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alt title(s): It Was All Just A Dream Darkwing:: Wait, you're telling me I went through all that mental anguish over a dream? What a cheat!
Around 50 minutes into the program, really weird stuff starts happening, like little people juggling while riding a tricycle around a bewildered protagonist. Then the protagonist realizes, just as you do, that this has all been a dream, a really bad hallucination, or some other escape from reality.
Sometimes, the character wakes up after the dream, realizes it was all "just a dream" (often actually saying this to himself, which rarely happens in real life), sighs with relief, and then sees an artifact lying next to him that was in the dream. This usually will leave protagonist and audience wondering " Or Was It A Dream?" However, it may be an opening gambit in a Dream Within A Dream sequence.
Sometimes the dream lasts longer than one episode — entire seasons have been known to turn out to be dreams. Often, when the dreamer awakens, the really epic events (death of a major character, etc.) from the "dream season" will be reversed. Or maybe the "waking up" is the dream?
If the show's other characters start acting out of character or otherwise just don't seem to be quite themselves during the dream sequence, expect lots of finger-pointing and exclamations of " And You Were There!" when the dreaming character awakens.
Normally, this really grates on the audience; but if done properly, it can be humorous, and for an individual episode, it can undo damage done if during that episode there was a Writer On Board.
At least one children's author opens a book by promising that the forthcoming events will not be All Just A Dream.
It's also a popular trope for music videos.
Variant form of the Reset Button. See also Pinch Me, Dying Dream, Push Pop Plot and Catapult Nightmare. If the dream is a quick-hit gag instead of a full episode, you have a Daydream Surprise. Not to be confused with Cuckoo Nest.
Examples
Anime
- The Season 2 opening of Genshiken starts with Sasahara opening a book... and then goes into an opening for a Mobile Suit Gundam-like series starring the Genshiken characters, including a helmeted Madarame as the antagonist. Then Sasahara wakes up and we see that he was looking at a sketch of the club members.
- The second season of Shakugan No Shana starts with Yuji trapped inside a dream (created by the real first villain of the season). Yuji picks up on some deja vu, but when complete scenes and defeated villains from the first season start showing up, then he knows something's wrong. No one will listen to him or tell him anything he—the one the dream is based on—doesn't already know. The dream falls apart once he pieces everything together, and he wakes up in the middle of a battle with that villain.
- Repeatedly used in several episodes of the anime series Ergo Proxy, due to the proxies, god-like beings who can shape-shift and invade human minds with horrifying ease. Several characters are subjected to this trope, but none more so than the main character, Vincent Law, to the point that when unexpected things happen in reality he assumes it's yet another dream. Half the time he's correct. Other times he's outright told he's being subjected to a dream, or is it a dream within a dream, or has it been reality all along? It's a wonder this show made any sense at all.
- One episode of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch was a very, very strange New Year's dream in which Lucia uses her Idol Singer powers to become famous.
- Cowboy Bebop has an odd example. Episode 11 appears to end with the entire crew of the Bebop dying. Then it's implied to be a dream in a short scene in the next episode where Spike wakes up. It's also pretty easy to miss, making it appear to be a complete Mind Screw.
- Or maybe the crew was just unconscious for an amount of time and the sign saying "The End" at the end was just a set-up for the preview.
- The idea is poked fun at in the 6th episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei's second season.
- Inverted in The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, in the sixth episode (chronologically). Kyon falls asleep, complete with explanations of REM- and Non-REM sleep and colorful visuals. Just at the climax of the episode, with Haruhi and him kissing, it abruptly cuts off and he falls off his bed. He then rants "What kind of dream was that? Sigmund Freud is gonna be laughing at me!" The next day, he meets Haruhi wearing a ponytail which he told her in the dream, looks good on her. After she also claimed to have had a bad dream, it is entirely obvious that it wasn't a dream.
- One of the great many interpretations of episodes 25-26 of Neon Geneisis Evangelion.
- One possible explanation for the recent filler arc in Bleach.
- Done humourously in the form of episode one of The Tower Of Druaga.
- A manga chapter of Mahoraba went from mild out-of-character moments for the other characters to intensely bizarre rooftop battles against a giant monster. At the end of the chapter, there is a chart which grades the reader based on when they figured out that the chapter was in fact a dream.
- Alien Nine has main character Yuri doing this Once An Episode, each dream focusing on her fear of aliens, each one getting closer and closer to Nightmare Fuel proportions until the Mind Rape sequence in the final episode.
Comic Books
- The last issue of Gen-13, vol. 1 combined this with a Downer Ending: The team - along with various other gen-active teens they'd met along the course of the series, had one last hedonistic, live-like-there's-no-tomorrow-cuz-there-ain't good time before "The End". Turns out this was all in Caitlin Fairchild's head, an extended hallucination brought on by the effects of another gen-active's powers in the split-second before a Death Trap disintegrated them all. (They got better).
- This has happened innumerable times in superhero comics as an "out" for a wacky story that doesn't fit into canon. So much so that it was common to include the blurb "Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!" on covers to reassure readers that no such cop-out would be used. Of course, since Covers Always Lie, they'd usually find some other cop-out that meant the events still weren't what they seemed.
- The current high-profile Batman: RIP storyline is (among other things) an attempt to bring the wackier Silver Age adventures of the Dark Knight in-canon by explaining them as hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation experiments. An original quote from one of those Silver-Age tales is a prominent part of the storyline (and very typical of the trope): "It would be far easier to consider this a dream...but how can I? For in my hand, I hold the BAT-RADIA!"
- Noteworthy in that the sensory deprivation experiment was not a Ret Con, but was itself a framing device in an actual Silver Age story. An alternative explanation provided for some of these episodes is the insinuation that they were hallucinations brought about by exposure to Joker toxin, Scarecrow's fear gas, etc.
- Tom Strong issues 29 & 30 had the titular hero awaken from his superheroic life into a gray world with no wonder or adventure where he was just a factory worker with a case of bad self-esteem. Then the clues mount that he really is a superhero - only to discover that he was a failed military experiment and all of his memories of a heroic life were delusions. But at the last moment, he breaks out of the hallucination - back into the superheroic world where the Big Bad of the story had been forcing him to hallucinate. He said later that he knew the world he had been in wasn't real because it was all gray, with no sense of hope or wonder in it. (Of course, a cynical person might just say that he was unable to cope with the truth and retreated into his dream-world ... ā la that much-referenced episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.)
- A two-week storyline in Fox Trot, parodying The Metamorphosis, has Jason waking up one morning to find he's turned into a miniature version of his sister, Paige. Midway through the story, he subverts this trope by saying he's figured out that he's dreaming, because he thinks that if this were real, Mulder and Scully would've come to investigate. (Dream-Peter then points out that Mulder and Scully are TV characters - and therefore only investigate incidents appropriate for primetime shows. Turning into a teenage girl is too horrific.)
- The Sandman. Quite a bit of it really is just a dream, but that doesn't make it any less real.
Film
- The Wizard Of Oz is the most famous film example, of course. This is original to the film; the book did not have it.
- Arguably done in Memento where we are left wondering whether or not the bit about Sammy Jenkis was true, or if Leonard was simply projecting himself on someone else.
- If you look carefully at the editing in one scene, it's pretty clearly the latter possibility.
- In Total Recall we are Left Hanging as to whether or not the entire film after the point he goes to Rekall is real or a hallucination. (Actually, as the technician is putting Quaid under he comments "Blue sky on Marsthat'll be the day", which pretty much settles the issue. Word Of God [1]
 confirms this interpretation, and points out other clues.)
- Word Of God has wobbled back and fourth on this one as the possibility of a sequel has risen and fallen.
- Subverted in 1408, where the protagonist "wakes up" from his harrowing ordeal in room 1408 to be told it was only a dream, only to find his surroundings literally demolished and stripped away to reveal that he is still in fact stuck in the hotel room.
- Reality and dreams are blurred in The Science Of Sleep.
- Throughout Pans Labyrinth, there are strong suggestions that certain aspects of the plot may be All Just A Dream. They aren't. They aren't? Chalk door, mandrake root!. Word Of God, thankfully, debunks that theory.
- In The Shining It sometimes got difficult to tell what was real and what were projections of the family's minds. Roger Ebert's review talks at length on the subject.
- The Descent. Did the crawlers exist, or was Sarah unable to handle the claustrophobia and stress of the already bad situation, causing her to imagine them and kill all her friends? Their existance will probably be confirmed in the sequel.
- Related to this is the film Atonement in which the entire conclusion of the plot (involving Briony taking back her evidence and Keira Knightley getting back together with her boyfriend) from the wedding of the rape victim and her rapist onwards is from the imagination of Briony. She reveals that James Mc Avoy's character in fact died while at Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed in the (real-life) flooding of Balham tube station by a German bomb.
- Vanilla Sky (2001), directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise. Remake of 1997 Spanish film Abre los Ojos, a.k.a. Open Your Eyes. After a car accident that kills his girlfriend and disfigures his face, the protagonist is haunted by increasingly bizarre occurences. The ending explains that everything that has occured after the car accident has been a dream. In real life, after the car accident, he signed a contract with a company that preserves its clients' bodies after death and keeps their brain waves active in lifelike virtual reality dreams, and then committed suicide. The bizarre occurences are explained as glitches in the program. In the end, he decides to wake up from the dream program.
- Ripley's nightmare of having an alien rip out of her chest near the beginning of Aliens.
- In Hackers, the two main characters (played by Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie) each have erotic dreams about the other at the same time.
- In Brazil, a dystopian sci-fi film, the entire, increasingly weird, ending of the film is revealed to be a fantasy in the mind of protagonist to "escape" from being tortured in a scene near the end of the film.
- Played very non-comedically in Happiness, where one of the characters apparently goes on a rampage through his neighbourhood with a machinegun, only to wake up. He's a... troubled guy. We later find out he's a paedophile. (One of this troper's friends evidently blinked during the wake-up scene, and wondered afterwards why nobody had come after him for the shootings.)
- Give My Regards To Broad Street. All portions of this film with plot are a dream, so it's a good thing this is a McCartney musical. This dream even has a Dream Within A Dream inside it.
- Phantasm..Or Is It?
- Lampshaded/parodied in Top Secret: Nick Rivers passes out under torture by the East German secret police and dreams he's back in high school about to take a test for which he hasn't studied. He wakes up back in the torture dungeon and smiles with relief, while being whipped: "Oh, thank God."
- A Nightmare On Elm Street toys with the boundaries between dreams and the real world throughout the film. At the end, the last surviving girl wakes up and thinks her entire ordeal has been a dream. Then Freddy takes control of the car she's in...
- Dead End Early in the film, the characters are all weary and very nearly get involved in a car crash, startling them awake. From here, things start to get weird. By the end, it transpires that nobody woke up in time to prevent the crash.
- Most of North is the title character's dream.
- Unlike in the original book, where the events did actually happen to the title character.
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari gives a particularly jarring version.
- Notably this was because of the Executive Meddling, which the creators despised, as the whole point was to show an evil, monstrous authority figure, but the censors of Weimar's Germany didn't like it. They apparently even made an extra twist for an alternative version where it wasn't dream after all, despite of all the attempts to convince otherwise.
- In Mirror Mask, (boy, Neil Gaiman sure loves dreams) Helena figures out pretty early on that the entire Magical Land is all a dream, populated by characters based on people she knows. However, the possibility is certainly left open that it isn't just a dream, when she meets someone who was in her dream, but she'd never met before in her day-to-day life.
- It's Neil Gaiman- it's never just a dream with him. I think where she wakes up and her chance meeting at the end make it pretty unlikely that it was, in this case.
- Happily subverted in Forbidden Kingdom. He's back in his own world, but has mysteriously gained self-confidence, and is a better fighter. Was it all a dream?...oh, wait, the old shop-keeper is actually the now-immortal Jackie Chan character!
- They didn't even try to play it straight. When he wakes up on the pavement, the cut he received in his "dream" is still there.
- Time Bandits seems to use this at first, with Kevin returning from being enveloped by smoke from one of the remnants of Evil by seemingly waking up in his room during a house fire.. but it doesn't just settle for an Or Was It A Dream and goes for a full-on subversion. The film ends with Kevin finding the photos he took on his journey, and discovering that the fire was started by the final fragment of Evil getting lodged in the toaster oven — which his parents promptly touch despite his warning and explode. Also, it's implied that the fireman that rescued him actually is King Agamemnon, not just another case of the film using the same actors for multiple characters.
- One of the few relatively certain things about the plot of Mulholland Drive is that it includes some element of this.
- Inverted in Rosemary's Baby. The titular character undergoes a series of increasingly bizarre dreams, culminating in her rape by a demonwhich, as she realizes partway through, isn't a dream at all.
- Open to interpretation in Click. Just as the main character is about to die, he wakes up at the Bed, Bath, and Beyond he laid down for a short while at the beginning. However, Morty and the magical remote turn out to be real. It could be that this was more of his imagination. Given the prevalance of time travel in this film, it could also be that Morty simply reversed time to the exact point at which he laid down in the bed.
- Tacked on at the end of 2002 Hong Kong flick Undiscovered Tomb.
- The Matrix, of course. The entire world the film starts in is All Just A Dream, albeit an artificially constructed one induced by an empire of evil computers. So Yeah.
Literature
- One of the classic uses of All Just A Dream in children's literature is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass.
- The most famous anecdote by Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuang Tzu has him relating how he had a dream that he was a butterfly, and upon waking up was unsure whether or not he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamed it was a man. Since he lived around the 3rd century BC, this trope is Older Than Feudalism.
- Polish author Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress features its narrator accosted by powerful mood-altering drugs that cause powerful hallucinations while he sleeps (perhaps they could just be called dreams?). He awakens from hallucination within hallucination, sometimes by degrees and sometimes suddenly, with such frequency that less than halfway through the book it becomes virtually impossible to tell whether he is really awake (one of the major themes of the book).
- Towards the end, Neil Gaiman's Coraline very briefly appears to pull this... however, it's almost instantly subverted; not only was it not just a dream, but Coraline's adventure isn't quite over, after all.
- In The Queen and I by Sue Townsend, the election of the British People's Republican Party and subsequent banishing of the Royal family to a council estate turns out to be an election night nightmare by the Queen.
- Subverted in the original Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant; Covenant starts out by believing that everything happening to him is a dream, and is then made to doubt this over the course of the trilogy. The question is deliberately left unresolved, although the Creator's intervention to save Covenant's life at the end strongly implies that the Land was real, as do the passages from the points of view of Hile Troy and Lord Mhoram.
- Subverted in Maximum Ride. A group of scientists unsuccessfully attempt to convince the protagonist that the events of the entire past three books were all a dream.
- Inverted in the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in which the dream has the protagonist escape from his execution and meet up with his family, only to end abruptly when he dies.
- The sequel to Rosemary's Baby, Son of Rosemary, makes both books All Just A Dream. (since this troper thought everyone in both books were morons, she found this funny rather than a Wall Banger...)
- Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler.
- One of Dickens's less well-known Christmas stories, The Chimes uses this. The main character, Toby Veck, discovers he's fallen from a bell tower to his death, and spends the next two chapters watching all kinds of disasters befall his loved ones because of their poverty. Just as his daughter is about to drown herself and her baby, and you think the only way to fix the situation is for it all to have been a dream, it turns out that it was all a dream. After a short happy scene, Dickens brings the mood down again by pointing out that even though he'd made his story turn out to be a dream, for many people the miserable parts were real life.
- An in-story example occurs in one of the Henry Huggins books where Henry has to play the lead in the school Christmas program about a boy going to the North Pole to visit Santa. He hates the role- a six-year-old boy, the costume- footy pajamas, and the ending- where it turns out he dreamed the whole thing. Beverly Cleary didn't seem to like this trope, either.
- Each sequence of Living In Oblivion is revealed to be All Just A Dream, a dream which is referenced in the following sequence. In the final sequence is about trying to film a dream sequence important to the production, and lampshades tropes typical of filmed dream sequences.
Theater
- The famous ballet The Nutcracker usually ends with the curtain closing on Clara awakening in her home with the titular Nutcracker in her arms, and realizing that all of her adventures were a dream. Some productions stick a little closer to the source material and subvert this trope instead when the Prince turns out to be Drosselmeyer's nephew, whose father had orchestrated the entire series of events in order to break the curse on him.
Live Action TV
- Marissa Clark run over by a car in Early Edition, "Run, Gary, Run".
- The X Files was fond of doing this as well (in one, Mulder and Scully have fungus-inspired hallucinations).
- In a particularly egregious case, Dallas undid an entire season as "just a dream". So did the sitcom Married With Children.
- To explain what happened in Dallas: the actor that played Bobby left the show, and they had Bobby hit by a car and died. After the ratings started to sink, and the actor came back, the writers retcon the entire season as a dream by Pam, causing several continuity snarls and messing up the Spin Off, Knots Landing, where it referenced Bobby's death in the story line.
- There's even more to this: Producer Leonard Katzman was kicked off the show at the same time Patrick Duffy left, only to be brought back at the cast's demand. Katzman hated a lot of stuff that was done to the show in his absence (primarily making the women much stronger characters), and so thought of a way make it never have happened.
- Sent up by Robert Rankin in Armageddon, The Musical. A planet of aliens have been controlling Earth so they can watch us as a soap opera. Meddling executives decide that allowing World War III was a mistake and try to reboot the series by having Elvis wake up and discover it was all a dream of what would happen if he joined the army instead of lending his voice to the anti-war movement. In minutes, the whole story turns into an Anachronism Stew.
- What happened in Married With Children was a case of Real Life Writes The Plot.
- There are actually quite a few in Married With Children. One involves Al taking a job as a janitor for a Private Eye only to become one himself and solve a diamond case, getting a big fat check as reward. 'Course per Status Quo it was just a dream of his. (This one was the season-erasing resolution.) Another has Al making a deal with the Devil to lead a football team to the Super Bowl. He gets his wish but is killed in a tackle and taken to Hell where his family and friends also end up (as a result of improbable accidents after his death, oddly enough). After a few days in Hell, Al can't take it anymore and challenges the Devil to a football match. The Devil picks some of the world worst historical figures for his team. Al manages to win (even though given an offer to go back with beautiful women and loads of cash which, in a rare moment selflessness, he passes up). Al then wakes up back where he was before the devil appeared and it appears to be a dream to him...least until he pulls out some Red Hots candy the Devil had given him.
- And in a particularly, particularly egregious case, the last episode of St Elsewhere reveals that the entire series has taken place in the mind of an autistic child.
- In fact, if you accept that crossovers between shows imply that they occupy the same fictional universe, an argument can be made that no fewer than 282 shows (external site) were figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination, including Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The aforementioned site seems to have a very low threshold for calling a show a cross-over, however; it includes minor shout outs as linkage. Another crossover database site (external site again) gives a more conservative estimate, setting fewer than a hundred shows within young Tommy's mind.
- This scene is parodied in the heatwave episode of News Radio, where at the end of the episode, everything is revealed to be a dream of an autistic Jimmy James in a direct replay of the St Elsewhere scene, down to Dave Nelson dressed as a construction worker. Fortunately, there's no connection to the actual St. Elsewhere, or we'd have to face a dreaming paradox dilemma.
- In general, few tropes irritate the audience more. But there are exceptions: Its application in the Newhart episode "The Last Newhart" resulted in what is widely considered one of the best series finales, ever. This is because it didn't use the trope without reason, instead tying it to Newhart's previous show, The Bob Newhart Show. Interestingly, The Bob Newhart Show received a crossover from St Elsewhere, which combined with the previous entry could make Newhart a Dream Within A Dream.
- In season 4 of Angel, an entire episode takes places in Angel's head, in which the events of the dream actually solve all the problems of the season's arc, right down to a soapy heroic happy ending. When the episode reveals to the viewers that it was all "just a dream", it's when the dream climaxes with Angel experiencing a moment of perfect happiness, causing him to lose his soul, waking up as the evil Angelus.
- The second failed resurrection of Crossroads, a British Soap Opera, ended by revealing the entire series had been the dream of a supermarket worker. Whether the first resurrection was just a dream as well is up to viewer interpretation.
- The season 1 finale of Reno 911 ended on a Cliff Hanger, which was revealed in the season 2 premiere to be a dream, in what turned out to be a dream sequence itself Dangle wakes up from the dream, to discover himself in bed with Kenny Rogers. This turns out to be a dream Garcia is having in the meeting room at the sheriff's station.
- Although the logic of including dream sequences in what is ostensibly a Cops-style documentary-type series is suspect at best...
- The Cosby Show did a number of these, normally precipitated by Cliff's consumption of a large sandwich near bedtime.
- An episode in Smallville both uses and subverts this trope, as a girl with dream-walking powers is the Monster Of The Week. Yes, it was all just a dream, but the damage was real.
- An episode of MacGyver in which the title character dreamed of his lookalike ancestor ended with an Or Was It A Dream moment when he woke to find he now possessed his ancestor's distinctive pocketknife.
- Happy Days somehow managed to Spin Off Mork And Mindy from an All Just A Dream episode.
- The final episode of Roseanne reveals that everything that happened since Roseanne got a writing room, and possibly everything before that, was a story written by her, switching some story lines (Jackie was the lesbian, Dan died after his heart attack, they never won the lottery) and ending with her beginning a career as a writer.
- The Dick Van Dyke Show's classic Twilight Zone parody "It May Look Like a Walnut."
- British surreal comedy series The Brittas Empire concluded with the revelation that the entirety of the programme, all 53 episodes, had been a dream. The title character had fallen asleep while on the train to the interview for the job that he'd had throughout the series. The other people in the dream (apart from his wife, who was the same in the dream and in real life) were actually people on the train with him, and he projected them into the dream.
- Interestingly used in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, where Chief O'Brien is arrested by aliens and serves out a 20-year prison sentence within a dream that lasts only hours. The rest of the episode shows him dealing with this experience and how it has changed him.
- DS 9 played with this again in "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Shadows and Symbols", where a science fiction writer in the 50's dreams about Deep Space Nine.
- It's also lampshaded in the dream when someone suggests making Benny's story turn out to be a dream to get around complaints about the hero being black.
- In fact, the producers toyed with the idea of making the entire series a figment of Benny Russel's imagination
- Similarly, in an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, an alien artifact which turns out to be a monument to a long-dead race gives Picard the experience of living the life of one of its makers in less than an hour. In an unusual twist, Picard leaves the dream with at least one skill he didn't have before entering it — that of playing a recorder-like instrument his dream-self was fond of. Slightly different from most examples in that Picard starts off knowing that the experience isn't real, but it lasts so long for him that he forgets.
- Stranger yet, if that civilization can teach a skill in 20 minutes through this process, it's a wonder that they weren't able to either save themselves or go as far as transcending being made of matter a la 2001.
- A slight variation of this happens to Commander Riker in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Frame of Mind".
- Star Trek Voyager plays with this trope a lot in "Barge of the Dead". B'Elanna Torres survives a shuttle accident, only to find it's all a dream and that she's actually on a barge taking dishonored souls to the Klingon afterlife.
B'ELANNA: "But I was on Voyager with my crew!"
KLINGON: "That was the naj — the dream before dying. When we can't accept that we've died, we create the illusion of life to hold on to."
B'ELANNA (seeing the helmsman, Kortar}: "He slaughtered my friends!"
KLINGON: "No. He slaughtered the dream. He dragged you from the illusion of life. This is where you belong."
After being rejected in favour of her mother B'Elanna wakes up in Voyager's sickbay with the —>same hand injury she received on the Barge. She then has to convince her shipmates she —>didn't imagine the whole thing, and that she has to return to the Barge (e.g. recreate her —>near-death experience) in order to save her mother.
B'ELANNA: "Look at this — The eleventh tome of Klavek. It's a story about Kahless returning from the dead still bearing a wound from the afterlife. A warning that what he experienced wasn't a dream. The same thing happened to me!"
- The BBC Program Life On Mars makes use of this, both as (seemingly) the circumstances of the main character (in a coma, dreaming the entire thing), and side instances where Sam wakes up in bed after being harangued by the Evil Test Card Girl. Not to mention the fact that... in the end Sam's adventures in the past turn out to be just a dream. One Sam commits suicide to get back to... if you believe that interpretation of the ending instead of one of the dozens of others.
- And after that, there's Ashes To Ashes.
- In the finale of the American version it turns out that the entire series, including the 2008 sequences in the first episode, being the dream of an astronaut in hibernation on his way to Mars
- Not so fast. The final shot of Gene Hunt's loafer hitting the Mars surface also calls into question the validity of the 2035 "reality". This could be another hallucination/coma-induced-trip or something, making this more of a Or Was It A Dream. Granted, all the symbolism adds up to the Mars reality being the real one, but...
- A House episode the season two finale "No Reason" was "All Just A Hallucination", and the episode ends minutes after its beginning. Still, the fact that it was a hallucination meant that it served as an exploration of House's mental state (rather than an excuse to kick the audience in the teeth at the end), which may be why this episode is not derided in the way that so many All Just A Dream episodes are. (Also, House discovering it was a hallucination was an important part of the plot and set up literally moments into the hallucination, so it was in accordance with the rules of fair play.)
- Furthermore, House uses an idea from his hallucination in real life that shows its effects throughout the next few episodes.
- Similarly, the end of the season five finale "Both Sides Now" revealed that the sequence in the previous episode where Cuddy helped House detox and then slept with him was also just a hallucination. In case I didn't make that clear: House hallucinates sex with Cuddy.
- A recent episode has House trying to kill a mosquito, but accidentally knocks off the valve to a propane tank and lights the stove. Cue explosion, cut to House waking up.
- There's nearly always a quick way to tell that House is dreaming. If he limps, then it's sad reality. If he doesn't, then it's a dream or an hallucination.
- The Sopranos had a lot of these as a way to get into Tony's head, although it was made apparent to the audience what they were.
- In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 episode "Normal Again," it is suggested that the entire series is a hallucination of the main character, who is living in a mental institution and has power fantasies of saving the world with her imaginary friends. The episode's end leaves room for interpretation as to whether it is really All Just A Dream.
- The first episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts out this way. Just so you know.
- Also, in the second season episode "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep", Sarah is taken captive and interrogated by a man she had killed in an earlier episode. It is then revealed that this was in fact a dream, and that Sarah was admitted to a sleep clinic, because of her insomnia. She keeps having this dream, while she suspects something bad is going on at the sleep clinic. Eventually, we find out the sleep clinic was in fact the dream, induced by the drugs given to her by the man who abducted her, for real.
- In the Monty Python "Cycling Tour" sketch, a bicyclist (Mr. Pither) ends up in a Soviet prison cell about to be executed. He is suddenly woken up by his mother and says "So, it was all a dream!" His mother says "No dear, this is the dream, you're still in the cell." He then wakes up for real, still in the cell.
- Likewise at the end of The Young Ones episode "Interesting" where Neil experiences something similar as he is about to be kicked in the head by skinheads.
- In The Twilight Zone TOS episode "Death Ship", an astronaut stranded on another planet dreams that he has returned to Earth and everything's all right. His commanding officer bodily enters his dream and literally drags him back to wakefulness. The Twilight Zone Twist? He and his commander are actually dead, and his dream was actually the afterlife he should have gone to.
- Another Twilight Zone episode "Shadow Play", a man on Death Row tells everyone they are all figments of his dream based on people from his life, and that when he's killed, he'll dream the same dream again, with everyone in different roles. As it turns out, he's right.
- In Blackadder (3rd season, 2nd episode) Blackadder dreams that he overslept and Dr. Johnson is arriving, whose dictionary has been burned. Then, Dr. Johnson suddenly confesses that he never liked the dictionary anyways, then things get really surreal... and then he really wakes up. Of course, he has overslept, the book is still burned, and Dr. Johnson is arriving.
- The Grand Finale of Seven Days pulled this one off, revealing that the entire show was a delusion of the main character, who started the show inside a mental institution.
- In one episode of Lost, Locke causes Boone to hallucinate that his step-sister/lover is being mutilated and killed by smearing goop on his head. Allegedly to teach Boone a lesson.
- Totally subverted in the 2008 Doctor Who episode "Silence in the Library". A little girl on what looks like present-day Earth dreams of a futuristic library in which several people (including the Doctor and Donna) are in danger. Her psychiatrist tells her confidentially (in a complete reversal of expectations) that her dream is real and that the people in danger need her help.
- Used as a bit of a fake out in Smallville season 6's Lana/Lex wedding. The episode begins with a ridiculously melodramatic wedding/murder/suicide scene, which is immediately revealed to be a dream. The rest of the episode tells the story out of order chronologically, with many of the scenes using the same lurid gothic style, faking the viewers out into thinking these scenes are also just a dream; unfortunately, none of them are. Instead, when the episode is over and no one wakes up from the terrible dream, the viewer is left with the slow, horrible realization that the gothic awfulness actually happened.
- The Red Dwarf episode Back to Reality had the whole show as a computer game played by the main characters. This turned out to be a group hallucination.
- Walker Texas Ranger had an entire dream episode, where Partner Trivette was revealed to have gotten killed at the beginning, and Walker died at the very end, but not before foiling the villains' plans anyway. When Walker's wife wakes up at the end of the episode, you find out that it may end up coming to pass anyway.
- Not even Hispanic Soap Opera escapes from this trope. To this troper's knowledge, there has been at least two soapies who ended with the implication that all the chapters we've seen has been just a Dream: Los Amores de Anita Peņa and Pecados Ajenos. However, the results were very different:
- In Los Amores..., who was a comedic soap who swinged between the Affectionate Parody and the Deconstruction, the whole thing was played for laughs, with the ghost characters of the people who died during the story lampshading the Twist Ending and openly decrying it in a full rupture of the Fourth Wall. However, the series gives not only a whole chapter after the reveal to close the few loose plots and point out the paralelisms between the "dream story" and the "real life", but also gives a happy ending for the heroine and the story: maybe her life isn't as exciting as it was in her "dream", but she is now truly happy with her son and her beloved husband.
- In contrast, in Pecados Ajenos (who was non-comedic and pretty gloomy for a traditional soap) not content with using this trope to reset the whole story, also used the reset to put the heroine in a worse condition than the one she began with. It also left unpunished some of the worst villains of the story (a big no-no in traditional hispanic soaps), and leaves the unsavory feeling that all the grisly, tragic and creepy things that happened during the soap are going to happen in the same way. Naturally, none of the viewers were happy with this.
- Used rather drastically on Seinfeld when, after Kramer persuades him to get an illegal cable hookup, Jerry dreams that he is graphically gunned down by the FBI. Then he wakes up and discovers the plane he's on is about to crash, which is real.
"What have you done to my little cable boy?!?"
- A Saturday Night Live Digital Short parodied this. A woman has a frightening dream about a zombie, and then wakes up and sees it, which then turns out to be All Just A Dream for the ZOMBIE. This then happens numerous times, ending with a woman waking up from a horrible dream sleeping next to Dracula.
- Also done on Mad Tv. It begins with the children of an elderly couple shocked by their parents' dirty dancing and ends with Stephnie Weir waking up from a dream "about a skit that has no ending".
- In Hannah Montana Jackson and Lilly end up dating after Miley tries to sabotage it. At the very end, despite it being a fairly normal story line and not all that much changing, it still turns out to be a dream.
- The Stargate episode "Absolute Power" used a dream that lasted most of the episode to show Daniel Jackson why getting access to the sum total of Goa'uld memory and technology would be a bad idea.
- Another episode uses this to much greater effect with Teal'c switching between reality and a world that is obviously (to the viewer) a dream. In the dream Jackson (a psychiatrist in that world) advises Teal'c to treat both worlds as real. Both worlds are hallucinations brought on by lack of Teal'c symbiote
- Subverted in the Regenesis episode "Unbottled", where after the episode's shocking turn of events, the scene skips to David waking up at home and talking about his "crazy nightmare" with Rachel, who in the dream was killed by the terrorists who had taken over their lab and forced them at gunpoint to help them make a biological weapon. But then she reminds him that it really did happen, and disappears, and the next shot shows that he was in bed alone.
- UFO. The episode "Ordeal" has a lengthy sequence where Colonel Foster is violently abducted by aliens and taken to their UFO which is later (after various Shoot The Dog arguments between his superiors) shot down by SHADO. Foster is recovered inside an alien spacesuit and is nearly killed having it removed. The whole thing turns out to be a dream experienced when he passed out in a sauna after over-indulging at a party. A more imaginative use of this trope occurs in "Mindbender", when a crystal found at a UFO crash site causes Commander Straker to hallucinate that he is an actor in a science-fiction TV series.
- The Spanish comedy Los Serrano finished this way, with the main character waking up to discover the entire series has been all just a dream. Fans were not pleased.
- A critic saw it in a slightly different light: if all was just a dream, that means that the atrocious Boy Band that spun off from the series never existed at all.
- A segment on The Daily Show featured Steve Carell's greatest fears (including Stephen Colbert taking over the show), leading to him waking up in terror— next to Jon Stewart.
- The Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Man-Eating House". Near the beginning, the characters discover and approach the title house. After a series of terrifying events, at the end the characters wake up and discover that the horrific events in the house were all just a nightmare. In the last scene, they find themselves approaching the house again.
- The Halloween episode of Dark Angel started fairly normal, then became progressively more wacky until the end revealed it was All Just A Dream.
- The Season 4 finale of Bones seemed to take place in an alternate universe where everyone worked in a nightclub called "The Lab" and Booth and Bones were married. Then, at the end of the episode, it turns out that it was just a dream Booth was having while he was in a coma.
- And this was after weeks of promotions that they were actually going to *have sex*. "We promise this time it's for real, not a dream sequence or anything". Right...
- In the final episode of "Sunset Beach" Meg wakes up back in Kansas and discovers that the entire show was just a dream, complete with And You Were There. In the very last scene she wakes up in her bed in Sunset Beach, and it turns out that the "it was just a dream" scene was... just a dream.
- In the ABC Afterschool Special My Mother was Never a Kid, Victoria Martin gets into an argument with her mother, and runs away from home. While she is on the subway train, she hits her head and seemingly travels back in time to 1944, while she was there, she learns that she and her mother are very much alike in many ways, while still in the dream state she hits her head again, and wakes up back in the present with the reationship with her mother repaired
- This happened in the final episode of I Dream of Jeannie. Dr. Bellows (finally!) finds out the truth about Jeannie, and then her bottle gets broken and Major Nelson resigns from NASA. Luckily, it's all a dream.
- In-universe example: Phoebe from Friends gets pissed off at one of her friends for something that is eventually revealed to have happened in her dream.
Music
- Aaron Carter's upbeat song "That's How I Beat Shaq" relates the singer's adventures as he beats Shaquille O'Neal in a one-on-one basketball match, and ends with him waking up in bed. ("But if it was a dream, and it wasn't real... how'd I get a jersey with the name O'Neal?")
- You bought it at Wal-Mart. Idiot.
- Mesozoic Mind, by the Charmers.
Last night I had a crazy dream, I fell out of my bed! I missed the floor entirely, I fell through time instead!
- Britney Spears, "Baby One More Time". What?
- Josh Turner, "Loretta Lynn's Lincoln" begins with the singer buying Loretta Lynn's Lincoln, ends with the singer being woken up from a nap in his pickup truck.
I heard a tappin' on the window as I woke up
- R.E.M., "Losing My Religion":
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
But that was just a dream
That was just a dream
Video Games
- Video game example: In The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening, the whole game is a dream of the Wind Fish. In this case, you actually learn this fact about three-quarters of the way through the game, rather than right at the end, and the bosses of the last few dungeons constantly remind you of it. This adds more emotion, as Link knows that the island and its inhabitants will disappear once the Wind Fish wakes up.
- Phantom Hourglass looks like it pulls this in the ending cutscene, only to have Link pull out one of the artifacts he found... and then see one of the characters he met.
- In Super Mario Bros 2, upon completing the game, the characters celebrate... and then we see that Mario has been dreaming the entire game.
- However, this is complicated by the fact that numerous enemies from the game return in future Super Mario installments (such as the Bob-ombs, Shy Guys, and Birdo); on the other hand, the main villain Wart has not reappeared nor even been referenced in any subsequent Mario title.
- He's been referenced, it just took until Super Paper Mario for it to happen.
- That and the game does involve adventuring in 'Subcon, the Land of Dreams'...
- Considering the start of the game says Mario has already dreamed of the adventure before he appears in Subcon 'for real', this could also be a dream type time loop, multiple identical dreams in a row or a dream within a dream.
- Taken very, very seriously and sadly in Final Fantasy X, where Tidus, his father Jecht and their home Zanarkand are all the dream of a place that Spira, the country the game is set in, destroyed millennia ago. More interestingly, the dream is being dreamed by dead people.
- Twisted Metal: Black seems like an Alternate Continuity to the main Twisted Metal series. In fact, various in-game hints reveal that the whole game occurs inside Sweet Tooth's head.
- Roadkill's ending in Twisted Metal: Head On adds more Mind Screw. It's suggested that the regular Twisted Metal continuity takes place inside the head of Sweet Tooth's alternate personality, Marcus Kane.
- In the game before that in continuity, Twisted Metal 2, Marcus Kane (driver of Roadkill) can see through the Fourth Wall and is convinced the world is fake. His wish is to get out, and when Calypso grants it, he wakes up in a hospital bed, surrounded by the other characters - the game was a dream he had in a coma. But then Calypso's eyes appear, hinting that the Twisted Metal world is real and he's sent Kane into a dream.
- This troper once read a Touhou doujin in which Alice Margatroid seeks out help conquering insomnia from Yukari (who sleeps at least 12 hours a day). Alice wakes up in the morning, practically in mid-conversation, to discover that the whole episode was a dream.
- Concealed the Conclusion, a fanmade Touhou game, does this as well. It implies that everything in all the games is a coma dream Reimu and Marisa shared. It works surprisingly well, given the general tone of the games, even if Ct C itself is very, very dark. The Extra and Phantasm stages confirm that at least something of Gensokyo survives after they wake up.
- At the very least, the manga version, and most likely, the visual novel version of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni's Onikakushi-hen subverts this trope nicely.
- One of the Multiple Endings to Wario Land II has Wario, about to reclaim his treasure, falling into a pit trap before waking up back in his bed from the beginning of the game. The ending credits feature the invasion of the castle from the beginning happening for real.
- Chrono Trigger plays with this. After a boss battle, a time warp fills the room, sucking in all the characters. The screen turns black, and we're treated to a modified version of the game's opening, suggesting that the portion of the game you had just been playing through was a dream. It then turns out that's what was just a dream, and Chrono wakes up in 65,000,000 BC.
- In one of the endings of Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alex is revealed to be a mental patient and the whole game was just a delusion. Sort of like the bad ending (Dying Dream) in Silent Hill 1.
- Even Samurai Warriors 2 does this. At the beginning of Nagamasa Azai's last stage in his story mode, the Battle of Kanegasaki, the story up to that point is revealed to be a dream he was having right before the battle. The entire thing being brought on due to how torn he was between helping his friends, the Asakura, and potentially betraying Oichi's love by attacking her brother, Nobunaga.
- Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People sort of pulls this in the final episode. Having slain Trogdor, whose very existence was causing the entire Homestar Runner world to fuse with the Videlectrix video game world, Strong Bad wakes up outside the Trogdor! arcade cabinet with everyone standing by him. He starts telling them about this wild dream he had pointing out how everyone standing there was part of it - until he notices that Trogdor is standing right there. Trogdor immediately proceeds to run amok while the credits roll.
- The whole point to Kagetsu Tohya. Shiki figures out more and more often than he's living in a dream right now where days repeat instantly. Yesterday is the same as today and today is the same as tomorrow. Of course, everyone inside is actually apparently the same people he knows and even have their own versions of a nightmare ie. Dark Elesia for Ciel. Also, Len, who is making the dream. It's just a dream, but Shiki can't leave until Len dies (he doesn't want that) or he can make a contract with her so she doesn't feel the need to maintain the dream. In the original game, Shiki has dreams of himself killing people yet wakes up in the morning right where he was without having left his bed. Only the people he saw die are really dead. Even worse, the one time he doesn't remember his 'dream' he wakes up with his hands and arms absolutely covered with blood, because he really did go out and kill people that night.
- Mission Critical does a very interesting version of this trope. The events that took place during the vast majority of the game were all a dream, but also really happened. Near the end, you discover that time travel into the past is impossible, but that information can be sent back. As a result, you basically trigger a dream in your past self that outlines everything that has happened in the game, giving you the chance to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
- The Linear RPG has a dose of this as a component of its overall Stylistic Suck.
- The Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (of the Ace Combat series) featured a branching storyline with five separate endings; unlocking all five would show a short cutscene where it's revealed the player character is an AI that has been put through a series of simulations by a questionably-sane professor as preparation for carrying out his plan to avenge his late wife.
Web Animation
- Parodied in the Homestar Runner short "HREMAIL 2000": Homestar puts on a regular puppet show for Marzipan using his shoes, which "gets cancelled after the third season":
"You mean the whole last season was a dream?! Gimme a break! They shoulda just had babies, and then the babies shoulda gotten married."
Web Comics
Web Original
- More than once this has been used for Survival Of The Fittest characters, usually in imagining a rescue. However, on one occasion it was used to make it appear as if a particular character had died, only for it to be revealed that it had been a dream.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons' spoofed this trope as well. In the season six episode entitled Lisa's Rival, Lisa is competing against a new student, Allison, for the first chair saxophone position when she faints in the middle of it. After 'regaining consciousness,' she's told that Allison got the chair and Lisa screams. The screen then blacks out and she really wakes up...only to be told the exact same thing with the added disclaimer 'And believe me, this is not a dream!'
- In the episode after Mr. Burns is shot, Smithers wakes up in his apartment to find Mr. Burns in the shower, perfectly fine, and concludes with relief that it was all a dream. Burns then informs Smithers that they are the stars of a 60s detective show called "Speedway Squad", at which point Smithers wakes up again and realises, "Wait, that was all a dream!" — Mr. Burns really has been shot. Smithers then remarks, "Hey, then
maybe I haven't become a hideous drunken wreck, and —" only to realise that he's in the exact same state he started the episode in, and his mouth still tastes like an ashtray.
- In one Little Lulu cartoon, Lulu sneaks out to play baseball instead of practicing her violin, and when knocked out by a foul ball, she wakes up in a land of musical instruments, who arrest, try and imprison her for her misdeed. When she breaks out of the jail, she is [2] chased and terrorized by the musical instruments. It turns out to be a dream
- Futurama, "The Sting": Fry dives in front of a space bee about to sting Leela, gets impaled and injected with venom, and dies. Leela who comes out of the incident with only a "boo-boo", tops, begins feeling horribly guilty for the loss of Fry, and slowly descends into insanity, going through one Dream Within A Dream after another. At the climax, the walls are talking to her, bees are materializing out of nowhere, and Leela tries to steal Fry's corpse to remind herself that he's really dead. There's also a musical number in which the other characters serenade her with the song "Don't Worry, Be(e) Happy." It turns out it was all a coma-induced dream; Fry had come out of the incident relatively unscathed, save for the gaping hole in his chest, which was easily repaired by future-medicine, while Leela got all the venom from the bee and nearly died.
- In another episode, Bender is forced to get an upgrade to make him more compatible with Planet Express' advanced new robot. He breaks free and ends up on a deserted island populated by outdated robots, then returns to wage war on technology. The whole storyline was actually an artificially induced Aesop caused by the upgrade, resulting in the following exchange:
Bender: But I destroyed the technology of the world! I ran on the beach and felt the sand between my foot-cups!
Technician: (shrugging) Everyone experiences the upgrade a little differently.
Bender: Oof. If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure anything is real? Is is not possible, nay, probable, that my entire life is just a figment of my or someone else's imagination?
Technician: No. Get out.
- In the first Anthology of Interest episode it is revealed at the end that the entire episode, consisting of three scenarios generated by the professor's What-If machine, was, in fact, a scenario generated by the professor's What-If machine.
- The absurd (even for them) Y2K episode of Family Guy, "Da Boom", ends in live-action with Pam Ewing of Dallas waking to Bobby in the shower and relating the episode. (This sequence features the real live Victoria Principle and Patrick Duffy.)
- In a recent episode of Family Guy, Stewie manages to take over the world, killing Cleveland in the process, before he's killed by Peter and Lois. In the end it turns out to be a virtual reality simulation-don't call it a dream-conducted by Stewie to see what would happen if he killed Lois. When he explains this, Brian heavily lampshades this by commenting that anyone who were "watching" the simulation and found out it didn't happen would feel like they'd been given a "giant middle finger". Be aware of the huge Take That to the viewers...
- In Ed Edd N Eddy, "Take This Ed and Shove It", the finale of the fourth season (and originally of the series) ended with the elderly Eddy discovering that the whole show has been apparently a series of dreams about his childhood. The canonical implications of this are dubious at best, as the show has been renewed for two more seasons; though it explains things such as Flanderization, the cast never leaving the cul-de-sac, how we never see any characters but the main cast even at school, and just the general vagueness of setting throughout the show.
- First appeared in the South Park episode "Flashbacks", an episode which twisted the conventional Clip Show episode by having each clip end with a completely different situation from its original episode. All of this, including an unrelated subplot surrounding Ms. Crabtree, were all part of a dream by Eric Cartman which ended with him eating beetles, thus revealing that the entire episode was a dream within a dream conjured by Stan.
- Subverted in South Park, at the end of the "Imaginationland" series of episodes. Butters wakes up and starts telling his parents about the dream he had that he saved Imaginationland. His parents tell him that it really happened and they read all about it in the morning paper.
- Also subverted in the season 3 episode "Spontaneous Combustion". Cartman was tied to a cross for a crucifiction re-enactment, but his friends forgot about him and left him up there. A couple of days later, Chef finds him and takes him off the cross. The following conversation is from the car ride home.
Chef: Eric, i have to tell you something and it's really gonna bum you out.
Cartman: What?
Chef: It'll really piss you off.
Cartman: What, tell me!
Chef: This is just a dream, you're still up on that cross.
Cartman: *he wakes up, still on the cross* Oh, dammit!
- An episode of Batman The Animated Series has Bruce Wayne waking up in a world where he isn't Batman. He eventually realizes that it is a dream (because some people's dreams work in such a way that they can't read anything in a dream) and ends it by jumping off the clock tower.
- Apart from the reading issue, wish fulfillment dreams don't work on Batman. A world where Bruce Wayne is happy? His subconscious knows that's impossible.
- Another episode has Batgirl getting hit by Scarecrow's fear gas and hallucinating a scenario where she dies, and Gordon goes to war against Batman.
- The Rugrats episode "Pickles Vs. Pickles" was about Drew dreaming about Angelica suing him for making her eat broccoli.
- Subverted in the Looney Tunes cartoon Water, Water Every Hare. At the end of the cartoon, Bugs Bunny wakes up in his bed and thinks the events of the cartoon were all just a dream. Then Gossamer, who Bugs had made small earlier, comes in on a boat his size and says, "Oh yeah? That's what you think!"
- Brutally subverted in The Venture Bros. When Billy Quizboy wakes from having a dream, he's all ready to launch into a And You Were There scene when he suddenly realizes the events from the dream were true, screaming you bastards! while assaulting his so-called "friends."
- Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons had an episode where The Mysterons actually come to Cloudbase to attack it, leading to Captain Scarlet's death and the destruction of Cloudbase. We then find out this was all a dream one of the Angels was having after she'd been shot down over the desert earlier in the episode. When repackaged in a Compilation Movie for the American market, the episode ended up with the Reset Button treatment.
- Gerry Anderson is all over this one (he was once quoted as saying "I wish somebody would make a film of my dreams"). There are at least two episodes of Stingray, one of Joe90, two of UFO as noted under Live Action TV, and one of Space1999 where the events of the episode turn out to be dreams, hallucinations or implanted visions. The Thunderbirds episode "Security Hazard" manages to invert this by having International Rescue convince a boy that his real-life trip to Tracy Island has only been a dream
- An upcoming episode of Phineas And Ferb revolves around Candace actually managing to bust Phineas and Ferb, resulting in them being sent to an extremely strict reform school. She soon realizes how much she misses them and, along with Jeremy, ventures to break them out. At the end of the escapade, it's revealed that it was a dream Candace was having. She discusses it with the family, which results in them guessing that Perry is a secret agent, causing government agents to bust in and take them away while Perry is told he'll have to be relocated... and this turns out to be just a bad dream that Perry is having.
- Spongebob Squarepants has an episode where Mrs. Puff goes to jail. At the end, it's revealed that it was all a dream, and Spongebob is going to jail. Except that was all a dream, and she's in the boat with a random person from prison. After that, she just gives up, and the episode ends.
- In the Invader Zim episode "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom", Dib receives supernatural powers from the alien race of the Meekrob, to help him stop Zim and the Irken invasion. The episode portrays Dib's following life being a celebrated Hero and the most successful paranormal investigator in the world, until old age, where in a TV interview he confesses having tossed a cupcake at Zim in the school cantine once, upon which the moderator pulls of a mask revealing Zim's face laughing at him. Dib wakes up in Zim's laboratory realizing all of this was just a dream, programmed and simulated by Zim.
- Averted - The Snowman. When J. pulls the scarf out of his pocket.
- Tom and Jerry had one too. Tom wangs his head and kills himself where he ends up in train station in Heaven. The boarder however won't let him through due to his chasing Jerry all the time but give Tom a change to redeem himself by getting Jerry to sign a forgiveness certificate, otherwise Tom will end up in Hell tormented by a devil looking Spike. Tom is then sent back and tries everything he can to get Jerry to sign the thing. In the end though he doesn't make the deadline and it looks like he doomed...till he wakes up and more then glad to find it was a dream. Even kissing his worst enemy to show his gratefulness.
- An episode of Rockos Modern Life deals with Heffer choking to death on a chicken ribcage and ends up going to Cow Heck for his punishment for being a glutton, the entire episode turns out to be a dream.
- One episode of Kim Possible,"Rewriting History",ended with the whole episode being just a dream. Which is sad,because Generation Xerox plot seemed pretty cool. Though,oddly,the episode did end with a rather absurd Generation Xerox being canon.
Real Life
- Some people believe that "real life" is really all just a simulation using technology that doesn't yet exist in real life/this simulation. This is based on the belief that technology is likely to get to the point of being able to perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life while in the simulation and that since once this technology exists it will result in more virtual worlds than the 1 real one the odds are that this is a simulation and not real life.
- This Troper (hnng) remembers teachers often telling the class explicitly not to use this ending during story-writing-based lessons in primary school.
- The trope may have arisen from a dream those grieving a deceased loved one often experience. In the dream, the griever learns that the loved one is not dead and that the "death" was nothing but a very bad dream. The griever then wakes up, only to realize that the death really took place and the "miraculous survival" was in fact the dream. Although not every griever experiences this dream, it's common enough to be considered a normal part of the grieving process. Children who experience the dream may not be able to differentiate the dream from reality and therefore may suspect that the deceased person didn't really die (a common fallacy among bereaved children). Books by reputable scientists have been written on this phenomenon.
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