Talking in Your Dreams

Or rather, teaching in your dreams.

"We bring the subject into the dream, and they populate it with their subconscious. You can even talk to my subconscious; that's one of the ways we extract information..."

— Dom Cobb, Inception

You're asleep, you're dreaming — you're really talking with someone else. Or fighting them. Or —

Dreams that are secretly (or openly) a form of two-way interaction. (The other person may or may not be asleep.) Harm can only come to the dreamer through psycho-somatic effects, or as mental damage. Maybe the other person is a Dream Walker.

May shade into Dreaming of Things to Come / Opinion-Changing Dream, if the other person tells of or shows the future, or Dreaming of Times Gone By, for the past. Dream Spying is particularly likely to overlap, letting the dreamer see the present with the other as a guide. May be mistaken for Dreaming the Truth, or if a Dead Person Conversation, be indistinguishable.

May take place in Dream Land. Can be a form of Adventures in Comaland, if you are seriously out of it.

Not to be confused with Talking in Your Sleep, which may or may not share similarities with this trope.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In several of CLAMP's works, dreamseeing and dreamseers are important elements of the plot and can speak with the dead, especially in X1999, ×××HOLiC and Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, in the latter two cases allowing people to communicate across dimensions.
• In Fruits Basket, the spirit of the God of the Zodiac speaks to all of the Juunishi in a dream on the night of Akito's conception, telling them that he'll see them soon.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • The second Sound Stage of A's has Hayate falling asleep during her medical treatment and finding herself having a chat with her Book of Darkness in her dreams.
  • The third Sound Stage of Strikers crosses this over with Converse with the Unconscious, where Shamal uses telepathy to talk with Zafira while he's in a coma.
• Tiara, the heroine of Shamanic Princess, has several cryptic conversations with her missing best friend Sara in her dreams.
• YuYu Hakusho: When the protagonist Yusuke is temporarily dead and can only wander around in his spirit form, at one point he helps his rival Kuwabara study for a science test he has to pass. His only way of communicating with the latter is to enter his dream, which he does while Kuwabara is asleep at his desk.

Comic Books

• In Astro City story "Knock Wood", the Blue Knight directly addresses a lawyer who's been dreaming of him in the last dream.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story "The Long Way Home", Buffy has a long talk with Ethan Rayne in her dreams, who gives her valuable clues into who's attacking her, and why.
• In Iron Man #20, "Haunted — Part One", Tony talks to the then-dead Captain America in his dreams.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992): Shortly after witnessing a vision of his parents, Zelda appears to Link in the desert, causing him to brush it off as another mirage. Zelda claims that they are in a dream, for if two people dream the same thing, they will run into each other.
• In Teen Titans, Raven forms the new team by appearing in the dreams of former members and some new young heroes to help her fight her father, after the Justice League wouldn't trust her.
• In The Untold Story of Argo City, Zor-El and Allura repeatedly talk to their daughter Supergirl in her dreams to warn her that they are alive and trapped in a pocket dimension.

Fairy Tales

• In the first known version of "Beauty and the Beast", Beauty has repeated dreams of a handsome young man begging her to save him. Only after she agrees to marry the Beast does she realize that he and the man in her dreams are one and the same.

Fan Works

• Becoming Ponies has the character stalking to their counterparts this way. Notably, this only happens after the counterparts become aware of the character's presence, and the examples shown thus far could easily also be Anxiety Dreams caused by The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body.
• In Can a Boo Be Friends with a Human?, the Star Spirits contact Mario and Luigi through their dreams although not without difficulty when neither brother feels like talking.
• In Child of the Storm, Harry Thorson makes a habit of this:
  • He first talks to a cousin who becomes somewhat of a very occasional obscure mentor figure in a way described as:
  When he opened his eyes, he knew imediately that [...t]hey were metaphorical eyes, and like real eyes, opening them signalled his becoming aware of his surroundings. [...] He knew that he wasn't conscious, which presumably meant that this was some sort of dream.
  • Later, he does so again with another cousin, Maddie, and then with Carol, as part of Supering in Your Sleep. Both are particularly impressive since he's on the other side of the Atlantic.
• In the Dangerverse by Anne Walsh aka Whodoyouneedtoknow, a very long series of Harry Potter fics, the Pack and the Pride can do this. Develops as the stories progress so to do the ways in which various characters are able to meet up.
• In Death And Ker, Minako has recurring dream-conversations with several keres and people whose Personas are keres. The ones with Jin and Takaya could simply be normal dreams (considering that both of them are presumably dead), but the ones with Souji, Ryoji, and Ker herself fall under this trope - particularly the one with Souji, as a later chapter confirms.
• A Diplomatic Visit: Per Luna's ability as a Dream Walker, she can do this to anyone who needs her help; in the first story, she visits Twilight, and later allows Celestia to talk to Twilight this way as well. In the third story, after awakening a deeper connection to her Mantle, Twilight becomes able to speak to Magic in her sleep; in the epilogue, Pinkie and Fluttershy confirm they've become able to speak with their Mantles of Laughter and Kindness as well, and Rarity thinks she's heard Generosity.
• Don't Go Stealing My Heart: Jaskier and Geralt meet while Jaskier is sleeping and Geralt is suffering from a sleeping curse. Geralt's medallion that Jaskier is wearing allows them to communicate via a shared dream.
• "Sharing dreams" among the Psyches is implied to be a Mental Affair going on between members of the same sex in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, but Empath and Polaris mostly use it as a means to talk to each other while still in Psychelia.
• Eugenesis give this as the explanation for how Megatron came up with the idea of transforming. The Liege Maximo appeared to him in a dream and showed him the designs.
• The Eventide Verse: Implied, but not shown, in Dawn of the Chiroptera. The young pegasus, Redeye Flight, has been hospitalized with a magical disease that turns out to be a form of vampirism with nightmares as one of its symptoms. As she's being tucked into bed after a visit from Twilight Sparkle, she's asked to "say hi to Luna," who is a Dream Walker and who Redeye had earlier stated a fondness for.
• Holly Potter and the Witching World: Lily, who after sacrificing herself in battle with Tom Riddle to save her daughter Holly, lives on as a spirit tied to Holly's wand and can communicate with Holly in her dreams.
• The Urusei Yatsura story "Just A Dream" used this to justify a Transplanted Character Fic; the series was explained as a dream shared by the AU Ataru and Lum, featuring "distorted" versions of themselves and their respective friends.
• In the Jackie Chan Adventures fic Queen of All Oni, Tarakudo has been using Jade's dreams to drudge up painful memories and drag her deeper into darkness. Later in an interlude Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, he tries to contact her directly, but that doesn't work.
• In With Strings Attached, the Fans (specifically Varx) first contact the four (though we only see his contact with Paul) through dreams, or hypnogogic telepathic contact. Most of their subsequent interactions are plain old telepathy. However, much later, after Jeft leaves and the other Fans lose their easy computer access to the four, they manage to contact George and Ringo this way.

Film — Animated

• Throughout The Wind Rises, Jiro Horikoshi has dreams where he discusses airplanes with his hero, Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who believes that he is dreaming. We never see them meet in person, making it ambiguous whether they are actually sharing dreams.

Film — Live-Action

• The Curse of Sleeping Beauty: While sleeping at Kaiser Gardens Thomas dreams of the sleeping girl and this time is able to kiss and awaken her. She tells him her name is Briar Rose and that they can communicate now that they are close in the physical world.
• The researchers in Dreamscape initially trained psychics to project themselves into others' dreams and help them confront their fears. Then the plot got hijacked by an assassinate-the-President-in-his-sleep scheme.
• The Golden Child: The sorcerer Numspa communicates with Jarrell in a dream. After he wakes up, Jarrell's attractive female sidekick Kee Nang informs him that while what Numspa said was actually happening, the parts where she suggested they get together and "let nature take its course" actually was a dream.

Literature

• Anita Blake: Anita starts the process of becoming Jean-Claude's human servant in the first book (Guilty Pleasures), which means he can get in her dreams. At first, he shows up in a coffin overflowing with blood. In later books, this comes up again, and the dreams span from seduction to sex.
• In Robin McKinley's Beauty, a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast", the Beast sends Beauty's father dreams of how she is faring in his castle.
• Subverted in The BFG in that the BFG and Sophie create a dream for the Queen of England about the man-eating giants, since she would never believe them if they simply told her. To make the "dream come true", the dream includes Sophie sitting on the Queen's window sill, which the Queen then sees in real life when she wakes.
• Heralds of Valdemar: Kerowyn, the protagonist of By the Sword, spends ten years having dream-conversations with Eldan before finally learning that they'd actually been communicating telepathically the whole time.
• In Charles de Lint's The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, Lillian is assured that the Father of Cats can get into your dream and chase you there, and if he kills you, you die in reality.
• In John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos the children receive repeated dream messages from their parents, who can reach them no other way.
• In the Chronicles of the Kencyrath Jame and Torisen frequently interact and talk with each other in their dreams. This is especially the case when one of them is knocked out, or someone else interferes with their dreams. Some shanir have the ability to visit the dreams of others.
• In Dorothy Gilman's The Clairvoyant Countess, after trying to contact a woman in a reading, she starts to get dream messages from her.
• The Court Of The Stone Children: Nina dreams of a time when her home is taken apart and sent to a museum. Her dead father appears to tell her something.
• In Dora Wilk Series, this happens several times to Dora:
  • All of her conversations with Badb happen in rather unpleasant dreams.
  • Goddess, the Mother Nature, pays Dora a dream visit to give her a mission.
  • Dora herself interrogates a witness to coup d'etat in Hell in a dream vision of the future, and the witness remembers the conversation. Don't think too hard on logic of it.
  • Dora and Baal have a dream conversation on children and marriage.
• In Laura Amy Schlitz's A Drowned Maiden's Hair, Victoria tells Maud that she used to be able to dream of dead people, and sometimes talk with them, until she lied about one telling her something. After that, Maud starts to dream of a dead girl.
• In Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, Esk dreams about the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and interacts with them. They even tell her the word "psychosomatic" and assure her she can die because of her dreams.
• In The Girl from the Miracles District:
  • Nikita's conversation with Ture, after he dies, all happen when she's asleep.
  • It eventually turns out that her entire trip to Asgard was this.
• The Graveyard Book, Nobody can do this with Dreamwalking to deal with bullies.
• In C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, the narrator meets with George MacDonald — who solemnly warns him that it is All Just a Dream and he must make it clear when he tells the story in Real Life.
• In the Kull/Bran Mak Morn story "Kings of the Night", Gonar claims to be visited in his dreams by the first Gonar.
• Malta gets a shared-dream-in-a-box as a present from her fiancee in Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy.
  • And in the later Tawny Man trilogy, Nettle's Skill manifests itself as the ability to control dreams, and she and Fitz interact in dreams before they actually meet.
• In Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, when Yama goes to assassinate Sam, he meets monks, who cast him into an immensely symbolic dream where he destroys the universe trying to kill him. He asks Sam after, who can not explicate it to him.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Fellowship of the Ring: All the hobbits except Sam felt the Old Forest trying to get into their dreams at Tom Bombadil's.
  • The Return of the King: Frodo's dreams are filled with the Eye of Sauron, who fortunately has less ability to reach him than in most instances of this trope.
• In No Gods Only Daimons this is how Al-Hakem Al-Dunya primarily communicates with his chosen agent, Luke Landon.
• In Seanan McGuire's October Daye novel, Katie, as an oneiromancer, can do this to get information to Toby. Since she's a Dream Weaver, she can set the scene, too.
• In Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny's dreams let him talk with Kirsty — and find her afterward, when they are awake.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls, a god appears to Ista in her dreams while looking like his priest, dy Cabon. After the god has finished speaking with her, he leaves and dy Cabon's awareness fills the dream body. Sadly, as soon as Ista figures out that this is a true dream, each the other's, she wakes up. Thus she learns that dy Cabon is alive, but not where he is or whether anyone else has survived.
• Pale: Alpeana's gift to the trio is to facilitate communication with each other and other people through dreams. She also has a colleague who works with erotic dreams instead of nightmares who is tapped for this service once.
• In Palimpsest, people will understand you regardless of what language you speak. Characters run into people they know on the other side frequently.
• In John Milton's Paradise Lost, one attack Satan uses on Eve
  methought
  Close at mine ear one call'd me forth to walk
  With gentle voice, I thought it thine; it said,
  Why sleepst thou EVE? now is the pleasant time,
  The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
  To the night-warbling Bird, that now awake
  Tunes sweetest his love-labor'd song; now reignes
  Full Orb'd the Moon, and with more pleasing light
  Shadowie sets off the face of things; in vain,
  If none regard; Heav'n wakes with all his eyes,
  Whom to behold but thee, Natures desire,
  In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
  Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.
• "The Phoenix on the Sword": Conan the Barbarian is warned in his dream by the long-dead Epemitreus.
• The Shining Falcon: Finist appears in Alexi's dreams, posing as a bad dream.
• Solaris has an ambiguous example: while asleep, Kris hears Gibarian's voice and has a perfectly sensible (if a bit cryptic) conversation about what's been happening and whether the other crewmembers have seen through the lie Kris told them. Of course, Gibarian's been dead for months at this point, but it's suggested that Kris's memory of him briefly took over Harey's copy. On the other hand, later on she admits to having listened to Gibarian's voice recorder while Kris was sleeping, then hiding the recorder - so this may have been All Just a Dream brought on by hearing the recording.
• Star Trek Novel 'Verse: The Cardassian Fates communicate like this. Non-corporeal creatures inhabiting a mysterious dimensional plane that intersects with our own, they can telepathically influence mortals. In particular, with individuals of the right genetic makeup (or whose minds have been altered by particular artifacts), they can appear in dreams and hold "conversations" - or alternatively just plant images and desires. In the Terok Nor books, their apparent leader, Oralius, uses it to find the next Astraea so as to keep the Oralian Way religion and the compassionate, noble aspect of Cardassian society alive. Her Evil Counterpart Uramtali uses it to telepathically rape young boys.
• The Power of Five: The Five all meet in their dreams before any of them meet in real life.
• Stardust: Tristan is asked, in his dream, to keep down the volume of his dream.
• In Storm Over Warlock, the Back Story featured the first-in scout reporting dreams that drove him off planet. The events of the novel reveal that it was this trope.
• In Robin McKinley's Sunshine, after the final battle, her grandmother appears in Sunshine's dream to talk things over.
• Abridail's power in Super Powereds. He uses it to keep Globe in contact with the Melbrook gang.
• In Anne McCaffrey's Talents series, the Mrdini have a limited ability to manipulate human dreams. This works out quite well for first contact between humanity and Mrdini: they're able to communicate through dreams until they learn enough of each other's language to do so verbally.
• Those Who Hunt the Night: Vampires can communicate with people's dreams.
• Thursday Next: In Lost in a Good Book, the eradicated Landen talks with Thursday in her dream.
• In Vampire Academy, certain spirit users with Dreamwalker powers use it to communicate with others. This is primarily used by Adrian to speak to Rose, even when they are in different continents.
• This is how the cats of StarClan generally communicate with living cats in Warrior Cats, although the cat must believe that StarClan exists for them to be able to do it. Blind Seer Jayfeather can also do this, which is a huge deal because, well, he's still alive. Indeed, he often gets exasperated when the dreams he has frequently do not turn out to be his dreams at all.
  • Cats in the Place of No Stars can also communicate like this, but it is somewhat vague as to what the rules are for who they can and cannot speak to. The books have also shown that any injuries sustained in The Place of No Stars is inflicted on the cat in the real world too, possibly to the extent where you can be killed in a dream.
  • RiverClan medicine cat apprentice, Willowpaw, receives the StarClan portion of her training via dreams from ThunderClan medicine cat, Leafpool, since Willowpaw's mentor does not believe in StarClan.
• In the Warhammer 40,000 novels, this is a stock Psychic Power for telepaths or the psykers who are powerful enough to cross disciplines.
  • In Dan Abnett's Brothers of the Snake, the comatose Petrok sends a psychopomp to conduct the dreaming Priad into his own dreams. He warns Priad to flee, because he himself is under dream attack from Dark Eldar.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand, Cain thinks he's just having yet another Flashback Nightmare about a Slaaneshi cultist he killed after she tried to suck out his soul. Turns out she's Back from the Dead and can "caress your mind"...
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honour Guard, the wounded Ghosts, left behind, received repeated messages, apparently from the dead, to desert and join the honour guard.
  • In Graham McNeill's Fulgrim, Fulgrim hears voices nagging at him every night. He convinces himself that it's his subconscious. He's wrong.
  • In Only In Death, the dreams plaguing various Ghosts are revealed to be Soric attempting to reach and help them.
  • In Dan Abnett's Ravenor Returned, Ravenor contacts members of his team in their dreams to confirm that they want to go on working with him.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Scourge the Heretic, the sleeping Carolus is attacked by a demon. (Disguised as an Erotic Dream, no less.)
  • In Lee Lightner's Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, Ragnor confides in Gabriella that he think his enemy Madox is in his dreams. Gabriella dismisses it as Bad Dreams; he feels guilty about what went awry in an previous encounter. In reality, he is Dreaming of Things to Come.
  • In Graham McNeill's Ultramarines novel The Killing Ground, both the Space Marines and the Unfleshed suffered horrible dreams while on the Chaos-tainted space ship.
• In Marion G. Harmon's Wearing the Cape novels, Kitsune can do this to Hope. Falling cherry blossoms alert her to the type, and she (usually) remembers it unusually well.
• In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time:
  • Tel'aran'rhiod is an alternate reality that people can access through their dreams. Most only enter it briefly and unconsciously without special help, but those with a talent for Dreamwalking can enter freely and channellers can physically travel there.
  • Dreamwalkers also have the ability to find a person's dreams and project messages into them, pull the dreamer into Tel'aran'rhiod, or project themselves into the dream. However, entering another person's dreams puts the dreamer in control, so it's a bad option if they're not a lucid dreamer — and far riskier if they are.
• In The Witchlands, Weaverwitches can apparently invade other people's dreams to chat. Esme uses this to try and befriend Iseult, and later, when Iseult figures out how to communicate with Safi across large distances, the latter can only hear her while asleep.
• Witch World series:
  • In Sorceress of the Witch World, Kaththea's first real communication with Hilarion is in her dreams. (When she had stumbled into his prison, he had tried to take over her mind first, but then, he was desperate.)
  • The Key of the Keplian contains another example.
  • In Horn Crown the hero dreams of himself at a long-ago banquet — where a woman talks with him and realizes he's from the future and gives him some aid.

Live-Action TV

• In the Angel episode "Orpheus", Faith defeats Angelus by shooting up with a Fantastic Drug and letting him feed on her. They both fall into a coma and end up reliving Angel's life, with both providing appropriate snarks and jibes.
• In Barney Miller, The two parter, "Quarantine", the are stuck overnight sleeping in the squad room, and Harris has a soliloquy during dreaming, waking up each member of the squad, as he rants in his dreams about Yemana's bad coffee, Fish running to the bathroom all the time, Barney's 'human compassion', finally waking himself to find everyone staring at him - Barney says it's 'coincidence'.
• Behind Her Eyes: Rob and Adele have the ability to enter each other's dreams and talk.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Amends", as the First is trying to turn Angel evil or drive him to suicide, so sends him dreams of his past crimes as Angelus. To further torment him, Buffy also shares these dreams. Then because having sex with Buffy will turn him evil, they start having shared Erotic Dreams as well.
    Giles: You had another dream, with Angel? What happened?
    Buffy: [long pause] We don't need to get sidetracked.
  • In "Graduation Day Part 2", after Buffy puts Faith in a coma, then ends up in hospital herself, she has a dream in which Faith appears to reconcile with her, giving a clue on how to defeat the Mayor.
    Buffy: [with a half-smile] Is this your mind or mine?
    Faith: [laughs] Beats me.
  • "Restless" is an episode of this trope, with the primeval doing the communicating.
• The Strucker twins can communicate with each other in dreams in The Gifted (2017).
• In Heroes, Angela wakes up Sylar through this while they're both comatose.
  • This is season 1 character Sanjog Iyer's power.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Trip Tucker and T'Pol find themselves communicating in a daydream, despite being on seperate starships, a sign that their brief "intimate relationship" has led to a somewhat more permanent connection. As they've just broken up with each other, neither are very happy about it.
  T'Pol: Please leave.
  Trip: Exactly where am I supposed to go?
  T'Pol: Away.
  Trip: This is my daydream. You go away.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors" has the ship trapped in a Negative Space Wedgie, with most of the crew hallucinating and slowly going insane due to lack of REM sleep, while Troi, The Empath, is going just as mad from nightmares about twin moons and voices whispering "eyes in the dark, one moon circling". It turns out there's an alien ship trapped in the same wedgie, and they're using telepathy to try to communicate through the crew's dreams and suggest an escape plan.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Waking Moments", the whole crew gets trapped in a communal dream by telepathic aliens, with Chakotay the only one who can escape.
  • The Borg Queen communicates with Seven of Nine while she's dreaming in "Dark Frontier" and "Endgame".
  • In "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy", an alien hijacks the Doctor's daydream program and speaks with him to warn him of an impending attack on Voyager.
  • "Unimatrix Zero" is about a dream realm that some drones enter while regenerating.
• As in The Bible, angels on Supernatural use dreams to communicate with humans.
  • This turns out to be embarrassing in "The Song Remains The Same" when Dean is having an Erotic Dream involving two strippers in angel and devil costumes, and Anna turns up in his head.
  • Dean and Castiel are also seen regularly conversing this way, often with Dean not realizing at first that it is a dream. Castiel even unnerves Dean by telling him his dreams aren't secure and other angels could be listening.

Mythology & Religion

• The Bible: Angels use dreams to communicate with humans: for example, an angel comes to Joseph in a dream to explain to him the circumstances of Mary's virginal conception, and later returns to warn Joseph that Herod wants to kill the child.

Tabletop Games

• One possible use of Oneiromancy in Changeling: The Lost.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dream is a mid-level spell allowing one-way communication from the caster to the recipient. Nightmare is a harmful version, which both deals damage and disrupts sleep, so that repeated castings can be fatal.
  • The Eternal Blade is a Prestige Class for elven martial adepts, whose gimmick is that the character is assisted in battle and out by a "blade guide," the spirit of a departed eternal blade. Elves are usually The Sleepless and instead enter a meditative trance for four hours, but an eternal blade dreams of training and sparring sessions with their blade guide. This allows the eternal blade to, a few times each day, gain a bonus on attacks and damage against a certain type of enemy, or use martial maneuvers they might not themselves have mastered.

Theatre

• I and You: Anthony reveals to Caroline at the end of the play that this is how they've been interacting the whole time: he's dead and she's been unconscious the whole play.

Video Games

• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • In the Warden's Keep DLC, the mage/Grey Warden Avernus reached out to Levi Dryden in his dreams, encouraging him to explore the haunted fortress that was the resting place of his great-great-grandmother, Sophia Dryden. Fearful of the danger (and rightfully so), Levi contacted the Grey Wardens to help him search the keep for his family history.
    • In-game, viewing the dreams of others and actually entering them is stated to be one of the powers granted by Blood Magic.
    • While they don't exactly have a conversation with it, both the Warden and Alistair wake up from a nightmare involving the Archdemon with the feeling that it actually "saw" them somehow. It's a prelude to an attack by a squad of shrieks.
    • A Warden's dreams will always be filled with the whispers of the Old Gods after the Joining though he/she can eventually suppress them. The return of the dreams is the first sign that the Taint will soon overwhelm a Warden turning him/her into just another ghoul.
  • In Dragon Age II Feynriel is a somniari (dreamer), a very rare kind of mage who can manipulate the Fade and enter the dreams of others without resorting to Blood Magic or piles of lyrium. If Hawke helps him survive the demons constantly assaulting him (a dreamer is a very appealing target to demons), Feynriel will go to Tevinter and learn to control his powers. In Act III he saves a young noblewoman from a gang of rapists by entering their dreams and forcing them to kill each other, then comforts the girl by speaking to her in her dreams. The girl becomes smitten with Feynriel and looks forward to when she falls asleep again so she can be with him in her dreams.
  • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, Solas (an apostate mage who's spent his life studying the Fade) has a conversation with the Inquisitor in a shared dream. Apparently, they sought him out rather than vice versa - their Anchor allows them to dream with unusual focus, whether or not they're a mage.
• Used by Rose during the fifth chapter of Dragon Quest IV to show those who stay at Strathbaile's inn her whereabouts and how to get inside.
• Paula uses her psychic abilities to call Ness, and later Jeff in EarthBound.
• In Evolve, Kala's hybrid nature links her to the monster's Hive Mind. When she sleeps, she is forced to fully connect and communicate with them. Naturally, this makes her teammates uneasy.
• Aerith has a conversation with Cloud in his dream in Final Fantasy VII after she's left the party, to tell him about her plan to stop Sephiroth and to reassure him that everything will be okay. Unfortunately, Sephiroth was also in the dream and, after she's left, he pops in to remark to Cloud that that's interesting to know. Cloud immediately wakes up, and the race for the heroes to find her first is on.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2:
  • Vanille and Fang come to speak with Serah while she's trapped in a forced dream state. Although they state that it's only because she wanted to wake up that they were able to come and help her.
  • Similarly, Serah goes into Noel's forced dream state to try and wake him up by making him realize he's stuck in a dream.
  • Lightning talks to Hope in his dreams while he's sleeping in a time capsule. She can do this because she's in Valhalla, and can send her consciousness out to others.
• Shiki has lots of dreams in Tsukihime but as you get into the farther routes, at one point SHIKI becomes aware he is being watched and starts screaming for Shiki to leave. Throughout lots of the dreams there's also a sort of not-quite communication going on. This is exclusive to these two characters (and maybe Akiha) apparently as the two of them each have one quarter the life of Akiha and therefore are linked, sharing energy, some traits, dreams and mental influence.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale):
  • In Season 2 Episode 5, Clementine converses with Lee in a dream set in the RV from Season 1, after she was shot by Arvo.
  • Lee returns in Season 4 Episode 3 in Clementine's dreams, this time on the train from Season 1, and passes on words of wisdom to inspire Clem before her mission against the Delta.

Webcomics

• In Agents of the Realm, Norah has a short, but confusing conversation with what seems to be the ghost of Filoni when she takes a short nap in chapter 3.
• Credenza, The Protagonist of Archipelago, has several of these conversations. This later turns out to be a sign of Dream Walker talents.
• In Bardsworth, Fitzpot uses this as a method to giving Mike private tutoring lessons.
• Charby the Vampirate: Tony does this as a favor to find out if Charby has a chance with his crush. Tony also uses it to annoy Victor.
• In City of Somnus the denizens of Majestan, where dream walking and weaving are an important, established part of the local culture, have dream conversations all the time.
• Eerie Cuties: Near the end of chapter 15, Queen Lamia appeared in Ace's dreams, where she vaguely implied they shared a past together. She appeared to him again, in the following chapter, along with a past incarnation of Brooke, who she said belonged to her, just as he does - hinting at a deeper connection between them.
• In the Squirrel Prophet arc of El Goonish Shive, a wizard makes contact with Grace in her dreams and delivers an important message. Embarrassingly enough, he shows up in one of those naked in public dreams. This particular instance is also a bit less effective than most cases of dream communication considering that it is no more likely to be remembered than any ordinary dream. After three attempts, Grace only remembers bits and pieces.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Zimmy does this when Antimony passes out.
• Magick Chicks: Melissa first began seeing "fade-out girl" in her dreams, shortly after being transferred to Artemis Academy. Then met her in person on her way to school, where she staged her Cat Up a Tree routine as a test of Melissa's character. While the first attempt failed, the second succeeded. Then, in chapter 15, she made an unexpected appearance in Faith's subconsciousness.
• In Our Little Adventure, the messages that drive the adventure are received through dreams.
• In a deleted Parallel Dementia/Emergency Exit mini-crossover, Eddie does this in order to talk to Fall after he's been forbidden to visit her dimension in real life.
• Andrew Hussie's brilliant Problem Sleuth and his other comic Homestuck both contain dream worlds that can be accessed by the protagonists.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli, Onni and Reynir all have the ability to access a magical shared dream space while asleep, in which they can speak to each other, contact spirits, and go on spirit visions. It includes secure private realms whose appearance seems to suit the mage's personal preferences and a more dangerous public space between them that works a little differently depending on the source of the mage's powers. The latter results in Reynir having an easier time circulating between realms than the two others.
  • Later in the first story, Lalli and Emil end up Sharing a Body (to be specific, Lalli's spirit is trapped in Emil's dreamspace, and is able to communicate with Emil while the latter is awake) due to a Heroic RRoD. While Lalli is able to return to his own body before anything bad happens to it, an unforeseen side-effect is that Emil is able to (unwittingly) enter Lalli's private dream space at random when they're both asleep.
• In The Weave, protagonist Tally comes to witness a supernatural murder, gets in contact with the victim's blood, then is contacted in her dreams by the ghost of murder victim Rhiannon, who wants Tally's help for her revenge.

Web Original

• In Brennus, the protagonist Basil has a conversation with Ember this way.
• During the Keep the Flag Flying arc of Our Avatars Were in a Room Together: The Continuation, Ragna the Bloodedge is visited by a very familiar "bunny-leech" vampire in his dreams.

Western Animation

• In Adventure Time Jake gets a vision of his dead father, along with his brother Jermaine. Jake asks Jermaine if he's dead too, but no, it turns out he's just taking a nap at the time.
• Rose and Jake on American Dragon: Jake Long communicate via dream charms because it's too dangerous for them to be seen together due to Dating Catwoman and the fact that Rose's Heel–Face Turn is a secret from the Big Bad.
• In the Futurama episode "The Sting", Leela has recurring dreams about speaking to the dead Fry and becomes convinced that he's alive and communicating with her somehow. Which he is: Leela is in a coma after receiving the brunt of the injury that she imagines killed Fry, responding to the very alive Fry's attempts to wake her up.
• In Jackie Chan Adventures, Jade does this multiple times when using the astral projection of the sheep talisman.
• Ribbon the telepathic unicorn from My Little Pony could talk to people in their dreams.
• The Powerpuff Girls discover they have the power to communicate with each other in their dreams.
• In the Season 1 semi-finale of The Venture Brothers, "The Trial of the Monarch", Phantom Limb utilizes this on Doctor Orpheus during the Guild raid on the courtroom, since the typical memory wipe doesn't work on magic users.

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