Dying Dream - Television Tropes & Idioms

''"There is no out of here. You've been killed, don't you remember?"'

—Jacob's Ladder

"I find it kinda funny/I find it kinda sad/That the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

— Tears for Fears, Mad World

"The ill and dying are said to have the most beautiful dreams."

—Chopin's doctor, Eternal Sonata. If the game is to be trusted, this is the first medical acknowledgment of fever dreams.

The trope that launched a thousand Wild Mass Guesses (most recently those for Lost), the Dying Dream is easily the most fashionable form of Shaggy Dog Story. The beginnings may be different - although these days they usually seem to start with a car crash - but each one ends in pretty much the same way, with the reveal that the protagonist has been dead or dying all along, and that everything that has happened has been some kind of dream, or else a purgatorial cleansing of sins. The absolute end of the story may involve the protagonist entering Heaven or Hell, The Nothing After Death or just winking out of existence altogether, if the writer doesn't believe in an afterlife (or just wants to leave the question open).

Typically, the stories have protagonists going about what they believe to be their normal lives, but finding "reality" becoming increasingly unhinged, with demons, surreal elements and other oddities making them increasingly baffled and afraid.

Note that stories don't count if we know all along that the character is dead/dying, or if the dying dream bit only comes in at the end.

Compare Dead All Along and Dead To Begin With. May overlap with Schrodinger's Butterfly. Contrast Your Mind Makes It Real for the belief that dying in a dream kills you off for real.

WARNING: By definition there are story-ruining spoilers ahead.

Examples

Anime and Manga

At the end of the Hentai Manga Alice in Sexland, it is revealed that Alice broke her neck while fleeing from her oppressors at the very start - the entire realm of Sexland is her afterlife. (And it's explicitly single-occupant - she's the only "real" person there besides the Queen of Hearts, and one of them needs to be reincarnated.) Given that the whole story up until then has been a cheerful sexual adventure vaguely mimicing Carroll's classic book, it's a rather unsettling twist of genre.
- Or so you heard?
  - I think we're mature enough to acknowledge that we all enjoy porn. also, its not that the characters aside from Alice and the Queen aren't "real", they're more akin to nature spirits than souls. remember that Sexland is a Japanese story, and that the major religion of Japan is animistic.
An alternate ending to the manga Pretty Face has the entire story be just a dream before Rando dies in a coma. This troper is glad it wasn't chosen as the true ending.
A short one in the manga of Battle Royale. One character is delerious from an infected bullet wound, and stops to drink at a well. She gets tipped in by a classmate, but rain begins to fall and raises the water allowing her to climb out and find her friends came back to her and there is a way to escape the island. Uh-uh, panel of the girl's smiling face is followed by a picture of her deranged grin as she falls into the blackness of the well.
A variation in the Zone Of The Enders anime: In Idolo, Radium starts to see the world around him as the chapel he planned to marry his just-killed fiancee Dolores (a.k.a. Dolly) in shortly before he dies. In Dolores, i, a not-so dead Radium begins to hallucinate again, imagining the Humongous Mecha battle between Hathor and Dolores (named after Dolly) as a fight between himself and James, who is piloting Dolores, in the same chapel. Dolores' AI appears in the chapel as a child-like version of Dolly, while his own frame's AI appears as an evil version of her. When he is mortally wounded, the real Dolores suddenly appears and embraces him, and when he finally passes on, he sees both Dolores and Viola (from the first game) waiting for him.
In the third season of Hell Girl, Yuzuki has actually been dead the whole time and the past few years have been an illusion, which she only discovers when evidence of her "life" starts disappearing. Oh, and Ai tells her.

Comic Books

The Invisibles has an issue called "Best Man Fall," which tells a man's life story in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness structure. Only at the end of the story does the reader discover that the protagonist is an enemy soldier who is shot in the face by the hero in the first issue, and that everything we have seen is him having a flashback in the seconds before he dies.
One issue of Spider-Girl features Dying Dreams of both Normie Osborne (Harry's son) and The Kingpin. One survives, but you don't find out which until the next issue. It's Normie.
The second-to-last arc of Adam Warren's run on Gen13 appears to be a Breather Episode after the Cliff Hanger ending of their last storyline (which was resolved off-screen). However, as more and more examples of "dream logic" appear, heroine Caitlin Fairchild eventually realizes that she's retreated to a fantasy version of her life in the last few microseconds before the Earth Shattering Kaboom from the aforementioned cliffhanger vaporizes her and her friends, making way for Chris Claremont's short-lived Revamp of the series.
This was the original ending for DC Comic's short-lived Kinetic series, where a hemophiliac gains superpowers after being hit by a truck. The original ending was, described by the writer in a Wizard Magazine article later as, a Downer Ending because the original idea was the boy was killed by being hit by the truck and the whole series was his Dying Dream.
Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" is partly this as it is Batman's last dream as he dies from Darkseid's Omega Sanction attack in Final Crisis, and part sendoff to every version of the Bruce Wayne Batman in similar vein of Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow of Superman lore.

Film

Jacob's Ladder is probably the best known example of this trope, and stars Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet who eventually discovers that he never made it out of 'Nam and that the demons he keeps seeing are just stripping him of his worldly cares.
Carnival Of Souls predates Jacob's Ladder, however, as does the Oscar-winning French short An Occurence at Owl Creek, based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce.
Dead End reveals that the family all died in a car accident and are in some kind of purgatory.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is open to numerous interpretations, including this one.
- And Lost Highway.
At the end of Waking Life, the protagonist wonders whether the reason he can't wake up is because he's dead. The ending leaves this question unanswered.
Crazy as Hell
Room 6
Stay
November has Courtney Cox's character reliving the same things over and over in order to get her to give up her worldly cares.
The Life Before Her Eyes (well what did you expect with that title?)
One interpretation of the ending of 28 Days Later is that the final scenes are one of these for the main character. Another interpretation is that the entire movie is one of these for the main character.
The made-for-video Hellraiser sequels have started relying on this trope, turning entire movies into dying dream sequences hosted by Pinhead. That the original premise didn't really involve dying is another matter, and if the critical response is any indication, they don't use this trope well.
John Boorman has confirmed that this is the correct interpretation of Point Blank.
One of the interpretations of Vanilla Sky is that David really inflicted fatal injuries upon himself and was placed in cryogenic lucid dream for the past 150 years, dreaming of Sofia.
- One of the interpretations? This troper thought that was the ending...
All That Jazz is all about the idea that death and show business go together like peanut butter and jelly, so it's no surprise when it whips one of these out for the final number. Alternatively, like many movies on this list, the entire thing might count.
The original ending of The Descent.

Literature

Ambrose Bierce's short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has a man who has been sentenced to death by hanging escaping his execution and running back to his family - only for his neck to break at the very end, revealing that it was in his head all along. It was first published in 1890, making it Older Than Radio.
- The story was later made into a short film, which won the 1962 Palme d'Or for Best Short Subject and became a Twilight Zone episode.
The Third Policeman is another oldish example - it was written in 1940 (but not published until 1967), and its protagonist is forced to walk through the same nightmarish dreamscape over and over as punishment for killing a man for his money.
over again, the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce is a stream-of-consciousness ramble that could be about anything, even a dying man's thoughts circling around the same ideas over and over and over and oh bugger it's all starting
At the end of C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, the final Narnia installment, it is revealed that the kids died in a train accident at the start of the book, and the whole thing has been marking time before Aslan let them into Heaven. This troper found it pretty creepy.
- This Troper enjoyed it, as it is one of the times that The End Of The World As We Know It is not a Downer Ending.
- I have always understood that the particular kids who are in Narnia throughout the book were transported before the train accident, meaning they end up entering the afterlife without dying at all, a la Elijah in the Bible.
Lucille Fletcher's short story, "The Hitch-Hiker". Adapted into three different radio plays for three different shows, each written and starring Orson Welles. The Twilight Zone adaptation changed the protagonist's gender to a woman.
- The fact the character was originally a man goes a long way in explaining why no one in The Twilight Zone episode would help a Damsel In Distress.
This trope's lightly touched on in the last chapter of The War Of The Worlds, as the narrator finds himself haunted by the idea that the Martian defeat and humanity's recovery is his own hallucination, and that the city around him is really still in ruins. That most of the happy ending only started after the narrator had gone temporarily insane makes this Downer Ending interpretation eerily plausible.
In Connie Willis's Passage large portions consist of a Dying Dream.
Some interpreted The Little Match Girl's vision of her Grandmother as this instead of a Ghostly Visitor.
An unusual version of this is found in Greg Egan's Transition Dreams. A man's brain is scanned and transferred to a computer. The end result is an exact copy, as though the man's mind had been instantaneously transferred from brain to computer. But the mind is conscious of the transfer, and realizes that all its dreamlike experiences of the process must be annihilated before it can be identical to the original brain scan. The real twist, though, is that the end of the story calls into question whether he even really is being transferred to a computer, or if he's just plain dying and the whole brain-scan thing is a hallucination born of denial.
Pretty much all of the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant may or may not be this- the First Chronicle involves three separate serious accidents for Covenant, each of which he survives; the second, he dies, and in the Last Chronicle, it appears that Linden has been shot and killed on Earth.

Live Action TV

Promoted to Glory was a British TV movie about a recovering alcoholic who goes to work at a Salvation Army and falls in love with a woman he meets there. At the end, he is revealed to be a homeless man who has been knocked down by a bus.
Life On Mars was revealed in the end to be the dream of Sam Tyler as he lies in a coma. In the final episode he finally wakes up, but realises that he preferred his imaginary world to the real one and jumps off a building. In the final seconds before he hits the ground, he re-enters the dream world, where he apparently remains indefinitely (NB, this is a bit of a borderline case, since he apparently wakes up from the dream world for a bit. Still, eh?)
- In Ashes To Ashes, Alex finds out that Sam died in a car crash shortly before she arrived. She hypothesizes that the time he spent in the "dream world" was actually the amount to time it took for him to die after he hit the ground in the real world, and that her time in the same world could be a few seconds in the real world between her getting shot and actually dying. It's a little Mind Screw-y.
The Comic Strip Presents episode "Les Dogs" has a man crashing his car at the very start of the episode; he then goes to a surreal wedding where he seduces the bride. Just as they are about to have sex, her eyes turn into headlights - there is a screeching sound and the film cuts to black.
The episode "The Hitchhiker" of The Twilight Zone.
- I myself think that the idea is more that she was a ghost walking or a dead woman walking or in some netherworld and the hitcher was an inversion of the Ferryman who takes you into the afterlife: *she's* the one feyying *him* in literal fact but it's the same principle. He's a psychopomp.
Not exactly dying, but fitting the trope: An episode of Scrubs introduces Dr Cox's friend Ben (an avid photographer who likes to take spontaneous pictures, claiming that 'posed pictures aren't real'), who gets diagnosed with cancer. JD takes a liking to Ben, and gets convinced that the diagnosis is wrong - all his friends have complained how important files have been mixed up and the wrong patients sent to surgery and so on, and JD believes that the same thing happens here. After convincing the lab doctor to redo the test, Ben is proven to be healthy, and everything is rosy... and the edges of the frame starts getting kinda blurry... when Ben wants everyone to gather together for a group pic, JD thinks it's odd because doesn't Ben think pics like that aren't real? And Ben replies, "Don't you see? None of this is real." And that's when JD's wishful daydream, which has been going on since just before the second blood test, ends.
- And in a later episode, Ben visits for Cox's son's birthday party, Dr. Cox blames JD for the death of a patient, and Ben manages to convince Dr. Cox to apologize. Later, Dr. Cox and Ben are on the way to the party, and JD arrives, prompting Dr. Cox to realize that Ben is not there, that Ben was in fact the patient who died and that they are attending his funeral rather than Jack's birthday party.
Used for this delightful exchange in I Claudius:
The Sybil: Why are you laughing?
Claudius: I've cheated them again. They think I'm dead.
The Sybil: But you are dead, you fool. You're as dead as anyone can be.
The season 7 finale of Magnum PI, Limbo, was supposed to be a dying dream of Magnum's, but then they were renewed for another season, so he got better.
In the final season of Six Feet Under Nathaniel Fisher jr. dreamt he was driving to the beach with his brother and father, before finally submerging in the ocean, never resurfacing.

Video Games

The entire game of Velvet Assassin is the Dying Dream of Violette Summers, a young British secret agent during WWII who is dying in a hospital. The surreal, disjointed game missions are actually her memories, and there's even a disturbing "morphine mode" where, if Violette becomes too agitated remembering her missions, a nurse will inject her with morphine and time will slow down in the game world, allowing Violette to escape or come to terms with whatever is frightening her.
One ending of Silent Hill - a game that is truly as open to multiple interpretations as any novel or film - has a clip after the credits showing the protagonist in his crashed car, apparently dead - suggesting that the whole thing is a dying dream.
- However, since this is the worst ending you can receive, it's more of a Nonstandard Game Over and was probably intended to be a Shout Out to Jacob's Ladder rather than a true ending.
Eternal Sonata is set in a fantasy world created in the mind of the composer Chopin, who is dying...Or Is It?
A particularly dirty example in the game Tech Romancer: in the "Wise Duck" storyline (about The Squad in a Humongous Mecha,) the New Meat Arvin discovers that his unit has been given orders to destroy a nearby village, and is not happy about it. The player is given the choice to have Arvin follow his commander's orders, or continue to to protest. If he protests, the entire unit finds itself in a bizarre Planet Of The Apes-type world where they have to save the remnants of Humanity from rampaging Super Robots. In the end, however, you find out that it's all Arvin's Dying Dream: He was shot by his commanding officer for disobeying orders. Ironically, had you had gone along, the unit would have deserted, eventually turning on their commanders, and taking on the monster responsible for the whole war. Apparently, the choice is a Secret Test Of Character, to see if Arvin can be trusted.
Reversed in the visual novel Little Busters by KEY (of Clannad fame)— but no less bitter, at that.
The scenario of the PC game Weird Dreams. Work your way through various fantastic scenarios trying to prevent them from just being part of a Dying Dream.
Primal: The heroine is the spirit of a girl lying critically injured in a hospital ICU. Averted in that her injuries were caused by an obviously demonic form in the real world. While it still all may be a dying dream, there's some evidence for a supernatural explanation.
Serves as the final twist in the text-based adventure game Shade. No, you're not about to leave your apartment for a trip to a rave in the desert; you've already wandered away from the rave in a drug-induced haze, and are dying of heatstroke and dehydration.
Saber's a.k.a. King Arthur's story in Fate Stay Night (her only ending): while dying after the Battle of Camlann, she makes a pact with the world to allow her to atone for her perceived failure as a king. As a Heroic Spirit, she gets to participate in at least two Holy Grail Wars, finally returning to her time after their conclusion. Of course, her "afterlife" really did take place in a distant future but for her time, it was but a beautiful Dying Dream.
Shiki in Tsukihime experiences a long Dying Dream in Ciel True Ending, which serves as a foreshadowing of the Far Side of the Moon routes. Fortunately, he gets better, in no small degree thanks to his actions within said dream.
Max's happy ending in the first season finale of Dark Angel turned out to be a Dying Dream as a result of a being shot by her clone.

Real Life

Near Death Experiences have been reported by tens of thousands of people. NDEs usually have a journey through a tunnel into light, a life review, a meeting with dead family and friends, a glimpse of Heaven, and then a painful return to the physical body. The exact details of the experience and how it effects the rest of their lives varies from person to person and by the amount of oxygen deprivation, however.
- And by what you expect the afterlife to be like.
  - So if you expect the afterlife to be Death's house in a far dark country surrounded by fields of grain and his home is completely overrun by kittens, what happens then?
George Orwell, in a notebook kept during his final illness, wrote about "Death Dreams": "Sometimes of the sea or the sea shore but more often of enormous, splendid buildings or streets or ships, in which I often lose my way, but always with a peculiar feeling of happiness and of walking in sunlight. Unquestionably all these buildings etc mean death - I am almost aware of this even in the dream..." He did not believe in an afterlife, and wondered why death, which he wasn't afraid to think about while awake, had to be represented as something else in a dream.

Durable Deathtrap

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