThey Will]] she pulls out a gun and shoots him in the face which jolts him properly awake.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''
** Happens in #41: ''The Familiar'' as part of the setup and backstory early in the novel.
** Even more prominently in #48: ''The Return''.

* Of course as noted above, this trope is TruthInTelevision. However the ''other'' version of this trope is also technically possible if you choose to sleep inside of the dream you're having, then have a dream inside of the dream.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaLinksAwakening'' [[spoiler:is AllJustADream, and within that game there's an area called the Dream Shrine which you access by climbing into a bed and going to sleep.]]

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* Used in WebAnimation/LuckyDayForever to reveal that [[spoiler: the scene where 514 escaped from the LotusEaterMachine and jumped into a screen to make love with a White with Sasiadka's face is all in Sasiadka and 514's minds.]]

* Oh. My. God. ''Sonic's Nightmare''. It starts with a ''Anime/SonicX''-esque sequence of him and Chris, then he keeps waking up, finds characters sleeping next to him and screams at them.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaLinksAwakening'' is AllJustADream, and within that game there's an area called the Dream Shrine which you access by climbing into a bed and going to sleep.

* A variation in the music video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSmOvYzSeaQ "Amazing"]] by Music/{{Aerosmith}}. A guy lives VR fantasies with Alicia Silverstone. That is itself revealed to be a VR fantasy of Alicia Silverstone.