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Schrödinger's Butterfly
aka: Schroedingers Butterfly
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Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with myself and doing as I pleased. I didn't know I was myself. Suddenly I woke up and there I was, solid and unmistakably myself. But I didn't know if I was myself who had dreamt I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was me.
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 nagging 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 Author's 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 Schrödinger'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:
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Anime & Manga
- 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 first major stage 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 (Itachi's strongest genjutsu), 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 leave 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 a cyborg hacker with the ability to completely alter the perception of people with any kinds of brain implants. When they notice they are trapped in an illusion, they manage to break out, only to realize they are just in another illusion, before they finally manage to break free for real. Of course, they wonder if perhaps they never actually left the false realities, and if they might unknowingly live out the rest of their lives in an illusion. Scary!
- .hack//SIGN ends with Helba forcibly deleting Net Slum in a desperate effort to stop Skeith, causing everyone to be ejected from the game as the server crashes. This results in Tsukasa finally logging out of the game for the first time in the entire series and having a heartwarming meeting with Subaru in the real world...but when their hands touch, a distinctly cyberspace-y hexagon grid appears, and it then cuts to a scene of what appears to be the ruins of Net Slum (which is very similar to the very start of the first episode), with a mysterious monologue from Morganna. It doesn't help either that the "real world" segment of Tsukasa leaving the hospital and meeting Subaru has a somewhat surreal tone to it, what with the whole silent movie style and all. Ultimately, it's not really clear until later installments in the .hack series whether or not Tsukasa actually ever managed to log out.
- Aizen's zanpakutou ability in Bleach Its very essence is to warp a victim's perception of reality.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Gold Experience Requiem's powers is like this, specifically the endless chain of "waking" only to be in another fabricated scenario. The victim catches on after about three times that he's no longer alive, but that doesn't change the fact that he'll never die, either.
- Never really happens in El-Hazard, but at one point Makoto wakes up after having a weird dream. Since he's not entirely sure that El-Hazard itself isn't a dream, he gets a bit confused on the subject.
Makoto: What a weird dream. Within a dream. Or is this the dream?
- "Vision of Escaflowne": Every episode for the first half or so of the episodes starts with ""Was it all just a dream? Or maybe a vision... no, it was real!". In addition on several occasions she does go to the other reality in a dream
First episode has her see a vision of Van appearing through a beam of light before she passes out, later on in the episode this actually happens.
While in Gaea she has several dreams where she is back with her friends in Japan.
- Are we all (as in, all of objective reality, not just the reality within the series) but a dream of Haruhi Suzumiya? At least Koizumi sets this as one of the possible theories.
Comic Books
Film
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.
- 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 that Zampano made up the film, or that Johnny made up both Zampano and the film, or that Johnny himself is also made up.
- 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.
- The complete mind screw ending of The Man in the High Castle which seems to somehow end in our world.
- In Ubik, the line between the living and the dead existing in "half-life" becomes blurred in the end, after having been seemingly resolved.
- Dick, who was also the author of the original short story "The Minority Report" and the story that inspired Total Recall, among many others of this type, could be said to owe his whole career to this trope. To a certain extent, his whole life orbited around this trope.
- 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, and what might happen if the Red King wakes up while Alice is still in 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?"
- This is basically the plot of The Red King, the second novel in the Star Trek: Titan series. The novel features an eponymous intelligence, which resides within a protouniverse overlapping with our own. As a result of this overlap, its expansion threatens several worlds with destruction. The legends of many local races' speak of the protouniverse, or at least the associated intelligence. They describe it as a sleeping dreamer, the surrounding region of space being the content of the dream. The expansion and its resultant destruction is therefore supposedly the dream coming to an end as the being begins to wake. Frane, a native of the Neyel (whose world is part of the threatened region), describes the myth to Titan's crew:
"And when it wakes, it ceases to dream. But all the worlds that surround it are part of that dream. Like Newaerth, the first world to vanish as the Sleeper begins stirring from its long ages of slumber".
- Gödel, Escher, Bach uses several of these, nesting several layers of drama. In one story, Achilles and the Tortoise are on an airship and start reading a book about themselves, and inside the book. The bad news is that the story doesn't "pop back" all the way to the last level, and the initial story is still left hanging. The good news is that the Tortoise and Achilles can move up to a previous level using popcorn.
- This is basically the entire premise of a Jostein Gaarder novel Sophie's World.
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream, a 17th-century Spanish play, deals with the conception of life as a dream particularly in the first act.
- The book Liar is told from the point of view of a chronic liar. The make it worse, every now and then,she tells you shes lied about something and promises not to do it again, then a few chapters later she's confess to lying again. By the end of the book, you're really unsure if any of it actually took place.
- In Robert E. Howard's "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", the mirrors nearly trap Kull in another world.
For there are worlds beyond worlds, as Kull knows, and whether the wizard bewitched him by words or by mesmerism, vistas did open to the kings gaze beyond that strange door, and Kull is less sure of reality since he gazed into the mirrors of Tuzun Thune.
- Polaris by HPL is based on this entirely.
- The Goosebumps book I Live In Your Basement, to the point of being a Mind Screw.
- Stanislaw Lem did this in his novel The Futurological Congress. With hallucinogens being used as a war weapon, neither the protagonist or the reader is really sure when or if things get back to reality.
- Some Choose Your Own Adventure books had the results of really bad screw-ups followed by "it was all a dream". An egregious exanple is Space and Beyond; one ending has it be All Just a Dream; the rest of the endings say that it is not.
- Several times during the course of The Circle Series, Thomas Hunter actually asks himself whether he's dreaming or not. He never does figure out which he's actually living in.
- Stephen King's Pet Sematary includes a heart-wrenching scene in which the protagonist has exactly this kind of dream.
- The second series of Hawkmoon novels by Michael Moorcock start with the hero trying to be happy with his wife and young family but being haunted by the ghosts of his friends who died at the climax of the first series. It then switches around to him being comforted by those friends having recovered from a delusion caused by the death of his new wife instead.
- In Michael Flynn's The January Dancer, the Compelling Voice can make you forgot things. As a consequence, you can't be sure that anything you know really is true. Perhaps the person with the Dancer has taken over the galazy and you just don't realize because you've been ordered not to.
Live Action TV
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.
- This is actually (or also) a reference to the original ghost story the song is based on, in which the doll drives its owner insane enough to try destroying it once and for all, and when they do, it takes over their body (or just vanishes, its mischief complete, depending on the retelling) and leaves the owner in the form of a new doll, ready to do the same to the next person who picks it up.
Theater
- William Shakespeare's ''The Taming of the Shrew" begins with a Framing Device of a drunk vagrant named Christopher Sly who passes out. A passing noble decides it would be good fun to mess with Sly's head and have all his servants pretend Sly is a lord when he wakes up, telling him that he was sick for like fifteen years or something. Sly asks himself "Do I dream? Or have I dream'd till now?"
- The same kind of plot is not unknown in the european theatre of that period : Compare with the Spanish play La Vida es sueńo (Calderon, 1635) and the lesser-known French play Le Songe des hommes eveillés (Des Brosses, 1646)
Toys
- In BIONICLE, a character asks the question of whether Metus is a snake dreaming he's an Agori or an Agori dreaming he's a snake.
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
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.
- Then there's the Fing-longer episode, where we see several characters' theoretical scenarios play out on the Professor's 'What if" Machine, only for it to be revealed at the end that the whole episode was one big "What if" scenario for the Fing-longer itself. This raises certain questions when the "What if" Machine makes a repeat appearance in a later episode.
Real Life
- The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi
 is the Trope Codifier. Zhuangzi, however, did not think reality could be a dream. He was not Buddhist, idealist, rationalist, or (ontological) dualist. The short anecdote actually finishes "Zhōu and the Butterfly, there must be distinction. This is the 'becoming of things'." 'Becoming of things', 物化 "wůhuŕ", can also translated as 'transubstantiation,' 'objectification,' or 'being.' The point is not that life might be a dream but that the distinction between dreamer and dream, thinker and thought, subject and object, the distinction itself is ontologically fundamental (a philosophy similar to Descartes' "I think therefore I am"). While early Daoists did not have the same concept of consciousness as Continental philosophers this is really closer to Phenomenology than the popular Buddhist/idealist interpretation used in this trope.
- 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.
- A fairly common one is false awakening Which, if it happens enough, just gets annoying.
- The personality disorder called Solipsism has the person believing everything around them is a figment of their imagination or similar. Most of these people are entirely normal-seeming folk who will treat the people around them civilly despite them being "unreal".
- Solipsism is also both a philosophical belief and a common argument against empiricist and sceptic philosophy (we can only know what our senses tell us and what we experience, but since we are often mistaken, and our senses decieve us sometimes, maybe we can't). The idea is that if you doubt everything, then what is left is total uncertainty, a life which is near-impossible to lead and one which most people would find utterly pointless. Philosophical solipsism can be summed up as "My mind is something I know for sure exists, but as for anything or anybody else..."
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