History Main / DyingDream

* Essentially the entire plot of Creator/JamesPatterson's novel ''You've Been Warned'', crossed with OutOfBodyExperience and heavy doses of HowWeGotHere and MindScrew.

* The infamous hentai manga, ''Emergence'', when Saki has been brutally assaulted by a group of delinquents [[HopeSpot just as she was about to get her life in order]]. In addition to stealing her money, they also forced a miscarriage by kicking her pregnant belly. With her last bit of strength, she overdoses on heroin, and drifts away as her body bleeds out, dreaming of a happy future with the daughter she would've had.

* ''Manga/{{Metamorphosis}}'': The story ends with a despondent Saki [[DrivenToSuicide overdosing on heroin and dying]]. As she's expiring, she briefly sees a vision of a life with her baby, free of the horrors she's experienced.

->''Doubtless, despite his suffering, [Peyton Farquhar] had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene — perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon — then all is dark-ness and silence!''

->''Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.''

* In the last episode of ''LightNovel/FateZero'', Kariya Matou staggers into the bug room, close to dying, and rescues Sakura, reuniting her with her sister Rin and mother, and both Rin and Sakura call him 'Daddy'... then cut to Sakura watching his dead body being eaten by the bugs.

[[folder:{{Literature}}]]

[[folder:Live Action TV]]

* Londo gets one in the ''Series/BabylonFive'' episode "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" while he's in a coma, trying to recover from a heart attack. He must soothe his own guilty conscience in a BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind to regain [[YourMindMakesItReal his will to live]].

[[folder:{{Podcasts}}]]

[[folder:{{Music}}]]

[[folder:VisualNovels]]

[[folder:WebVideo]]

[[folder:WesternAnimation]]

[[folder:RealLife]]

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_death_experience 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 affects the rest of their lives varies from person to person. It's unclear whether they're a real metaphysical experience or some kind of hallucination brought on by lack of oxygen or a flood of neurotransmitters in the brain.

* An early draft of the ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' article for [[http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-4205 SCP-4205]] details the weeks after an agent saw it (it instantly killed everyone else who saw it). The end revealed the researcher died instantly while typing his report. What was presumably his Dying Dream was somehow put into his report.

* The narrator of Creator/LordDunsany's short story "In the Twilight" capsizes with a boat and bumps his head on a boat's keel. As he desperately tries swimming upwards, he hears the people in the boats above him say that they "must leave him now", to be followed by the river, the river banks, and the sky all taking their leave from him and disappearing. Subsequently he has several visions of places where he spent his childhood and youth, such as the valley of his childhood and his old school, where he he sees old friends and classmates and the also the heroes of Literature/{{the Iliad}} and [[Literature/{{Anabasis}} the Ten Thousand]] (implied to be his boyhood heroes), all of which tell him "Goodbye". His last vision is of himself standing with a crowd of people at the near end of a "white highway with darkness and stars below it that led into darkness and stars". A lone man is walking down the highway away from the crowd towards the darkness, despite the people calling the man by his name, "and it was a very strange name". The narrator gets angry because the man won't stop or turn back and makes a "great effort" to call the man's name, and "with the effort" opens his eyes to find himself lying on the river bank with a crowd of people resuscitating him, "and the name that the people called was my own name".

* ''[[Film/Deathwatch2002 Deathwatch]]'' is about a British team of soldiers who, a day after a heavy fight, found themselves in a foggy German trench system. They did not find it odd that the German soldiers are happy to see them. They kill all the Germans for fun, except one that a young private saves. They cannot get out of the trenches any way they try, and it becomes alive and takes them one by one. At the end of the film, it turns out they all were dead all along, and the trench was last a chance for them to save their souls.

* ''Manga/GetBackers'': Babylon City was more virtual than expected & [[spoiler:Ginji]] was dead the whole time.

* An alternate ending to the manga ''Manga/PrettyFace'' has the entire story be just a dream before Rando dies in a coma. Thankfully it wasn't chosen as the true ending. And in the last panel, Rando beats the mangaka into a pulp for being so dark.

* A variation in the ''VideoGame/ZoneOfTheEnders'' 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 HumongousMecha 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 his friend Viola (who died in the first game) waiting for him.
* In the third season of ''Anime/HellGirl'', 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.
* Near the end of ''Anime/GunXSword'', Ray is mortally wounded when the Claw's men gun him down. He wakes up in a rocking chair, on the porch of a house by the sea. His wife - long since killed by the Claw - asks him what he was dreaming about. They talk for a while before he joins her, and "Calling You" starts playing... [[TearJerker There's no shame in crying.]] Subverted in that this isn't how the show ends - It's AllJustADream Ray has as he dies.

* ''Anime/EighteenIf'': Episode 3 is this for Kayo Sugisaki, a girl who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease. In her dream, she meets the protagonist [[DreamWalker Haruto]], who decides to make her last moments as happy as possible. Before dying, she admits her love for him.
* A DiscussedTrope in ''Anime/CowboyBebop'', where main character Spike 'lives' under the philosophy that he may not be alive at all and died during his backstory. [[spoiler:Julia's death seems to end the uncertainty, as Spike's reaction to her death is to undertake a SuicideMission to clean up his past.]]
-->'''Spike:''' I'm just watching a bad dream I never wake up from.

* ''ComicBook/SpiderGirl'': Issue #63 features dying dreams of both Normie Osborne (Harry's son) and The Kingpin, the former being haunted by his grandfather Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, while the latter is tormented by his son Richard Fisk. One survives, but you don't find out which until the next issue. [[spoiler:It's Normie.]]
* ''ComicBook/Gen13'': The second-to-last arc of Adam Warren's run appears to be a BreatherEpisode after the CliffHanger ending of their last storyline (which was resolved off-screen). However, as more and more examples of "[[AllJustADream 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 EarthShatteringKaboom from the aforementioned cliffhanger vaporizes her and her friends, [[DyingToBeReplaced making way for]] Creator/ChrisClaremont's short-lived {{revamp}} of the series.

* Creator/NeilGaiman's ''ComicBook/WhateverHappenedToTheCapedCrusader'' is partly this as it is Batman's last dream as he dies from Darkseid's Omega Sanction attack in ''ComicBook/FinalCrisis'', and part sendoff to every version of the Bruce Wayne Franchise/{{Batman}} in similar vein of ''ComicBook/WhateverHappenedToTheManOfTomorrow'' of Superman lore.
* In ''ComicBook/TheBoys'', Creator/GarthEnnis' sendup of traditional caped heroes, the local Batman Expy dies in a HeroicSacrifice that results in this trope. After pushing a woman and her child out of the way of a falling meteorite (one that heralds an ''Armageddon''-style meteor shower) the mortal hero makes an unlikely flight into orbit to personally destroy an enormous asteroid about to smash the Earth. Turns out the initial "meteorite" that he saved the family from was actually a wheelbarrow load of bricks spilled from above by a construction worker and the hero suffered fatal head trauma from said bricks.
* ''ComicBook/TheGrievousJourneyOfIchabodAzrael'': One possible interpretation of the ending, as Ichabod lays dying when reality ceases to exist all around him, he finds himself back with Zoe and their child in the cabin.

* During the Franchise/{{Batman}} ''Contagion'' storyline, Tim Drake has vivid hallucinations of his family while lying dying from the [[SyntheticPlague Clench]].

* ''Fanfic/DavionAndDavionDeceased'' has Hanse Davion dreaming of his distant ancestor from the twilight years of the Star League, John Davion. But John is oddly insistent [[DreamWalker that]] ''[[DreamWalker he's]]'' [[DreamWalker the one having the dream]]. When the dream ends, John is indeed the one who wakes up, only now he's haunted by the ghost of a man who hasn't even been born yet.
* ''Fanfic/DestinyAfterandalasia'' is a fanfic trilogy where all Disney animated films are the dying dreams of various people. Just before they pass, they're allowed to dream of the perfect life they couldn't have. Considering the prompt, their dreams might also count as an afterlife.

* Implied to be the case in the film ''WesternAnimation/WakingLife'', which is rather ironic considering the title. Although there are some digressions to other random figures, much of the film follows a main character ([[NamelessNarrative credited only as The Dreamer]]) who appears to be having a lucid dream, which he spends interacting with people, exploring ideas and philosophies, and occasionally [[RealityWarper exploiting the power of lucid dreaming]]. However as time goes by, The Dreamer finds himself apparently unable to wake up, as every time he thinks that he does wake up it just [[DreamWithinADream leads him into another level of dreaming]], and furthermore, the figures he meets and the scenery of the dream become more foreboding; some speak about themselves as if they are dead and use the past tense when speaking of their lives, others say cryptic and vaguely threatening things about death or dying, and The Dreamer starts to worry that [[DeadAllAlong he's dead and not aware of it]]. The ending can be taken as more evidence that this trope is in play, but ultimately leaves the question unanswered.
* French short, ''[[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6LLyheo3ZZU Above Then Beyond]]'' is about an old woman converting her house into a hot air balloon after getting an eviction notice. Although she seems to succeed at taking off, at the end the eviction men walk into the house and find her dead or asleep in her chair.

* ''Film/JacobsLadder'' 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.

* Creator/DavidLynch's ''Film/MulhollandDrive'' and ''Film/LostHighway'' are open to numerous interpretations, including that their stories are dying dreams.
* ''Film/MenaceIISociety''. At the end of the film, Caine is thinking about his life as he lies there dying, and it's at this point that we realize (if you consider this interpretation of the film) that the ENTIRE film we've just seen has been Caine's life passing before his eyes, as he lies dying.
* ''Film/{{November}}'' has Courtney Cox's character reliving the same things over and over in order to get her to give up her worldly cares.
* ''Film/TheLifeBeforeHerEyes'' (well what did you expect with [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin that title]]?)

* John Boorman has [[WordOfGod confirmed]] that this is the correct interpretation of ''Film/PointBlank1967''.
* Likewise, in ''Film/RepoMen'', something like this happens to Remy himself about halfway through the story.
* ''Film/AllThatJazz'' 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, [[MindScrew like many movies on this list]], the entire thing might count.

* Rob Zombie confirmed the ending of ''Film/HalloweenII2009's'' director's cut is [[spoiler:this for Laurie.]]
* The original ''Film/TotalRecall1990'' already has enough of the it was all a dream theories going around, but some go as far as to say that the entire film was part of a dying brain embolism Arnold is having while in the "Rekall" machine.
* A popular interpretation for the ending of ''Film/TaxiDriver''. Roger Ebert noted that it was too good of an ending to be true.
* ''Film/{{Hypocrites}}'' is all about a pastor, sick of his congregation for being a bunch of hypocrites, having a dream in which he reveals all of their hypocrisies. The ending reveals that he died in the church after giving the sermon on hypocrisy that they all disliked.
* ''Someone's Knocking at the Door'' (2009). All but one of the protagonist's friends have fatally overdosed on the drugs he shared with them when they snuck into a file storage room in their med school, the serial killing couple who've been murdering his friends are old psych patients from a file he was reading, and the cops who questioned him after the first murder are actually doctors who are in the process of failing to resuscitate him.
* The events of ''Film/CarlitosWay'' are all a flashback after Carlito has been shot just as he's about to escape from the Mob. [[DownerEnding By another crook in retaliation for an unrelated incident]].

* One interpretation of the last 15 minutes of ''Theatre/HedwigAndTheAngryInch'', because it has no dialogue, is that Hedwig died in the crash and the rest is a dying dream.
* Maconel, in ''Film/HeWasAQuietMan'', was imagining the events of the movie while dying in two of the three endings.
* The ending of ''Film/{{Brazil}}'' plays out this way, only instead of dying the main character suffers a hallucination before being lobotomized.
* ''Film/{{Stay}}'': the entire film is Henry's dream as he bleeds out following a car accident which killed his girlfriend and parents.

* ''Beyond'' is about a couple hiding from aliens after an invasion, with flashbacks to their life before: meeting, falling in love, arguing, pregnancy , wondering what will happen if the looming asteroid hits Earth. The ending [[spoiler: implies that everything in the story present is the man's dying dream after he was shot trying to get to the hospital for the birth.]]
* ''Armistice'' features a lone Royal Marine who awakens in a house from which he cannot escape and in which he must fight daily for his life against a terrifying monster that repeatedly appears in the house. He finally tunnels out of the house, symbolically forcing himself out of the dream by sheer effort, to find that he is lying in the grass on a sunny battlefield, legless and disemboweled.
* The entire ending of ''Scenic Route'' is revealed to be one. It's ambiguous whether both lead characters are sharing the same dying dream or if one of them is already dead.
* ''Film/{{Flatliners}}'' is about a group of medical students attempting to invoke this via an experiment in which they manually slow their heart rates until they're legally dead for a few seconds, all to learn about the afterlife. Their experiment ends up trapping each of them in their own personal IronicHell, where they're forced to face the demons of their greatest mistakes.
* ''[[Film/Deathwatch2002 Deathwatch]]'' is about a British team of soldiers who, a day after a heavy fight, found themselves in a foggy German trench system. They did not find it odd that the German soldiers are happy to see them. They kill all the Germans for fun, except one that a young private saves. They cannot get out of the trenches any way they try, and it becomes alive and takes them one by one. At the end of the film, it turns out they all were dead all along, and the trench was last a chance for them to save their souls.
* ''Film/ChristmasEvil'' ends with Harry driving his car off a bridge. We than see him in his car flying away. The writers confirmed that the final shot of him flying away in his car was all in his head because he believed he could make his car fly, and he really just drove off the bridge and killed himself, making this his dying dream.
* ''Film/TheEscapist'': [[spoiler: Although it’s debatable. Frank clearly dies, but it’s implied that the escape was real and at the very least Lacey escaped.]]
* ''Film/SecretlyGreatly'': After [[spoiler:Hae-rang is killed by a grenade and Ryu-hwan jumps off a roof with Hae-jin's bullet-ridden body]], we get a flashback of the three spies cleaning anchovies back in the village. They discuss their wants and dreams in life.

* Directly inspired by (and referencing) "Literature/AnOccurrenceAtOwlCreekBridge", the story [[https://onthepremises.com/issues/issue-35/issue-35-place2/ "Strength in Numbers"]] features a character undergoing a similar dying dream, only for the dream version of himself to recognize what it is and then turn around to try to enter the real world to save the dreamer/itself.
* ''Literature/TheThirdPoliceman'' is another oldish example - it was written by Flann O'Brien 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. On literally the penultimate page, his accomplice joins him.

* This trope's lightly touched on in the last chapter of ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'', 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 [[HeroicBSOD temporarily insane]] makes this DownerEnding interpretation eerily plausible.

* Some interpreted Literature/TheLittleMatchGirl's vision of her Grandmother as this instead of a Ghostly Visitor.
* An unusual version of this is found in Creator/GregEgan's "Transition Dream". 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 [[GainaxEnding 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, or if [[SurrealHorror transition dreams are a normal part of everyday thought]].
* All of ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfThomasCovenant'' 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.
* Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/{{Ubik}}'' is all about this (twice, with the second one showing up at the very end -- compare the screenplay if you get the chance), while ''The Divine Invasion'' averts (or perhaps inverts) it very effectively.
* ''Laura and the Silver Wolf'' has this as alternate interpretation. (And [[WordOfGod canonically]], it is '''also''' this, though not '''only''' this as the heroine lives on in Ice-Land.)

* ''Literature/AnElegyForTheStillLiving'' explodes into full dream state by the end of the first chapter, but it isn't until later on that the second half of the trope gets fulfilled.
* A variation appears in the short story ''The Black Coat'' by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. A girl wakes up in the wilderness, [[AmnesiaDanger not knowing who she is]]. A scary trucker gives her a lift to a dank apartment where a woman drops ominous hints about where they are. She eventually pieces together that it's an in-between state caused by her committing suicide. As it happens she's still in the process, and manages to save herself.
* ''[[Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse Star Wars Adventure Journal 11]]''[[note]]later reprinted in the anthology ''Tales from the New Republic''[[/note]] featured a short story called "The Longest Fall" that imitated [[Creator/AmbroseBierce "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge"]] in a BroadStrokes fashion. It opens with an Imperial captain who expects to be on the receiving end of a YouHaveFailedMe by [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Antinnis_Tremayne High Inquisitor Tremayne]]. At first it looks like Tremayne had Force-choked him nonfatally, then let him go. He makes it all the way back to the bridge of his Star Destroyer ... before collapsing on the floor of Tremayne's office with his neck broken.
* Essentially the entire plot of Creator/JamesPatterson's novel ''You've Been Warned'', crossed with OutOfBodyExperience and heavy doses of HowWeGotHere and MindScrew.

* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' novel [[Recap/NewSeriesAdventuresEnginesofWar "Engines of War"]], as Cinder dies, her last visions are of the family, in perfect bliss, when she was just aged six.

* {{Invoked|Trope}} in the ''Literature/DreambloodDuology'' by the city-state of Gujaareh: the priesthood consists of four orders of {{Dream Weaver}}s, of whom the Gatherers are tasked with creating peaceful Dying Dreams to usher people into the DreamLand afterlife of Ina-Karekh. The process also produces Dreamblood, a unique form of {{Mana}} that's hugely useful in PsychicSurgery.
* ''Literature/GoingBovine'' is this, maybe. The book starts as main character Cameron contracts Mad Cow Disease, which slowly causes bacteria to eat holes in his brain, eventually. It's ultimately left [[AmbiguousEnding ambiguous]], given that the book doesn't end upon Cameron's death in the hospital, but it would explain the slowly encroaching [[MindScrew mind screw]] surrounding the journey.
* The narrator of Creator/LordDunsany's short story "In the Twilight" capsizes with a boat and bumps his head on a boat's keel. As he desperately tries swimming upwards, he hears the people in the boats above him say that they "must leave him now", to be followed by the river, the river banks, and the sky all taking their leave from him and disappearing. Subsequently he has several visions of places where he spent his childhood and youth, such as the valley of his childhood and his old school, where he he sees old friends and classmates and the also the heroes of Literature/{{the Iliad}} and [[Literature/{{Anabasis}} the Ten Thousand]] (implied to be his boyhood heroes), all of which tell him "Goodbye". His last vision is of himself standing with a crowd of people at the near end of a "white highway with darkness and stars below it that led into darkness and stars". A lone man is walking down the highway away from the crowd towards the darkness, despite the people calling the man by his name, "and it was a very strange name". The narrator gets angry because the man won't stop or turn back and makes a "great effort" to call the man's name, and "with the effort" opens his eyes to find himself lying on the river bank with a crowd of people resuscitating him, "and the name that the people called was my own name".

* ''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.
* ''Series/{{Life on Mars|2006}}'' 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. He falls, re-enters the dream world, where he apparently remains.[[labelnote: Time Dilation Note:]]The correlation between dream time and real time (and its relation to the stages of death and post death) is up to interpretation and is expanded in ''Series/AshesToAshes2008'' (see below).[[/labelnote]]
* ''Series/AshesToAshes2008'' is Alex's ''Series/{{Life on Mars|2006}}'' wherein 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" (up to the in-dream crash) was actually [[TimeDilation the amount of time it took for him to die after he hit the ground in the real world]], and that her time in the dream world follows the same principle. As revealed in the finale, the entirety of Season 3 was actually post-death.

* Londo gets one in the ''Series/BabylonFive'' episode "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" while he's in a coma, trying to recover from a heart attack. He must soothe his own guilty conscience in a BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind to regain [[YourMindMakesItReal his will to live]].
* The AllJustADream episode of ''Series/{{House}}'' is along the lines of this trope, except for the actual dying -- he was shot inside a hospital, and thus saved with swift medical attention.
* Max's happy ending in the first season finale of ''Series/DarkAngel'' turned out to be a Dying Dream as a result of her being shot in the heart by her clone. Don't worry, she got better.
* The ''Series/FreddysNightmares'' episode "It's a Miserable Life". Half the episode is from one character's point of view, the other half from another's.
* ''Series/{{Lost}}'''s SeriesFinale 'reveals that the season 6 "flashsideways timeline" is actually an afterlife created when all of the survivors died; they subsequently proceed to remember everything that happened to them while alive and then move on together. However, everything that happened during the course of the show happened, avoiding this trope.
* In the short-lived 1997 TV series ''Gun'', the first episode had one of these on the part of the main character.
* The horror anthology ''Series/TheHunger'' opened its second season with one in "Sanctuary". Eddie Falco is on the run for the murder of MadArtist Julian Priest's agent and asks the reclusive Julian (Music/DavidBowie) for help; Priest decides to make him the subject of an especially grisly piece of performance art. TheReveal is that this is '''Julian''''s deathdream. Eddie is actually a manifestation of Julian's regret over living long enough to have lost his touch as an artist, modeled on a rival who committed suicide back in TheSeventies and [[Main/DeadArtistsAreBetter thus cemented his reputation without risking the career downturn]] Julian did. In truth, Julian -- driven 'round the bend by outrage and shunning for his increasingly grotesque work -- killed his agent and then turned himself into his last work of art, resulting in a slow death, to achieve the immortality he wanted. It works too well, though -- rather than passing on into an afterlife, he becomes a ghost who dwells in the abandoned prison that became his home in life, and the narrator who [[HorrorHost introduces and closes each subsequent episode]].

* The ''Series/{{Heroes}}'' episode "Cold Snap": Matt uses his telepathy to give Daphne a "storybook ending" in Paris as she lay dying in a hospital bed. Episode writer Bryan Fuller said this was an homage to the episode of ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' based on ''Literature/AnOccurrenceAtOwlCreekBridge.''
* What the entire episode "The 12 Days of Christine" from ''Series/InsideNo9'' turns out to be. Christine meets a man, they move in, get married and have a son together. Among these seemingly normal events, bizarre things keep happening. Christine receives a Valentine's card from her first boyfriend (that she had when she was twelve and who is actually dead in the present day), eggs get thrown and smashed in her apartment out of nowhere and a strange man in a raincoat keeps appearing to her saying that he's sorry about something. Also, she sees her father after he has died from Alzheimer's. Throughout all of these events, she seemingly lapses in and out of timeframes. In her final holiday, joined by her ex husband, her long gone flatmate Fung, her mum and her now healthy and alive dad, she realises that this is her 'life flashing' before her eyes. We suddenly are at a car crash with Christine slumped over her wheel fading out of consciousness. She has crashed because the man with the raincoat stepped out onto the road without looking. Her smashed shopping, including a carton of eggs, lies in her passenger seat. Back at the dinner table, after receiving a hug from her son (who survived the crash and is actually dressed as a [[RuleOfSymbolism nativity play angel]]) and saying goodbye to her family and friends, the episode ends.
* ''Series/BoardwalkEmpire'': The last scene of Season 4 finale "Farewell Daddy Blues", played as a ShoutOut to TropeMaker "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge." Richard Harrow, after a botched hit on Dr. Narcisse leaves him mortally wounded, escapes the city and travels to the country to reunite with all his loved ones. Then [[DyingAsYourself his disfigured face suddenly looks normal again]] and we see his corpse beneath the Atlantic City boardwalk.
* In the ''Series/BlackMirror'' episode "[[Recap/BlackMirrorPlaytest Playtest]]", everything from the Whack-A-Mole game to Cooper going home and meeting his mom is one long dying dream as Cooper died not even a second in due to his cell phone interfering with the gaming device and his brain being partially uploaded.
* The 2014 ''Series/DoctorWho'' ChristmasEpisode [[Recap/DoctorWho2014CSLastChristmas "Last Christmas"]] is this trope crossed with DreamWithinADream for most of its runtime, save for the final few minutes. Clara, four innocent strangers, and the Doctor himself have all become victims of Dream Crabs who have put them to sleep and are slowly consuming their brains, using shared dreams of alternative, happier realities to distract them from their impending demises. SantaClaus -- a mental construct of the victims, representing their will to escape -- helps them work their way back up through the multiple layers of the dreamworld to reality and life with multiple false climaxes on the way, though one of the strangers does not make it.

* The country and western song Green Green Grass of Home. The protagonist is waken up to be taken to be executed.
* Music/{{iamamiwhoami}}'s video for "20101104" depicts a double suicide, who some believe to be the "real world" bodies of the mandragora and the "bearded" man from the previous videos. Another theory is that they represent Jonna Lee and Claes Björklund, the artists behind the AnonymousBand, "killing" or leaving behind their past careers to become fully immersed in only their iamamiwhoami project.

* Music/MyChemicalRomance's ConceptAlbum, ''Music/TheBlackParade'' is about an unnamed man dying from Cancer. Particularly the song ''Welcome To The Black Parade'' shows him dying and his final dream of the titular parade.
* The music video for the ''Music/ImagineDragons'' song "I Bet My Life" has two men having a fist fight before one of them flees into the water and goes on an incredible and improbable adventure. Cut to the end of the song and the other man is fishing him out of the water where the man has nearly drowned and clearly would have without the help of the man trying to beat his face in thirty seconds beforehand.

* In some versions of ''Theatre/SwanLake'', Siegfried dreams of Odette and her transformation before meeting her. In one variation, this turns out to be foreshadowing a DyingDream that he has in the finale, helplessly watching Rothbart take Odette as he did in the prologue.

* The entire game of ''VideoGame/VelvetAssassin'' 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.
* ''Franchise/SilentHill'':
** One ending of ''VideoGame/SilentHill1'' - 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.
** Retroactive aversion, as ''VideoGame/SilentHill3'' shows that he survived, [[spoiler:just long enough to bring up Heather and then take a giant knife to the chest]].
** ''VideoGame/SilentHillShatteredMemories'' seems to follow the same ending. Albeit, with an unforeseen twist. [[spoiler:In every ending, Harry is having a dying dream... 18 years after he actually died. And despite it being a dying dream, he's apparently really able to interact with real, living people. And it was all in Cheryl's mind.]]
* ''VideoGame/TechRomancer'' has a particularly dirty example: in the "Wise Duck" storyline (about TheSquad in a HumongousMecha), the NewMeat 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 Robot}}s. 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 SecretTestOfCharacter, to see if Arvin can be trusted.
* The scenario of the PC game ''VideoGame/WeirdDreams''. Work your way through various fantastic scenarios trying to prevent them from just being part of a Dying Dream.
* ''VideoGame/TheMissingJJMacfieldAndTheIslandOfMemories'': The events were all based on a dream [=J.J.=] was having, while she was in a coma-like condition from her [[DrivenToSuicide suicide attempt]]. She manages to wake up, with renewed desire to continue living.
* ''VideoGame/{{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 ''VideoGame/{{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. '''Then''' it gets [[MindScrew really weird.]]
* Of all things, ''VideoGame/DrawnToLife'', though Mike eventually wakes back up to see his sister, the only family he has left after the car accident that killed his parents and put him in a coma [[HeroicSacrifice when the Raposa willingly sacrifice themselves]] [[DreamApocalypse and their world]] [[UpTheRealRabbitHole to save his real self]]. The revised ending in the series' CompilationRerelease changes it to a more standard version of AdventuresInComaland, as he fell out of a tree instead.
* One ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII'' fan theory to explain the second half of the game and the ending is called [[http://squallsdead.com "Squall's Dead"]]. It postulates that Squall was killed by the ice spear through the chest at the end of disk 1, and the rest of the game is his mind trying to come to terms with it and piece together what was really going on as his body falls to the ground. WordOfGod says that was never his intention, but he likes the idea and might even use it if they ever do a remake.
* Revealed in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'', ''Wings of the Goddess'' : The Vana'diel you know ? Turns out to be a lie: the good guys never actually win the Crystal War, and the war is still ongoing. Oh, and this reality is trying to consume the ''dream'' you live in, because if it doesn't, it will disappear.

* ''VideoGame/TheVanishingOfEthanCarter'' is a story written by the titular Ethan Carter, a young boy whose hobby is writing stories, as he dies trapped in a room of a burning house. He essentially "hires" the OccultDetective from one of his other stories (the PlayerCharacter) to solve the mystery of his own death.
* According to a FreezeFrameBonus at the beginning of the first mission, ''all'' of ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsIII'' apart from the first and (probably) second missions is this.

* Subverted in ''VideoGame/TheWalkingDead'' Season Two, where Clementine [[spoiler:is shot in the chest by Arvo and has a dream about Lee, her caretaker and the protagonist from Season One.]] She doesn't die, though.
* This was one popular theory about what the surreal, [[WorldOfSymbolism highly symbolic]] ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac'' is. Eventually the MindScrewdriver of ''Afterbirth+'' [[spoiler:confirmed this was indeed the case, with the caveat that it begins with most of the intro; Isaac's mom never tried to kill him. ''Everything'' from that point onwards was part of the dream, complete with it breaking down by the time you fight the TrueFinalBoss of them all. ''Repentance'' either denies this completely, or simply extends the dream far enough that Isaac can at least forgive himself and move on to the afterlife properly]].
* ''VideoGame/JimmyAndThePulsatingMass'' is the dying dream of a child with cancer, centering around the illness and how it effects the members of his family.

* In the finale of ''[[VideoGame/FrogFractions Glittermitten Grove]]'', the narration, which has been cheekily (and, obviously, fictitiously) making references to the band ''Music/{{Korn}}'', reveals that it was all just the dying dream of the last mammal on Earth, AfterTheEnd. [[UnreliableNarrator Whether this is actually the case or not, we leave as an exercise to the reader.]]

* ''WebVideo/{{Phelous}}'' has the end of the ''Film/JacobsLadder'' review declare everything to be Phelan's dream after dying from a heart attack reviewing ''Film/MacAndMe'', his very first episode. It's implied that almost all of Website/ThatGuyWithTheGlasses since November 2008 was part of the dream. [[EpilepticTrees Or, depending on how the line is taken, that Kickassia and Suburban Knights were real things that happened.]] The next episode begins with him in the same "dead" position for a bit and then just getting up and introducing ''WesternAnimation/AladdinAndTheAdventureOfAllTime'' like nothing had happened.

* The ''Website/{{Cracked}}'' article ''[[https://www.cracked.com/article_18367_6-insane-fan-theories-that-actually-make-great-movies-better.html Insane Fan Theories That Make Great Movies Better]]''. When discussing the theory that the endings to some movies take place in the main character's imagination, they say they like to think most of ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull'' is hallucinated by Indy while slowly dying from radiation poisoning in a lead-lined fridge.

* The penultimate episode of ''WesternAnimation/BojackHorseman'' has [=BoJack=] attending a dinner and show at his mother's old house, and reuniting with his deceased family and friends [[MyFriendsAndZoidberg (and Zach Braff)]]. It soon becomes clear that this is a dream he's having while drowning in the pool of his old home, as everyone slowly succumbs to [[CessationOfExistence all-encompassing tar]] as they speak of their own lives and deaths. [[spoiler:It's revealed in the final episode that Bojack did manage to survive.]]

* ''WebVideo/DarkSimpsons'': In the "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS6E9HomerBadman Underwater Wonderland]]" at the end of "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPksAn7QQ0A Homer Is Dumb as a Mule and Twice as Ugly]]", Homer drowns himself in reality after being humiliated by public.

* John Boorman has [[WordOfGod confirmed]] that this is the correct interpretation of ''Film/PointBlank''.

* A variation in the ''VideoGame/ZoneOfTheEnders'' 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 HumongousMecha 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.

* The narrator of Creator/LordDunsany's short story "In the Twilight" capsizes with a boat and bumps his head on a boat's keel. As he desperately tries swimming upwards, he hears the people in the boats above him say that they "must leave him now", to be followed by the river, the river banks, and the sky all taking their leave from him and disappearing. Subsequently he has several visions of places where he spent his childhood and youth, such as the valley of his childhood and his old school, where he he sees old friends and classmates and the also the heroes of Literature/{{the Iliad}} and [[Literature/{{Anabasis}} the Ten Thousand]] (implied to be his boyhood heroes), all of which tell him "Goodbye". His last vision is of a "white highway with darkness and stars below it that led into darkness and stars, but at the near end of the road were common fields and gardens" where the narrators believes himself to be standing with a crowd of people. A lone man is walking down the highway away from the crowd towards the starry darkness, despite the people calling the man by his name--"and it was a very strange name"--and the narrator gets angry because the man won't stop or turn back and makes a "great effort" to call the man's name, and "with the effort" opens his eyes to find himself lying on the river bank with a crowd of people resuscitating him, "and the name that the people called was my own name".

* ''Fanfic/{{Destiny}}'' is a fanfic trilogy where all Disney animated films are the dying dreams of various people. Just before they pass, they're allowed to dream of the perfect life they couldn't have. Considering the prompt, their dreams might also count as an afterlife.

* ''VideoGame/ToTheMoon'' uses this as its basic premise: The protagonists work for the Sigmund Corporation, a business that is hired to implant false memories into dying people, allowing them to die happy thinking they achieved all of their greatest desires and ambitions.

* ''Film/SilentHill'' can count as well. In the movie version, Sharon and Rose were dead all along the film, and Silent Hill was only their dying dream.

* The penultimate episode of ''WesternAnimation/BojackHorseman'' has [=BoJack=] attending a dinner and show at his mother's old house, and reuniting with his deceased family and friends [[MyFriendsAndZoidberg (and Zach Braff)]]. It soon becomes clear that this is a dream he's having while drowning in the pool of his old home, as everyone slowly succumbs to [[CessationOfExistence a black, all-encompassing goo]] as they speak of their own lives and deaths. [[spoiler:It's revealed in the final episode that Bojack did manage to survive.]]

* The penultimate episode of ''WesternAnimation/BojackHorseman'' has [=BoJack=] attending a dinner and show at his mother's old house, and reuniting with his deceased family and friends [[MyFriendsAndZoidberg (and Zach Braff)]]. It soon becomes clear that this is a dream he's having while drowning in the pool of his old home, as everyone slowly succumbs to [[CessationOfExistence a black, all-encompassing goo]]. [[spoiler:It's revealed in the final episode that Bojack did manage to survive.]]