The obligatory one.
- Jenna is a Time Lord.
- And the Jenna Dream House is her TARDIS.
She dies
- Jenna hits her head on the closet, getting in a coma. She stays in that coma until she's 30, when she dreams about those things.
- When Jenna comes home, she actually finaly dies. Getting her way to go to paradise, in the scene she gets married. It's the end of her journey.
Jenna is an alternate universe Haruhi Suzumiya.
Matt is Kyon. After a birthday gone wrong, her subconscious provides a slap to the face by warping reality. Alternative ending interpretation:
The dust didn't work, the movie ends with Jenna alone. The "flashback" is just her thinking how things would have turned out differently.- This idea is actually explored in the fanfic "Picking Up the Pieces
", which looks at Jenna rebuilding her adult life after everything she's gone through (although she ends up getting back together with Matt anyway as things with him and Wendy don't work out).
Variation on the above:
The dust doesn't work in that Jenna isn't actually sent 17 years into the future; what it does do is let her see what she'll end up like if she keeps going the way she's going, especially in wanting to be friends with the Alpha Bitch Lucy. In other words she never left the closet but did get a revelation that straightened her out.- This troper agrees, something that a fan of fantasy movies such as himself doesn't usually do. The whole plot of her falling in love with Matt is her realizing that not only does he have feelings for her, but she also has feelings for him that she doesn't realize.
The whole thing is a Stable Time Loop created by Adult Jenna
Think about what her mother said about not regretting mistakes. She says that by making mistakes, you can learn how to fix them.Here is how this works: Adult!Jenna, the conniving, backstabbing Alpha Bitch version, goes back in time when Teen!Jenna goes forward. She, in her state of confusion and anger at going back to her teen self, is the one who lashes out at Matt, ruining the friendship. This causes the "mistake" that Teen!Jenna, on the verge of making it herself at the party, needed to learn about in order to fix it. The rest of Jenna's life was through Adult!Jenna taking The Slow Path back to 2004. Thinking that she has to "fix" her life by becoming the Alpha Bitch, she creates the circumstances that Teen!Jenna finds herself in. Teen!Jenna learns of her possible future, and at the end of the film, goes back and applies her own "fix".
The original adult Jenna underwent a Memory Gambit that Gone Horribly Wrong.
To prevent her co-workers from realizing that she was a spy, Jenna underwent hypnosis so that even she would not know that she was the traitor, and the idea is that she would be dehypnotized every time she needed to leak information. Unfortunately for her, hypnosis made her forget 17 years of her life. (Note: Hypnosis doesn't work like that in real life, but it's a theory for the sake of fantasy.) The magic dust was made by Morty
We know he likes to use magic to teach people important life lessons. Who's to say he only uses it in the form of a universal remote? Jenna is insane
She had a nervous breakdown and forgot 17 years of her life, and when that did not resolve her stress she had a full-blown psychotic break and now lives the delusion that she went back in time and lived a happier life. She is in a straightjacket in a mental facility somewhere, drugged out of her mind, mumbling about "Matty" while a line of drool runs down from the corner of her mouth. A la Fairuza Balk from The Craft.