All Just A Dream - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.
—>~Futurama, "Obsoletely Fabulous"

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.

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, 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:

Live Action TV

Marissa Clark run over by 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.
- 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.
- And Married With Children was a case of Real Life Writes The Plot
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. Subverted in that 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 failed resurrection of Crossroads, a British Soap Opera, ended by revealing the entire series had been the dream of a supermarket worker.
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) 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 program, all 53 episodes, had been a 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 "Image in the Sand", where a science fiction writer in the 50's dreams about Deep Space Nine.
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".
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.
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.
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.
One episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer implied that the entire series is a hallucination of the main character, who is living in a nuthouse and has power fantasies of saving the world with her imaginary friends. Turned out that it wasn't the case.
- Although the last shot of the episode in question has the doctor of mental institution examining Buffy and telling her parents that they "lost her", so you never know.
  - Considering the alternate universes mentioned in the series, it's probably more likely that both realities are true and the demon's psycho venom just causes one to have intermittent psychic contact with parallel selves.
  - Note that the episode ends before they actually give her the antidote.
- Also, considering that Buffy is on the St. Elsewhere list, one could conclude that this massive-verse is not actually an autistic boy's dream but rather a massive psychic dream plane that both the boy and Buffy are irreparably linked to.
The first episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts out this way. Just so you know.
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.
- Actually this seems more like an Outer Limits Twist.
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 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.
Dallas had a rather notorious example. 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 severing it's ties with another soap opera.
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.

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 unconcious 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.

Film

The Wizard Of Oz is the most famous film example, of course.
Arguably done in Memento where We are left wondering whether or not the bit about Sammy Jenkis ws true, or if Leonard was simpely projecting himself on someone else.
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 Mars—that'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!.
- This also happens for The Shining. It's difficult to tell what was real and what were projections of the family's minds. [[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060618/REVIEWS08/606180302 Roger Ebert's review talks at length on the subject.
- And 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, but it's fairly likely that the sequel won't exist either.
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.
Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky (and indeed Eduardo Noriega in the Spanish original 'Open Your Eyes' of which the movie is a remake) discovers that he's been living in a dream for quite a while, and he has the choice either to stay in it or wake up.
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 middle 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...

Literature

One of the classic uses of All Just A Dream in children's literature is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
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 familiy 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.

Western Animation

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 exchange at the top.
- 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 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".
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 [[clipshow]] 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.
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.
- 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 Rug Rats episode, "Pickles Vs. Pickles" had Drew's dream 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."

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.
- That and the game does involve adventuring in 'Subcon, the Land of Dreams'...
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.
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.

Web Comics

This episode of Dinosaur Comics satirizes the trope quite nicely.
As does this Narbonic strip.
The brief "Magic Flap" arc from Sluggy Freelance ends like this.

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).

Newspaper Comics

A series of Garfield strips, running from October 23rd to 28th, 1989, has the titular cat waking up... to find his house long abandoned. To add to the creepiness factor, Garfield runs into Jon and Odie, who vanish into thin air. Garfield, who doesn't want to be alone, starts to panic. But it was All Just A Dream...
- Or was it? Some people think the ending implies that, at the end of the final strip in the series, Garfield goes insane. All comics since then are his hallucinations, as he slowly starves to death in an abandoned house.
  - Yes, it was. Word Of God says so.
A Calvin And Hobbes strip has Calvin waking up, getting dressed, brushing his teeth, walking out the door ... and his mom says, "Calvin, it's time to get up!" "This had better be worth getting up twice for ..."
- There was another one where he wakes up, gets dressed, eats, walks out the door, and then falls screaming through the sky, only to wake up. Then he gets out of bed, and falls through the sky again. The last panel has his mother, off panel, asking if he's up yet, while Calvin himself is clearly too scared to move.
Winsor McCay's Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland. In both cases, every strip was a dream.
During a Bloom County plot-arc which features Opus literally wandering lost in a desert, there is one strip where he suddenly wakes up back home in the meadow and ecstatically realizes that everything that he thought had happened was a dream. Milo, who is sitting nearby, looks over his shoulder and says, "No, stupid, this is the dream. You're still in the desert." Opus then returns to the desert and says, "Well, pfbbt."

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!

Music Videos