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alt title(s): Dream World
"Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!" But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question.
Which do YOU think it was?
A Magical Land or Another Dimension comprising the collective dreams of humanity. Can be a collective dream, or the dream of a specific person. Generally surreal, nonsensical, and psychologically symbolic. Alternatively, just adorable randomness. Usually divided into two halves or factions — nightmares and good dreams.
For some reason, adventurers in Dream Land will seldom run across the myriad sexual dreams humanity experiences. Odd that, as you'd think there'd be a huge Red Light District.
In medieval Europe it was commonplace for a writer to situate a story in Dream Land, as a way of apologizing for the fictional quality. As fiction became more respectable, the Dream Land became chiefly used for fantasy works, as it provided a reason why the Magical Land does not obey ordinary laws of nature. As fantasy became more respectable (for certain values of "respectable"), the Dream Land came to be used only in fictional settings relying on actual dreams. Still, this makes this Older Than Print.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In Paprika, scientists invent a portable device that allows people to enter other people's dreams and record them. Things start going wrong when someone hijacks an insane person's dream for terrorist purposes, and then Dream Land and reality start to merge.
- In CLAMP's X1999, all dreams are connected and there are a few specially-gifted individuals (called yumemi, or "dreamseers") who can travel among them and use the Dreamscape to view the future.
- CLAMP's more recent works XXXH Olic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle depict yumemis with similar powers, but take it a step further and make the Dreamscape into a dimension of its own, which souls alone can enter and dreamseers can manipulate.
- The aptly named land of Vision in Brave Story.
- The manga After School Nightmare centers around a high school class based on this.
- Elysion in the Super S season of Sailor Moon.
Comic Books
- The Dreaming in DC's Sandman. This place has a huge red-light district, but most stories don't go there. There are also individual characters who are nightmares (the Corinthian, Brute, Glob), or wet dreams (Quivering Mary) or even lovely dream places (Fiddler's Green)
- Another Vertigo title, the Area in Milligan's Shade The Changing Man was originally called 'The Area of Madness', but as more entities started coming out of it, the definition was expanded to the land of dreams, the land of the dead, the place where all human consciousness gravitates.
- The magic system in Bone is based around tapping into the world of Dream Land, which in this case is a "Force"-like alternate world that permeates everything and everyone.
- The setting of The Maxx shifts back and forth between the "real" world and The Outback, a subconscious world resembling a prehistoric Australia populated by fantastic creatures and psychological symbolism. The Outback featured in most of the series is that of protagonist Julie Winters, but everybody supposedly has an Outback, and physical travel between them and the "real" world can be achieved by those with the proper knowhow.
- The Marvel Universe has not one but several Dream Lands. Arguably the most prominent is the Dream Dimension ruled by the Doctor Strange enemy Nightmare, who lives up to his name by inflicting terrorizing nightmares on humans. Lesser known parts of the mental plane include the Realm of Madness, which Spider-Man's enemy Venom was briefly trapped on, and the Mindscape, a dimension that connects the minds of all sentient beings, the home of the 1990s superhero Sleepwalker.
- Little Ego is an adult-oriented, erotic parody of the classic Little Nemo comics by Vittorio Giardino. The main character, called Ego, is a woman seemingly in her middle twenties. As in Little Nemo, each story is about her having a dream, and she wakes up in the last panel. Whereas Little Nemo talked to his mother after waking up, Little Ego thinks what she will tell her psychoanalyst.
Film
- The Land of Oz, as portrayed in the movie "The Wizard Of Oz," may be the best-known example of a Dream Land in modern culture. In the movie, Oz is a head-injury-induced hallucination on the part of the heroine, Dorothy. Note that the L. Frank Baum novel on which the movie is based represents Oz as a real country.
- The animated film Twice Upon A Time involves a conflict between Frivoli, the land of good dreams, and the Murkworks, the land of bad dreams.
Literature
- Both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass prove to take place in Dream Land.
- Jodi Lynn Nye's Dreamland mixes a fantasy realm which is subject to the rules of constant change.
- HP Lovecraft did a number of stories set in a fairly surreal and oddly-light-on-the-horror-he's-known-for Dreamlands. "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" includes Nyarlathotep, an enigmatic and dangerous being found in his other work, one of the major links between this Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos.
- These stories were based on Lord Dunsany's dream-like storytelling. Lord Dunsany himself also wrote several stories about the world of dreams, most notably 'Idle Days on the Yann' and its sequels.
- Fantasia of The Neverending Story is made up of humanity's stories, dreams and creativity — and often takes on a surreal, dreamlike nature.
- The End of the World in Ender's Game first appears as the last of several Videogame Settings in the Free Play game, but turns out to have a much more personal meaning for Ender.
- In Eric Nylund's novel Pawn's Dream, for a group of magic users the dream world is very real (If you die there you can't sleep here, so you'll die pretty quickly of exhaustion), and even weirder; the "real" world is just the dream world's dream world.
- Tel'aranh'rhiod (translated "World of Dreams" from Fictionary), from The Wheel Of Time, is a shared dream of everyone from every possible world that mirrors real-world locations. Ordinary people sometimes dream themselves into it, dangerously, as Your Mind Makes It Real. In addition, if a Dream Walker doesn't watch her thoughts, and they stray onto sexual topics, odd things can happen, including their clothes shifting suitably.
- L. Sprague de Camp's Solomon's Stone takes place in a world populated by figures from daydreams.
- Clive Barker's Books of the Art contain Quiddity which is essentially this, though, in the second book, the question is asked if whether Quddity is our Dream World or if we are its.
- In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath books, the dreams of the Kencyr form a dreamscape made of their individual dreams, from which one can journey to the soulscape (the land of the collective soul images of the Kencyr).
- This troper vaguely remembers a retelling of The Pied Piper in which a deaf girl is the only one left when the Piper takes away the town's children and sends them to dream land—so she has to fall asleep to find them and bring them back.
- I think it was After Hamelin.
- The Great Divorce by CS Lewis takes place in Dream Land.
Live Action TV
- The Fraggles of Fraggle Rock can join each other's dreams by placing their heads in contact and reciting the phrase "dream a dream with me, dream a dream and see" when going to sleep. Although normally just a form of benign dream sharing; it is possible to become trapped in another character's Dream Land.
Newspaper Comics
- Little Nemo is a renowned newspaper strip (and lesser-known film) about a boy's adventures in Dream Land.
Table Top Games
- The Eberron setting of Dungeons And Dragons has this in the form of Dal Quor, filled with nightmarish psionic creatures called quori. Peoples' minds go there when they dream, and the Dreaming Dark are quori that learned to do this in reverse. The kalashtar are the descendants of humans who merged with rebel quori long ago to escape the Dreaming Dark.
- Oh, and it used to be possible to get there physically, but an ancient race of giants managed to force the dimensions apart with magic. In the aftermath, they descended into savagery.
- The Immaterium of Warhammer 40000, a universe of the hate, fear and bad dreams of all sentient beings.
- Mage: the Awakening contains the Astral Realms, which have three distinct levels. The Oneiros is each individual's personal Mental World. The Tenemos is the Dream World of humanity, containing the sum total of all human knowledge, belief, and experience, albeit shrouded in metaphor, symbolism and subjectivity. Each concept has its own realm, and they are either ruled over by gods (all gods ever beleived in exist in the Tenemos) or archetypes. Travel is made by locating aspects in one realm and moveing to another connected to it by word association. It is possible for the realms of ideologies to enforce belief in their ideology upon visitors. Even deeper is the Anima Mundi (also called the Dreamtime), which is essentially the Dream World of the Earth itself. Its entirely inhuman perspective can wash away any unprotected human mind that tries to pass through it. It contains the Earth's perspective on humanity (represented as a vast swath of destruction), nature (which is filled with animal and elemental archetypes; notably, the animal archetypes are devoid of Animal Motifs) and the wider universe (represented as an incomprehensibly large void filled with bizarre objects and beings). All Astral Realms operate on subjective time. The length of real time one spends in the Astral Realms largely depends on the degree to which you interact with them (so, for example, if you merely pass through a desert, it might feel like hours, but in real time, it will take about as long as it takes to say "I pass through the desert").
Theater
- Franco Dragone's Las Vegas spectacle Le Reve ("The Dream") takes place in a woman's dream. There's plenty of sexuality and surrealism to go around. Dragone used to work for Cirque du Soleil, and his last show for them, La Nouba, is set in an attic where humanity's fairy tale dreams and nightmares coexist. (In part because it was commissioned for Walt Disney World, it's not nearly as suggestive as the latter show.)
Video Games
- Sub-Con in Super Mario Bros 2
- Nightopia in NiGHTs.
- Dream Land of the Kirby series was implied to be this at first, but later revealed to be a fantastic alien planet.
- The Whole game of Cocoron is a Dream World
- A stage of Ristar for the Sega Game Gear takes place in Dream Land.
- As does the entire Legend Of Zelda game Link's Awakening. (In this case, it's an actual world created by a dream of the Wind Fish.)
- Maginary World of Sonic Shuffle.
- Computer game variation: In The Simpsons arcade game, the family ended up inside Homer's dream, and, if this troper remembers correctly, had to fight a giant bowling ball. Bafflingly, this was the entire premise of another Simpsons' game, Bart's Nightmare.
- The UMN from Xenosaga, which is similar the the Warhammer example as is it the source of Faster Than Light Travel & is also their version of the internet.
- Yume Nikki (lit. Dream Journal), a Japanese indie game, is based on a Hikiko Mori girl who spends all her time sleeping then recording her dreams. The game features a vast, sprawling world of surreal dreamscapes, full of very interesting sights. The only real objective is to collect "Effects," which let you do things in your dreams like change your hair, ride a bike, or transform into weird objects. Get it here.
 Then hide under the bed. This girl has issues.
- The Dreamweb from the eponymous video game is an interesting example, as it subconsciously influences humans in their sleep and thus shapes the future of mankind. Then, someone tries to pervert it for evil purposes...
- As it turns out, in Final Fantasy X, Zanarkand is merely the "dream of the fayth" - when they awaken, it disappears.
- Supposedly, LittleBigPlanet is made from the creative energies of people that are dreaming.
- Kagetsu Tohya. The story is only focused around Shiki and only appears to encompass the town he lives in, plus the next one over. However, it's revealed that actually, all the people he meets are indeed 'real' in a sense. They can give him information he needs to figure out what's going on and will also realize the oddness of the repeating days in their own ways. The dream he's in also mixes all the different Tsukihime continuities heavily, though Shiki does not notice.
- Keen Dreams, episode 3.5 of the Commander Keen series, takes places entirely inside a dream world.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's Ivalice.
- The entirety of Dare To Dream takes place in the mind of the player's character.
- Dragon Age has this covered. The Fade acts as Hell, Heaven (but mostly Hell) and the place where regular folks dream. Mages stay aware of their surroundings, though, as does Sten.
- The mental worlds in Psychonauts are a bit like this, since a few kids mention that they've been having dreams about things that appear in peoples' heads.
- Silent Hill is implied to be this in some cases.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has its own version of this trope; in the special, Destination Imagination, the characters go on an adventure through an entire imaginary world created by a kid and controlled by the childish imaginary friend inside.
- Imaginationland from the South Park episode of the same name.
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