This video was sponsored by World Anvil!
And yes, I assure you - this is all very real.
Consuming media always involves a degree of suspension of disbelief.
Not much, most of the time.
But the fact is, when we’re consuming a story, we know it’s not real.
Getting invested is usually a matter of quietly convincing our brain that it’s okay that
it’s not real, we’re gonna put the realism on pause for a little and just let ourselves
get
immersed in the fiction for a bit.
Sometimes, we need to crank the suspension of disbelief up a little bit - like if we
notice
a plothole, or something just doesn’t quite click, we might need to up our suspension
levels a little so it doesn’t break our immersion.
But the fact is, even when we’re really invested in a story, on some level we still
know it’s not really happening.
This partially explains why the “all a dream” trope is such a notorious minefield.
For context, the trope “it was all a dream” is a specific kind of plot twist wherein some
portion of the events shown in the story are revealed to have been a dream, a hallucination,
a simulation or in some other way unreal.
This happens in small ways pretty frequently - any time a character is shown to be dreaming,
it’s usually initially ambiguous whether or not the events being shown are really happening,
with this only being confirmed one way or the other when the character is shown to wake
up.
But these are individual scenes - the “all a dream” trope tends to be more of a thing
when it’s applied to larger parts of a story, like a whole episode of a show or the bulk
of a movie.
Now fundamentally, the “all a dream” reveal is risky at its most base level because it
disrupts the suspension of disbelief.
It’s a dangerous gamble to remind your invested audience that the things they’re invested
in aren’t really happening.
They know that already!
Engaging with fiction involves kind of a… shared pretense, like a social contract,
that the writer creates a fiction for the audience and the audience takes the fiction
at face value - not treating it like it’s really happening in real life, but emotionally
investing in it, imagining that the plot and characters could be real, empathizing with
the things that happen to them.
If the writer then pulls back the curtain and says “Surprise, you fool!
It wasn’t real after all!” it’s a disruption of that unspoken agreement.
The audience is taught that they can’t trust the story to be internally honest with them.
If a story does this too much, writing off too much of its own plot as false, it can
end up completely disrupting the audience’s ability to take the story at face value, which
can lead to some really bizarre consequences, like, for instance, fans not actually believing
the story when it does plot things they might not like.
Sherlock, for instance, used a lot of twists about things not actually really happening,
or things being hallucinations or false memories, or scenes happening in Sherlock’s mind palace,
or overall not actually happening like they were shown onscreen, and I think this unintentionally
cultivated a fan mentality where the audience straight-up couldn’t trust the show to be
honest with them.
This, I think, contributed a lot to the uniquely bizarre reaction to the season four finale,
where it was a legitimate theory running around that there must be a secret good fourth sherlock
episode waiting in the wings that the showrunners would be releasing later because the actual
finale was… bad.
Like, really bad.
Like, I was there.
It was bad.
But how could the audience trust that it was actually bad when they couldn’t even trust
what the show was physically showing them?
Now obviously this is an extreme case.
But it’s a good place to start, because it’s a useful… cautionary tale, I guess?
Creators strive to get the audience invested in their story, but this is a really good
example of how overusing this one specific trope can completely disintegrate that investment
by just… undercutting the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief.
The audience already knows it’s not real, but they have to trust the story to be honest
with them, to construct a coherent fiction for them to become invested in.
If the author disrupts that fiction by revealing it to be false, it… it’s just bad.
Tolkien had some thoughts on this too - when specifically discussing fairy tales, he put
forward the opinion that no story that was All A Dream could qualify as a fairy tale.
“If a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he
cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realization, independent
of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.”
So basically, the “all a dream” trope is already a tricky beast to handle.
While a lot of tropes can help or hurt the story itself, not many tropes actively damage
the audience’s basic ability to engage with the fiction.
At its worst, the All A Dream trope tells the audience that they shouldn’t have gotten
invested, because there was no point - nothing that happened in the dream was real.
And that tells them not to be invested going forward.
But this conveniently leads us into a more helpful angle - because the All A Dream reveal
does not have to mean that the events of the dream didn’t matter.
Now don’t get me wrong - it is way more common for writers to play it that way.
And it’s not even necessarily bad!
If the events of the dream were really unpleasant or sad, with like, major character deaths
and stuff, the “all a dream” reveal becomes a relief.
But broadly, the “it was all a dream so it didn’t matter” twist is pretty unpopular,
and with good reason.
It undercuts its own story.
But just because it was a dream doesn’t mean it didn’t matter, and there’s a lot
of ways for a dream to still matter even post-reveal.
For one thing, the events of the dream can have a lasting effect on the characters involved.
It might’ve taught them a valuable life lesson or given them a glimpse of a darker,
more unpleasant scenario they want to avoid, or left them with lasting trauma that needs
unpacking, or otherwise had a tangible impact on their character.
It’s also possible that the dream might be obscuring something very real and potentially
quite high-stakes, like for instance if the character realizes they’re dreaming because
they’re in the process of actively dying and need to wake up to fix it - the Justice
League story “For The Man Who Has Everything” is a unique twist on this, where Superman
is trapped in a dream where Krypton was never destroyed and he has a beautiful family and
a quiet, peaceful life - but he needs to destroy that perfect fantasy and wake up or the supervillain
who put him in the dream is going to do very bad things to the world.
Giving up that imagined life and family is an incredible heroic sacrifice that really
upsets him.
Or, in cases like The Matrix, waking up from the dream is a very early step one in the
plot, and the entire rest of the story is about navigating a very harsh reality.
Some “all a dream” twists also leave it kind of ambiguous how unreal the dream actually
was.
A character might wake up and assume the events were a dream, but little hints might suggest
that it was actually at least sort of real, like an item from the dream showing up in
real life.
This is one variant of the All A Dream trope, but there’s lots of ways to play with it,
so we should probably talk about some of them.
The most basic version is the Plain Vanilla All A Dream reveal, where a character wakes
up and realizes the stuff they were experiencing was just a dream.
Nothing that happened was real and they’re back in their normal life.
This is the simplest option, and, as discussed, it’s a heck of a gamble - and a lot of writers
don’t seem to notice this!
The movie version of The Wizard Of Oz, for instance, changed the plot from the book to
makes Dorothy’s adventure in Oz all a dream because the creators were worried their sophisticated
1930s audience didn’t wanna watch a movie that was a fantasy adventure in another world.
No, it was obviously much more interesting to make a movie about a girl getting a concussion.
The Disney version of Peter Pan does the same thing, implying that the kids were dreaming
the whole adventure.
In both of these cases, the books make it very overt that the fantastical adventure
is really actually happening.
In Peter Pan, the parents are freaking out about their missing children when they get
back, and while The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz ends with dorothy having no way to prove that
she went to Oz, it’s definitely a real place - like, in one of the sequels, Dorothy and
her family end up moving to Oz full time so they don’t end up homeless after the farm
is repossessed.
For some reason, some writers seem to think that it’s safer for them to couch their
fantasy works as just dreams rather than having to commit to the bit.
It just ends up undercutting the adventure and making the whole thing seem pointless.
Taking an existing fantasy and reframing it to be all a dream just betrays a level of
insecurity on the part of the adapters - an unwillingness to let their fiction be fantastical.
As a contrasting example, Alice In Wonderland really is all a dream in the book too - and
it makes sense!
The plot is completely nonsensical and follows dream logic.
The adventures are fun, but the “all a dream” reveal doesn’t really break the audience’s
investment because it didn’t feel like it was happening anyway.
Some adaptations will actually change it so Wonderland isn’t a dream and is instead
a narnia-style fantastical otherworld, and those versions need to do some heavy lifting
to make the original setting even halfway coherent.
This ties into the next major variant, Maybe A Dream.
Some stories will leave this purposefully ambiguous - the
character will wake up and probably assume
what happened was a dream, but there’ll be clues or hints that it was real on some
level.
This also applies in situations where the character’s not dreaming, but they might
be experiencing some kind of fantasy or delusion - in some stories with magical realism it’s
not clear if the magic is really happening or not, but there’s enough evidence to support
the “it’s real” interpretation.
This is more the realm of fan speculation than it is a narrative trope, but a lot of
writers aim to make the fantastical elements deliberately ambiguous.
For instance, Pan’s Labyrinth interweaves one girl’s fantasy otherworld with an otherwise
brutally realistic plot, and it’s a little unclear if the magic is real or if it’s
just a wishful delusion from a very unhappy child - except that if it isn’t real, some
plotholes open up, like how the main character was able to escape from her locked room if
she didn’t actually use magic chalk to draw a doorway.
For the record, its director Del Toro says he thinks the magic is real, but it’s left
ambiguous so the audience can draw their own conclusions.
This ties into All A Dream But Real In Its Own Way, where it’s not ambiguous that the
character was dreaming, but that doesn’t mean the things they saw and did weren’t
real in some way.
This has overlap with Maybe A Dream, but also applies outside of it - like if the character
dreams they’re interacting with some surreal otherworld, but it’s implied that this otherworld
is more than just their own dream.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is built on this trope, since the protagonist Morpheus
is the personification of dream and his realm of dreams is very real - in its own way.
This is also how the all-a-dream thing works in Over The Garden Wall - spoiler alert, skip
ahead if you’re dodging those, but while they protagonists don’t initially realize
there’s anything more to their situation than just being lost in the spooky woods,
near the end of the show Wirt remembers how they got there and realizes the last thing
he remembers before The Unknown is narrowly avoiding getting hit by a train and falling
into a freezing lake.
After he successfully defeats the big bad in the finale, he wakes up moments after falling
into the lake and manages to get himself and his brother safely out of the water before
they drown.
So The Unknown was basically a very complicated near-death experience - and there’s lots
of hints through the show that The Unknown isn’t quite real, like how their adventure
seems to take several days but the moon never changes its phase.
But even after the heroes wake up back in the real world, we’re shown how some of
the storylines in The Unknown resolve and how the characters they met along the way
get their happy endings, implying that it’s more than just a dying dream or a hallucination
- The Unknown is, in some sense, its own reality - and it’s actually implied to be the afterlife.
There’s the fact that you can draw a direct line between the plot of Over The Garden Wall
and Dante’s Inferno, starting with both sets of heroes finding themselves in a dark
and spooky forest with no further explanation and continuing through nine more episodes
that perfectly line up with the nine circles of hell, and how their guide is called Beatrice,
and how at one point they need two coins so they can ride a ferry and if you’re really
looking for it, one of the characters the boys meet in the unknown is buried in their
town’s graveyard.
It’s wild.
The Unknown is clearly some kind of underworld-adjacent situation, but it’s still left kind of ambiguous
how real it actually is.
Now the twisty version of this trope is the ol’ Just Kidding It Wasn’t A Dream.
This cuts through the ambiguity of the previous versions and confirms that the questionably-real
part of the story was totally real and totally happened.
This is usually used as a very deliberate fakeout.
Sometimes the character will wake up and assume they just had a very vivid dream, only to
realize that nope, it was real, have fun with that.
This is often used if the “just a dream” reveal would’ve actually been a relief,
like if something very unpleasant had happened - in that case this is a bit of a knife-twist,
presenting the possibility of a “just kidding” and then undercutting it with harsh reality.
But sometimes things get sneakier - a character might be tricked or manipulated into believing
what happened was just a dream, only to gradually realize the truth and snap back to reality.
It’s fairly common for a hero in a fantastical adventure to wake up in a painfully boring
and mundane world, convinced that the whole fantasy adventure was just wishful thinking
or an overactive imagination, making it look like the story is setting up for the mother
of all disappointing Only A Dream reveals - only to learn that this reality is actually
the false one, often being maintained by some dream-weaving villain or other hallucination-inducing
antagonistic force keeping them in the dream and out of commission.
Bonus points if their fantastical friends and/or love interest manage to break them
out of it.
And a fairly nasty variant of this trope is the Dying Dream, where not only is the adventure
revealed to have been just a dream, but the character having that dream was also dying
the whole time.
We touched on this with Over The Garden Wall, but it’s not uncommon for the character
to realize they’re dying before they wake up, and “waking up” might become the win
condition they need to actually survive.
Of course, this is probably the nicest way to do this trope - it’s a lot more common
for this reveal to be a double-whammy of disappointment.
Not only was the adventure not real, but the character we got invested in was dying the
whole time and is usually dead by the end of the story.
You thought it was something cool, but it was actually a tragedy and you didn’t even
know it.
Great.
This is also a twisty fakeout trope, but it’s kind of the exact opposite of the Just Kidding
variant -
An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge is basically the archetypical example of this trope, and
it kinda works because that’s all that story is - it’s a very short story that starts
with the POV character being executed and ends with him being dead, and everything between
is a surreal escapist scenario where he miraculously escapes and runs home.
We don’t really have any outside context for the POV character, so while it’s twisty
and a solid example of writing, it’s not as actively frustrating as it would be if
we had already gotten invested in this character.
This trope is less popular in writing than it is in fan theories, because, frankly, it
is
the easiest fan theory in the world.
You can take any story and claim that it’s just a fantasy some character is making up,
because every story is a fantasy some writer is making up, and if you wanna make sure the
fan theory has no loose ends, just add that the pov character is also dying.
It makes it edgy and sad and completely undercuts all the joy in the original story by framing
it as a tragic delusion, a last gasp from a
dying brain.
Anything positive or cool or compelling in the story just becomes sadder from this perspective.
Aw, man, they must have really wanted to be happy to imagine something like that!
How depressing.
I think this is why this variant is comparatively a lot less popular than the rest.
All A Dream can be melancholy sometimes, but it’s rarely crushingly depressing, and the
happy parts of the story still have value just by virtue of making the character happy,
even if they weren’t real.
The Dying Dream variant typically undercuts that.
Not always, though!
There’s ways to do it that are emotionally impactful without being pointless.
The character managing to survive is one way to do this, but some stories will also give
the dying character some kind of catharsis or closure through the dream sequence to make
the concept more bittersweet than just plain depressing.
I think this trope is very deceptive.
I don’t just mean that it’s, like, a twist that messes with the audience, I think it’s
deceptive for writers.
It looks so easy!
It lets you write whatever you want, break the status quo however you want, and then
retroactively delegitimize your own storybreaking by saying it was “all a dream” - the audience
still saw it, the characters still experienced it, but now you’re not responsible for making
it real in your story.
But it almost never has the intended impact!
Most people don’t write “all a dream” stories because they’re aiming to thoroughly
disappoint their audience, and most don’t even consider that it might break the audience’s
trust in the fictional narrative as a whole.
It looks clean and pretty and simple.
Drop in this one trope and you can do anything in the story - bring back the dead, introduce
characters from totally different times and settings, do full-episode alice in wonderland
homages, write in all kinds of fantastical surreal scenarios without having to do the
worldbuilding heavy lifting to actually make them internally coherent.
But if you’re not careful, it erodes the foundations of the story.
And almost no other trope has that effect!
There are plenty of unpopular tropes that can disappoint an audience, but almost none
of them attack the audience’s basic ability to suspend their disbelief.
Not even breaking the fourth wall can break an audience’s trust in the narrative.
But the basic, fundamental premise of All A Dream is that the story cannot be trusted.
Plenty of narratives break the audience’s trust in little ways - mysteries will omit
key details to preserve tension, plot twists startle the audience by being unexpected - but
this trope doesn’t just tweak the audience’s perspective on the story, it calls the whole
fictional reality into question if the writer isn’t careful.
There’s a reason why most of the well-liked versions of this trope are either ambiguous
about how unreal the dream was or purposefully subverting the expectations of the trope by
confirming it actually was real.
Audiences do not like being jarringly pulled out of the story to be reminded that fiction
isn’t real.
So… yeah.
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