Schrodinger's Butterfly - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): Schrodingers Butterfly

Are you really a dream of this butterfly?

"He's dreaming now," said Tweedledee: "and what do you think he's dreaming about?"
Alice said "Nobody can guess that."
"Why, about YOU!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?"
"Where I am now, of course," said Alice.
"Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!"
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

A man falls asleep and dreams he's a butterfly. But in the dream, the butterfly falls asleep and dreams it's a man. When he awakes, he's never sure forever afterward if he really is a man, or just a butterfly having a dream.

When a story introduces the possibility of worlds within worlds, be they a Lotus Eater Machine or perfectly lucid dreams, there will always be a niggling doubt in the back of a viewer's mind whether the story is real (well, that is to say, real inside the work of fiction) or if they aren't dreaming or "still plugged in".

This serves as a source of mystery and speculation in a story. Did the heroes really break the spell cast by the Master Of Illusion, or are they all imagining it? Did they escape the Convenient Coma that trapped them in a Happy Place... or merely trade a perfect illusory world for a more realist one? These doubts may never be resolved until a Sequel comes out or Word Of God clarifies it. Sometimes, the ambiguity works in favor of the story, leaving it open to interpretation.

Much like the other Schrodinger tropes, this plot point can also serve as an Authors Saving Throw by retroactively making it All Just A Dream. Or if the author really wants to mess with us, end the movie or film on a Downer Ending, with a fading shot of the character's dying or still comatose body trapped in the illusion.

The trope name is a reference to a poem by the 4th century BC Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi

, a Taoist philosopher who influenced Chinese Buddhism. It refers also to Erwin Schrodinger

's thought experiment relating to quantum uncertainty. If you can't tell, we like to be well balanced in our geekery on this wiki.

Compare: Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory and Dream Apocalypse. Contrast Or Was It A Dream. See also: Cuckoo Nest, Dying Dream, Through The Eyes Of Madness, Masquerade, and Brainwashed.

Examples:

Anime

Paprika. Where to begin?
In Naruto, brothers Sasuke and Itachi Uchiha practice genjutsu, techniques centering around illusions. Thus, during the Sasuke vs Itachi fight, the bulk of the battle consists of Sasuke and Itachi standing perfectly still while both add layer upon layer of illusions. The readers, of course, are ignorant of what is an illusion and what isn't until after the illusion breaks. As a result, there are several points in which the fight seems over, only for the illusion to break and reveal that the brothers hadn't actually started fighting yet.
- Practically lampshaded when Sasuke breaks Tsukuyomi, and Zetsu pretty much lets the reader know the rest of this isn't genjutsu.
XxxHolic actually even refers to the above quote and it is an allegory of a central theme in the series.
In Get Backers, in one of the episodes, an elderly homeless man asks the Get Backers to save his daughter from the mafia. When they arrive the girl doesn't want to go with them, and they leaver her there. Upon seeing the old man being loaded onto an ambulance, Ban catches both the old man's and Ginji's eyes before the daughter runs up to tell her father that she loves and forgives him. It is never revealed whether the daughter truly showed up, or if Ban was showing both men a pleasant illusion. The viewer is often confused as to what is the illusion and what is reality, only being sure when Ban reveals his trick.
- It's a dream. In the original Manga, Ginji asks him if he used the Evil Eye, and Ban replies with a dejected 'yeah'.
In Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, Batou and Togusa meet an android with the ability to induce powerful illusions. After they break his illusions, they wonder if perhaps they never actually left the false reality, and if they might unknowingly live out the rest of their lives in an illusion. Scary!

Film

The Nexus from Star Trek: Generations. In fact, see the Trek Wild Mass Guessing page for one interpretation of this.
Taxi Driver shows our sociopathic "hero" getting great praise for his shoot out, right after being probably gunned down. Even if he really did live, you can bet he's still crazy.
- A large chunk of another Scorsese-De Niro film, The King Of Comedy, can be interpreted as a product of its protagonist's imagination.
Total Recall: Is it a memory implant gone awry, or all real?
- In the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale that inspired this (can't say based on, can't even say very, very loosely based on), it did really happen. As for the movie, Word Of God and a pivotal, though seemingly throwaway, line from a Rekall technician early in the film suggest that it was indeed All Just A Dream.
  - The DVD commentary is particularly interesting: the director seems to be implying the movie was All Just A Dream while Schwarzenegger (who is also commenting) seems to be implying that it was all real.
- The director's views on whether it was real or a dream also seem to vary with the possibility of a sequel of the movie being made at the time he asked about that dilemma.
The Thirteenth Floor has someone invent an artificial virtual reality world at the beginning, then reveal that their world is also a virtual reality world.
The Matrix.
- Particularly at the end of the second movie when Neo was able to stop a machine with his mind in what was supposed to be the real world when nobody had shown powers in the real world before, fans speculated that the "real world" might just have been another layer of the matrix used to control rebellious minds.
The deleted scenes of X Men 2 show that Jason didn't just make Xavier think he was back at the institute, he made him think that he succeeded in convincing Jason to let him escape from the Lotus Eater Machine.
As Brazil unfolds, the line between the real world and Sam's dreams gets progressively blurrier. The final scene reveals that Sam's escape was a delusion, likely brought on by the trauma of being tortured by his friend Jack.
Existenz embodies this trope. How many levels of this virtual reality are there? And how do you know when you're in real life?
Minority Report: Did John Anderton clear his name or was the ending of the film just a dream he was having in his containment cell?
1408: The whole movie plays with this concept a lot but especially when the main character (as well as the viewing audience) is tricked into thinking that he escapes the hotel room and has returned to a normal life before he realizes that it was all a vicious illusion. This arguably comes to an end when he burns the place down and escapes, but there's still the feeling that too could possibly be an illusion.
- Given that we see the main character's funeral it isn't likely that it's still an illusion. Then again, that doesn't prevent a downer ending, given that the final scare seems to strongly imply that the "evil fucking room" isn't completely dead yet.
  - The funeral was an alternative ending.
  - The one that makes the most sense is when he's at home, listening to the tape, just hearing static. Is the room just a place where people are so psychologically disturbed by the possibility of an "evil room" that they make it up? The second most sense-making one is where he hears the voice of his daughter on the tape and gives his wife a HUGE condescending look. This ending is indeed the most disturbing as the room could physically manifest objects.

Literature

Terry Pratchett loves to reference this one. Once he combined this trope with the Butterfly Of Doom in some kind of mega-metaphor involving butterflies.
- He also had it skewered by Susan Sto Helit, who asked if a poet who had came up with this wrote his poems with a brush or by leaving information-rich patterns on cabbage leaves. Upon being told it was the former, she concludes he was probably a man.
  - Well, it's easy from the outside.
House Of Leaves has tons of this. There are multiple layers of narration; Johnny is editing a text written by Zampano about The Navidson Record, which is a movie made by Navidson about the house. Throughout the book, there are hints that Zampano or Johnny are altering or completely fabricating things, or even that there never was a Navidson Record, a Zampano, or even a Johnny.
There is a dialogue in Douglas Hofstader's Godel Escher Bach involving a story within a story within a story within a story. The twist is that the story doesn't "pop back" all the way to the last level, and the initial story is still left hanging.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick involves a plot to Take Over The World through hallucinogens that in theory could take a thousand years to wear off. Every main character takes the drugs at one point or another, more than once a seeming recovery is merely hallucinated. By the end, it's virtually impossible to decide what's "real" and what's not.
- Not to mention the complete mind screw ending of The Man in the High Castle which seems to somehow end in our world...
In the Alice In Wonderland sequel, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the question is repeated brought up as to whether this is all the Red King's dream.
- In Sylvie And Bruno, the narrator explicitly thinks it:
"So, either I've been dreaming about Sylvie," I said to myself, "and this is the reality. Or else I've really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?"
Done in the second Star Trek Titan novel, where it appears that the entire Large Magellanic Cloud is the dream of some supernatural being.

Live Action TV

One Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode has her "wake up" in an insane asylum, having dreamt the last few seasons in a fugue. In the end, Buffy decides that Sunnydale is real and saves her friends... and then we see her psychologist pronounce her too far gone to save. Presumably the rest of the series is her continued hallucinations; how Angel fits in is anybody's guess.
- Alternately, the hallucinogen hadn't finished wearing off yet...
- A third interpretation could be that this other world was actually created by the demon, and the hero had the choice of remaining there, with a reasonably happy life, or returning to the other, harsher world
The Stargate Atlantis episode The Real World ends with the heroes briefly wondering if the reality they're in is real or another Asuran deception, then quickly deciding they'd rather not know.
Star Trek
- An undeveloped script idea for Deep Space Nine had Chief O'Brien and Julian Bashir trapped in a virtual reality prison. They escape and make it back to DS9, only to find that they're still in prison, so they escape again and make it back to DS9. The episode was to end with O'Brien telling his wife that he didn't know for sure if he'd actually escaped, and he never will.
  - The season 7 episode "Extreme Measures" does this exact thing with O'Brien and Bashir, when Sloan's mind tricks them into believing they've returned to reality (when in actuality they are still inside his mind, slowly dying with him).
- A similar concept would also be used in the 6th season episode "Far Beyond the Stars" in which Sisko hallucinates that he is Benny Russll, a pulp fiction writer, whose latest story stars none other than Sisko. It gets even more extreme in that Benny Russell has hallucinations about being Sisko. At the end of the episode Sisko is telling his father that for all he knows he is a figment of his own (alter-ego Benny Russell's) imagination.
  - This appears to describe an episode of Voyager involving a species which spend their entire life dreaming. Only Native American spirit magic can free the crew... or something.
- In another episode of Voyager, the crew falls prey to a gigantic space pitcher plant. It makes the crew see what they want to see (a worm hole to Earth) but they would actually be flying into it's stomach. Seven is the only adult left awake as Voyager is in the creature. At one point she believes she has escaped but it is just the creature showing her what she wants to see (that is Voyager outside the creature.).
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle", a holographic Moriarty think he escaped from the computer— but he is actually "exploring" a 24th-century screen saver. At the end, Picard speculates about his crew being someone else's entertainment in a little box... oooh, meta.
  - Earlier in the episode Picard and Data were in the holographic simulation of the Enterprise, thinking they had exited the program.
- Another Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Frame of Mind", both explores and inverts this trope, nearly driving Commander Riker insane.
One episode of The X Files dealt with this trope.
- "Name me one hallucinogen that loses its effectiveness because you know you've taken it. We're still there. "
This also appears in one episode of Red Dwarf (season 5, episode 6) where the crew dies, only to see the "Game Over" text appear and shortly afterwards wake up in VR-game chairs... The series continued after that episode, of course.
- Probably a reference to Better Than Life from Season 2, and at least one novel.By the end of the series, it's impossible to tell whether they've really escaped the game, or the game just lets them think they have. (It does explain a lot of the self-admitted implausible science.)
  - Better Than Life was the Season 2 version, played almost entirely for laughs. Back to Reality is the Season 5 finale that played a similar concept very seriously. Not only did this sort of go hand in hand with the series "growing up" over time, it also helped create multiple levels of mindscrew.
An Outer Limits twist, literally: did the hero escape early in the episode, or at the end? Neither—he's still hallucinating.
Played with at the end of a Lotus Eater Machine episode of Stargate SG-1—the protagonists are certain they're in the real world. The guy who trapped them in virtual reality wouldn't be freaking out over the other people they've led to escape ruining his beloved garden if it were virtual.
In the American version of Touching Evil, Creegan befriends Cyril, a homeless man who believes that he's dreaming the show's reality, and that when he goes to sleep, he's really waking up in the "real" world, the space colony Alpha 9.
An episode of Far Scape has Chiana introducing John to a self-creating VR program that operates based on a person's subconscious. John beats the game, only to end up back on the Moya as Scorpius invades and takes everyone hostage. John manages to escape, meet up with Chiara... and realize that he's still in the game, having lost track of the real Chiana and picking up an NPC based on her instead.
Supernatural's version of the genie works that way : he grants you your wish by making you hallucinate he did, while feeding on you till you die. Because Supernatural is optimistic.
There was a TWILIGHT ZONE episode in which the entire story consisted of a woman's repeatedly waking up from nightmares, only to find each time that she was still dreaming.

Music

Jonathan Coulton's song Creepy Doll ends something like this:
You decide that you’ve had enough
And you lock the doll in the wooden box
You put the box in the fireplace
Next to your bag of big city money.
As the smoke fills up your tiny room there’s nothing you can do
And far too late you see the one inside the box is you.

Video Games

Zhuangzi's poem is the source of all the butterfly symbolism in the Persona games, as referenced by Megami Ibunroku Persona's intro.
Silent Hill's Bad Ending shows us the protagonist dying in his broken car — apparently all the game was just a dream he had between the car crash and his death. Other endings are less unhappy, though... except for the one where he kills his daughter and he and an Innocent Bystander get roasted alive in a collapsing hell-dimension. Oh, and there are four sequels; he's revealed to have survived in the third only to be killed off-screen.
Part of the ending of the Ciel route in Tsukihime involves Shiki in a mental dream world where there are no vampires, Ciel is just a normal girl and he doesn't have his Eyes of Death Perception. He catches on pretty quick and has a little chat with his Nanaya side over whether he wants to leave or not, because leaving most likely means death.
The whole point of Eternal Sonata is the question of whether Frédéric Chopin is just having an extremely lucid fever dream, or if he really is in another world.
The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening - The island is nothing but one big dream, and the point of gathering the 8 dungeon items this time around is to wake both you and the Wind Fish up. Link is oblivious to this since you aren't directly told that it's a dream until late in the game, but the owl and boss monsters don't really try to hide this fact from you.
- It should also be noted that at one point you end up in a dream sequence inside the dream world.
Referenced in one of the endings to Yo-Jin-Bo. Sayori wakes up at home, alone, in her own bed, and assumes her adventure in 19th century Japan was just a dream. And yet, she says she can't shake the feeling that that time was the "real" time, and today's present is only a dream that her 19th century self is having.

Western Animation

Bender in Futurama Lampshades this when the episode Obsoletely Fabulous turns out to be just a dream while he gets a compatibility upgrade:
Bender: "Uff. If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure anything is real? Is it not possible, nay, probable that my whole life is just a product of my or someone else's imagination?"
Clerk: "No, get out. Next!"
Bender then walks out into a world of magical beer fairies and cigar trees while whistling.
- Umm... I always thought the twist was that Bender's whole life IS a product of someone else's imagination. Matt Groening, David X Cohen and the various writers on the show...

Comic Books

At the end of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, Crazy Jane finds herself trapped on a mundane alternate Earth, being treated by Marcia, a psychologist who regards her strange memories and dreams as delusions. The vividness of Jane's stories and the ineffectiveness of psychotherapy in explaining them away leads Marcia to doubt whether she's doing the right thing. After another doctor forcibly subjects Jane to electro-convulsive therapy, Jane appears to be cured of her delusions and her multiple personalities, but she gives Marcia the "Mystery Coin" she described in her stories, confirming Marcia's suspicion that Jane was not simply mentally ill.
- Morrison uses it again in The Invisibles, when Jack Frost tries to engage in one-on-one psychic combat with the King-of-All-Tears. Among the various tactics it uses (such as Mind Rape) is having illusions of his teammates show up, telling him that they've managed to win, and he can break that warding circle now...
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Dream subjects a character to a punishment of "eternal waking". The character in question continually dreams that he's woken up, only to see some nightmarish thing that tells him he's still dreaming, only to wake up from that dream...

Real Life

This trope probably derives from a dream commonly experienced during the earliest stages of deep mourning. In the dream the dead person is still alive, and it's explicitly stated in the dream (either by the dreamer or the deceased) that the "mourning" the dreamer has just gone through was nothing but a bad nightmare. The dreamer then awakes and suffers extreme confusion. It's common enough that journal articles and even a book have been written about it.
- Stephen King's PET SEMATARY includes a heart-wrenching scene in which the protagonist has exactly this kind of dream.

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