Current Events > What are some *good* "It was all just a dream" in media? (SPOILERS)

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Please mark spoilers if necessary.

People usually detest these, as they are usually considered a cop-out, but there are some entries that are actually really good. Just off the top of my head I can think of three.

Video Game: Super Mario Bros 2 (USA) in its entirety is just a dream.

TV Show: Gargoyles episode Future Tense. Great episode with shocking moments that may actually be a prophecy.

Movie: Inception. Basically a freebie. Only saw the movie once, but it really stuck with me.

Inception was totally not "all just a dream"

The dreams had a meaningful impact on the real world.

Feels weird to Spoiler what you're spoiling... but I guess I don't know how else you'd do it...

Movie: Click isn't a great movie (a lot of stupid moments toward the beginning) but eventually it gets better and kinda crushes you at the end before pulling it all back. It felt like a genuinely sweet ending with the second chance.

Even though by technicality it isn't but some people interpret it as such...

Game: Xenoblade 3. After all you've done, the end result of the heroes is essentially, "this world sucks and there needs to be revolution, complete destruction and starting over. And the very ending continues where the game starts off. But the reason I call it technically not a dream is because they were all very real, lived experiences, it's just they happened within the span of a single second.

In Angel when they gave him a perfect day where everything went right and it was actually in his head as part of the spell to release Angelus.

Link's Awakening because it actually deals with the consequences of everything being a dream.

Futurama had 2 good ones.

The Sting: Leela gets stung by a giant bee and is in a coma thinking the whole time that Fry is the one who died but he next left her bedside in the hospital and was trying to get her to wake up out of the coma.

and

Game of Tones maybe not ENTIRELY the same but I am counting it: Fry essentially has to go back to relive his days leading up to getting frozen in order to stop planet destroying aliens. He doesn't want to leave his past because he gets to reconnect with his friends and family back then. Eventually he has to but Nibbler lets him relive a moment in his mom's dream where they get to hug and say I love you to each other.

In MK11 the games end with your character becoming the Titan of time where they use their newfound time God powers to go back in time and do whatever they wish so that the now present falls in line with whatever that character desires. So in the follow up game, MK 1, the game takes place under the premise that Liu Kang from the previous game reset reality, altered several different characters histories, and he's now a god that's given up his titanhood and he's setting out to protect the realms in manner he'd always wished he could have if he were earth's protector god instead of Raiden. Only, during the course of the gameplay it's revealed that he's not actually the only person that used titan time powers from the previous game, but canonically so did everyone else and Liu Kangs's custom timeline sits in parralel with the custom timeline of everyone else from the previous game.

So I know it's a bit of a deviation from the topics premise but I think multiple characters all wiping away reality to create their own sorta makes the previous world a bit of a dream if you're jumping into the series fresh starting in MK1.

Book: Iain Banks- The Bridge (about a guy in a coma after a car crash, who dreams of a life living in a gigantic city/bridge based on the location of his accident. Among other things).

Book: Paul Gallico - Jennie (about a boy who longs for a cat. When he is stuck by a car, he wakes up to discover that he is one, and is befriended by a stray female cat, Jennie). If you love cats, you will love this, because the observation of cat behaviour is pin sharp. But it will make you cry.

American Psycho maybe?

i think this one Stargate SG:1 kinda sorta fits the bill, and it is an amazing episode called The Changeling

where Teal'c is throughout the episode drifting between the world of Stargate and a world where is a fireman, and any time he is one, he thinks the other is the dream. in the end it turns they're both fever dreams caused by him intermittently losing his symbiote cause he's giving it to Bra'tac to keep him alive after an ambush

actually, there's a couple in Stargate now that i think about it, if you consider "someone else with great power caused it" to count

While not really a dream, the Family Guy ep of Stewie killing Lois and achieving world domination through virtual simulation was pretty great.

It wasn't all a dream but I thought The Machinist (Christian Bale film) was really good

Movie - I liked Smile 2

Ending to Brazil sorta fits the category. It's a good ending that's open to interpretation.

Twin Peaks, at least that's my interpretation, though multiple characters literally say they're living inside a dream, sometimes while staring right at the camera.

It never feels like a cheat, either, because the whole series is surreal.

Also "The Inner Light" on TNG. It's a classic episode for a reason. It's not exactly a "dream" that Picard experiences, but it's close enough for the purposes of this topic. It's also another instance of not being a cheat. We see Picard hit with the beam and know from the outset he's unconscious while experiencing that reality.

Easily Jacob's ladder

Movie: Nightmare City

ROBBAN posted...

i think this one Stargate SG:1 kinda sorta fits the bill, and it is an amazing episode called The Changeling

where Teal'c is throughout the episode drifting between the world of Stargate and a world where is a fireman, and any time he is one, he thinks the other is the dream. in the end it turns they're both fever dreams caused by him intermittently losing his symbiote cause he's giving it to Bra'tac to keep him alive after an ambush

actually, there's a couple in Stargate now that i think about it, if you consider "someone else with great power caused it" to count

damn doctor who totally copied this lol

Movie: Total Recall

Or was it?

tv series:st elsewhere

The stargate SG-1 episode The Changeling

Seaman_Prime posted...

American Psycho maybe?

That was my first thought

Wizard of Oz

EmbraceOfDeath posted...

In Angel when they gave him a perfect day where everything went right and it was actually in his head as part of the spell to release Angelus.

This is a great choice for TV.

The first thing that popped into my head was The Wizard of Oz.

In the Batman TAS Batman realizes he's in a dream coma because he can't read anything. Always wondered if that was real. Pretty sure I've had dreams where I could clearly see and read text.

TV Show: The New Batman Adventures episode "Over the Edge".

sfcalimari posted...

In the Batman TAS Batman realizes he's in a dream coma because he can't read anything. Always wondered if that was real. Pretty sure I've had dreams where I could clearly see and read text.

Yeah, that's actually not true. I read in my dreams fairly often, with my most recent one just a few nights ago. A hand-written letter, addressed to me (irl name), more than a paragraph, perfectly legible.

sfcalimari posted...

In the Batman TAS Batman realizes he's in a dream coma because he can't read anything. Always wondered if that was real. Pretty sure I've had dreams where I could clearly see and read text.

Thats a good one, and the one in season 4 where Batgirl dies.

loafy013 posted...

Movie: Nightmare City

The nightmare becomes reality...

Lost Highway
Mulholland Drive

YoshiNESFamicom posted...

In TV- The Newhart Finale is one of the best moments in both sitcoms and TV.

Oh yeah this.

The finale to Newhart works on a surface level because it's just a low-stakes sitcom, but it also makes sense on a meta level if you consider him to be the same guy from The Bob Newhart Show dreaming the whole thing up. He's dealing with eccentric weirdos even in his dreams

i dont think spoiler tags work in this context for something like this

It relies on you not caring about spoilers

LightSnake posted...

Easily Jacob's ladder

YoshiNESFamicom posted...

In TV- The Newhart Finale is one of the best moments in both sitcoms and TV.

Or I guess you could just format it like this and have me be like "awww yeah those are dope"

Captain Planet: Everyone, even Gaia, was just living a normal idgaf life.

I guess you could say this for the manga Medaka Box. IDK, it felt strangely honest how everyone who was privileged as Pluses were enjoying successful lives in normal society while the Minuses dropped off the face of the Earth and people couldn't even find them

Heineken14 posted...

Futurama had 2 good ones.

The Sting: Leela gets stung by a giant bee and is in a coma thinking the whole time that Fry is the one who died but he next left her bedside in the hospital and was trying to get her to wake up out of the coma.

and

Game of Tones maybe not ENTIRELY the same but I am counting it: Fry essentially has to go back to relive his days leading up to getting frozen in order to stop planet destroying aliens. He doesn't want to leave his past because he gets to reconnect with his friends and family back then. Eventually he has to but Nibbler lets him relive a moment in his mom's dream where they get to hug and say I love you to each other.

Both amazing

GeminiDeus posted...

TV Show: Gargoyles episode Future Tense. Great episode with shocking moments that may actually be a prophecy.

More so since the several revivals.

The show Newhart.

There's an episode of Young Justice where aliens attack and most of the adult heroes in the League are killed (this makes it pretty obvious to the viewer that it is a dream from the beginning). It's up to the team to stand up and fight back, but things just keep getting worse and worse no matter how hard they try. Almost all of them ultimately end up sacrificing their lives to kill the mothership only for another mothership to immediately show up.

It turns out the entire thing was a training exercise created with Martian Manhunter's telepathy. The team all knew that going in, but what they didn't know was that it was a lesson in failure, designed to escalate no matter what they did. The problems started when Artemis was "killed" near the start. Miss Martian's subconscious saw her friend die and wrested control away from J'onn, making them all forget it was a simulation and putting them in very real danger because the illusion was so convincing that their minds would just put them into a coma when they died.

What makes it work is that this isn't just a one-off, the events of the "dream" cause real, actual psychological harm to the team members and they even have therapy sessions about it in a later episode.

https://youtu.be/ONjH0h2GqvM?si=XJ53F8Qr_LT62SVE

pegusus123456 posted...

There's an episode of Young Justice where aliens attack and most of the adult heroes in the League are killed (this makes it pretty obvious to the viewer that it is a dream from the beginning). It's up to the team to stand up and fight back, but things just keep getting worse and worse no matter how hard they try. Almost all of them ultimately end up sacrificing their lives to kill the mothership only for another mothership to immediately show up.

It turns out the entire thing was a training exercise created with Martian Manhunter's telepathy. The team all knew that going in, but what they didn't know was that it was a lesson in failure, designed to escalate no matter what they did. The problems started when Artemis was "killed" near the start. Miss Martian's subconscious saw her friend die and wrested control away from J'onn, making them all forget it was a simulation and putting them in very real danger because the illusion was so convincing that their minds would just put them into a coma when they died.

What makes it work is that this isn't just a one-off, the events of the "dream" cause real, actual psychological harm to the team members and they even have therapy sessions about it in a later episode.

And shares the same supervising producer of the show that TC mentioned. Wonder how something like either could be done for The Spectacular Spider-Man.

AceMos posted...

i dont think spoiler tags work in this context for something like this

I figured it was worth doing out of courtesy, and if someone who hadn't seen anything posted, it was totally on them for taking the risk of reading the spoilers. Just out of curiosity, I have been reading all the spoiler tags, even though I haven't seen some of the media in question. Most of them so far are things I haven't seen or planned to see, but have made me at least little interested.

another Stargate SG1: Season 4 "Absolute Power"

they find the "Harcesis child", without going into detail, a child who posess great but evil knowledge through genetic memory. Daniel Jackson tries to get him to access it, but he refuses. instead granting it to Daniel, who uses this knowledge to build a series of weapon satellites meant to keep Earth safe from attack...and then he immediately uses them to become evil dictator of the world, ruling with an iron fist.
at which point he wakes up, realising that the whole event was a dream/hallucination that the child caused in order to teach him that this genetic memory knowledge is too evil and too strong to use.