South Park

This is a very common ending that I’m sure all of us have encountered.  After all of the events, the main character wakes up and it’s revealed to have been a dream.  I believe this was the ending for ‘Newhart’ and it also makes me think of ‘Wizard of Oz’.  From what I can tell, there are two uses for this trope:

1. Having everything be a dream comes as a shock ending. The audience is surprised, but not upset.  At least, that’s how it used to be.  I think this usage doesn’t hit as well due to previous overuse and readers being hunters of foreshadowing.  If you don’t show any signs of it being a dream, they’ll say you made a bad ending.  To be fair, if you have signs and they figure it out, they’ll say you’re predictable.  This is why I want to steer clear of it in my own stories.
2. A more accepted and useful method is to have it happen in the middle of a series.  This can reset characters and plots back to before the dreaming.  It can help if an author has written themselves into a corner and have a previous event that could explain a coma or any form of unconsciousness.  If it’s planned, an author can experiment with characters to see if anything is worth establishing in the real world.  Either way, you now have a hero remembering a dreamworld and that gives you a subplot for them reacclimating.

‘Just a dream’ is still a risky endeavor in this day and age.  I can see how it was shocking and popular long ago.  Similar to ‘I am your father’ being said by the villain, this trope was used to the point where it lost its power.  It only works on those who haven’t read or watched many stories that utilize the twist.  So, they are shocked since it’s new to them, but everyone else might just shrug.  This limits your audience to a very narrow population, which can shrink more once they realize you aren’t the first to do it.  So, why would anyone use it again?

The truth is that sometimes the ‘just a dream’ twist simply works for the story.  This can go for any trope since they became that way due to effectiveness.  Even if you remove the shock effect, a character being in a coma and going through a fake adventure can open the door to many things.  I already mentioned them having to acclimate to reality, which can be disorienting.  Another option is the character hating the real world and setting off to see if they can return to the fake one.  This does remove the trope from being a true ending, but more of a catalyst for more.  It can extend the life of a series in this way since you can’t use it at the start.

When you use it is another good point I should touch on.  Having a character start off waking from a vivid dream can be done, but the audience won’t have any interest in any effects.  They won’t understand why the real world is better or worse than the fake one because they don’t know what was ‘lost’.  You lose that investment and replace it with a mystery that can easily fall flat if it doesn’t grab the reader immediately.  This is why ‘just a dream’ can work better as a mid-series twist.  Placed there, you allow the reader to see both worlds and how they merge.  They could even relate to the disorientation of the character since they have to figure out where the dream started.

Another positive for this trope could be seen as rare because it depends entirely on how philosophical the reader is. One can start trigger a discussion about reality and if we are in a dream right now.  Maybe it can be about how people perceive things differently or anything about how we see the world.  After all, the character experienced a dream so real that it was a story worth sharing with the reader.  It was enough for them to also remember after waking, which isn’t always the case with dreams.  They tend to fade away pretty quickly or remain solely as fractured shards.

So, what do other people think of ‘just a dream’?