Is the “it was all a dream” trope generally disliked?

[Rensuka]

Hi All,

In writing is the “it was all a dream” rugpull a disliked trope? Can you show me some examples where you felt it was actually done well?

I feel like if I were to do something like that I would then have the challenge of explaining to the reader that the events in the dream were important and not just a standalone disposable story.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

The "It was all a dream" trope is VERY disliked, and for good reason.

It invalidates the stakes of your storytelling, and without stakes there is no tension, no character growth, no real redemption.

The Wizard of Oz movie pulled this, and while it (maybe) seemed clever at the time, it wasn't what the Wizard of Oz book did. None of us has ever had a dream so vivid that it resulted in personal character growth or us changing our lives, right? So why would the same be true of a character in fiction?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland book also did the "all a dream" trope, but it sort of works there, because the whole book isn't about a real plot (aside from finding the white rabbit), but more an exercise in clever absurdity and dream logic.

I don't think the "all a dream" trope CAN be done well. But if you want to do something SIMILIAR, you can use a "Lotus Eater" plot, where the main character is in a dream but crucially, the audience knows it. The stakes are the character losing who they really are and never waking up, so the audience is rooting for them to figure out it is all a dream and escape before their mind and personality is lost forever.

This still has pitfalls, because you can't make other characters inside the dream matter, since the audience knows they aren't real. A Lotus Eater plot works best when part of the stakes are in the real world and they compliment the plot occurring in the dream. I.e people outside the dream trying to keep the main character there, or friends trying to liberate the main character, but it still relying on the main character to meet them half-way.

Basically, your story needs to have consequences and stakes, and "it was all a dream" flushes that down the toilet.

[Rensuka]

The "It was all a dream" trope is VERY disliked, and for good reason.

It invalidates the stakes of your storytelling, and without stakes there is no tension, no character growth, no real redemption.

The Wizard of Oz movie pulled this, and while it (maybe) seemed clever at the time, it wasn't what the Wizard of Oz book did. None of us has ever had a dream so vivid that it resulted in personal character growth or us changing our lives, right? So why would the same be true of a character in fiction?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland book also did the "all a dream" trope, but it sort of works there, because the whole book isn't about a real plot (aside from finding the white rabbit), but more an exercise in clever absurdity and dream logic.

I don't think the "all a dream" trope CAN be done well. But if you want to do something SIMILIAR, you can use a "Lotus Eater" plot, where the main character is in a dream but crucially, the audience knows it. The stakes are the character losing who they really are and never waking up, so the audience is rooting for them to figure out it is all a dream and escape before their mind and personality is lost forever.

This still has pitfalls, because you can't make other characters inside the dream matter, since the audience knows they aren't real. A Lotus Eater plot works best when part of the stakes are in the real world and they compliment the plot occurring in the dream. I.e people outside the dream trying to keep the main character there, or friends trying to liberate the main character, but it still relying on the main character to meet them half-way.

Basically, your story needs to have consequences and stakes, and "it was all a dream" flushes that down the toilet.

That’s a fair assessment I think. Would it be ok if I pm’d you with my plot idea. I still think it’s different enough from what you described to be not a giant middle finger to the audience. Would you be willing to let me know what you think?

[LateWhiteRabbit]

That’s a fair assessment I think. Would it be ok if I pm’d you with my plot idea. I still think it’s different enough from what you described to be not a giant middle finger to the audience. Would you be willing to let me know what you think?

Sure. I could let you know how much in danger of running afoul of the trope you'd be.

[felix]

All of the above. Also: Inception is an excellent example of "it's all a dream" done right. Arguably The Matrix, too. Though the former manages to avoid the "your mind makes it real" trope, while the latter leans into it, rather annoyingly.

For what it's worth (with apologies for the shameless plug), I also wrote a couple of novellas that literally take place in a dream, albeit not one the characters can escape. Afterlife By Night states as much right from the prologue:

"Welcome to the Great Beyond," he said in a voice like the rustling of dry leaves.

"What do you mean?" gasped the boy. "What's going on?"

"You died," said the one in black matter-of-factly.

It took a moment for the significance of those words to sink in.

"No." The boy shook his head. "No. I must be dreaming. It's a lucid dream," he almost screamed, "I've had them before."

"Oh, you're dreaming all right. It's just that you'll never wake up again."

So it can definitely be done right (not sure if I succeeded). But not by telling the audience at the end "none of this mattered".

[Fuseblower]

Well, there is of course H.P.Lovecraft's Azathoth. If he wakes up then the entire universe is blinked out of existence because the universe is nothing but his dream. How's that for Cosmic Horror?

In John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London", the "It was all a dream" device is used to have the MC question his own sanity. The MC has terrible dreams which appear very real. When the MC's dead friend comes back from the grave to warn him that the MC is a werewolf then the MC believes the dead friend to be a dream as well and he ignores the warning.

And there's Wes Craven's "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise. Kids wake up from nightmares where they are stalked by Freddy Krueger. Here, the "It's all a dream" is used to declare Freddy Krueger to be harmless because he's just a dream. But he's far from harmless, if Freddy Krueger kills you in your dream, you die in the real world. Nobody believes the children to be killed by a man who only exists in dreams.

In Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm" the "It was all a dream" is used to create a surreal story. A bit like "It was all a dream.... or was it?" thing.

It can also be used for comedic effect. In the episode "Interesting" of the BBC's 80s serie "The Young Ones", Neill is being beaten up by a bunch of Vyvyan's friends. Then he wakes up, saying "Oh fancy that. It was just a dream". He gets out of bed, plays a bit of guitar but then hears sounds of the fight and realises this is the dream and he wakes up for real just as the bullies are about to kick in his head.

So, that are a couple of examples in which the "It was all a dream" can be used as something better than a cop out.

[phantmoftheomsi]

It's definitely used by lazy writers for a shocking plot twist, but it's also a foundational plot point in Dune and part of Paul's struggle is understanding whether or not the dream he just experienced is fated to become reality. So it cuts both ways.

[SelLi]

Hi All,

In writing is the “it was all a dream” rugpull a disliked trope? Can you show me some examples where you felt it was actually done well?

I feel like if I were to do something like that I would then have the challenge of explaining to the reader that the events in the dream were important and not just a standalone disposable story.

Like many things if this is done respectfully then it can be done well. And like many things, if it's done in a way that feels cheap then it just feels cheap. The difference between a Lord of the Rings and a generic fantasy story without heart that was made to cash in on fantasy. Often times the problem isn't the genera or plot-device, it's how good the actual story is. Spoilers for a Key visual novel but one could easily argue that the "it was all a dream" plot device was done very well in

Little Busters

The reason people tend to dislike this plot device is because it can easily be done ineffectively. As, a character after waking up from an "it was all a dream" story can easily forget all about it, have the dream not effect them in any meaningful way after waking, or the story can just end after waking with a sense of anti-climax. However, it can be done very meaningfully.
Maybe it's a very profound dream that effects the main character after they wake up. Maybe several people wake up from a shared dream of some kind and they later find out why they were in that shared dream. Maybe the main character was recovering from some sort of illness and the actions of real people around them came through roughly in the dream. The plot-device can just feel cheap if you do it cheaply. ^^
It's easy to point to "it was all a dream" as the reason one didn't like a work but, really, what one didn't like was the cheap writing and they would have disliked that cheap writing no matter what form it took because it was, well, just cheap. Just make things out of love and respect. If you honestly feel like you're telling a good story then, as a general rule, you're probably doing good.
If you're talking about an "it was all a dream" story that really is all a dream and simply ends with the main character/characters waking up, then it can still be done well but it's more difficult because the reader has no time to acclimatize to the new state of things which have changed so abruptly. In such a story as that, I would say to significantly foreshadow things so that, when the character does wake up, it feels like a well built-up, natural conclusion. Or you can foreshadow it more subtly for that "I need to read it again! I bet I'll notice a bunch of new stuff now that I know how it ends!" experience.

[Chiagirl]

I've seen "Can the {it was all a dream} trope be done well" question come up a lot in various places, and my thoughts were always "probably not, but I'm hesitant to give a hard no without actually experiencing it for myself." Having recently played a game that that did it though, I'd say my earlier hunch of "probably not" was correct, and I'm going to give a hard "it's bad; don't do it".

It's easy to point to "it was all a dream" as the reason one didn't like a work but, really, what one didn't like was the cheap writing and they would have disliked that cheap writing no matter what form it took because it was, well, just cheap. Just make things out of love and respect. If you honestly feel like you're telling a good story then, as a general rule, you're probably doing good.

For the game I'm talking about I actually really liked the writing and worldbuilding, which was why I'm so mad that the "psych, it's a dream!" invalidated it all. I was so much more invested in the fake dream world than I was in the real one that we briefly got to see at the end, and I feel like I got cheated because the story I came for (which was actually just a fake dream I guess) wasn't the story that ended up being delivered (because they copped out at the end with the dream BS). I get what the author was trying to do with having their guilt over the fake happenings in the dream world be a reflection of the guilt they felt for a real happening irl, but I still would have preferred they just stuck with the dream world story and left the irl stuff out. TBF the later irl stuff could have been an interesting separate story on its own, but by trying to merge it with the fantasy dream which had a completely different tone, the ending just kind of fell apart imo.

[SelLi]

I've seen "Can the {it was all a dream} trope be done well" question come up a lot in various places, and my thoughts were always "probably not, but I'm hesitant to give a hard no without actually experiencing it for myself." Having recently played a game that that did it though, I'd say my earlier hunch of "probably not" was correct, and I'm going to give a hard "it's bad; don't do it".

It's easy to point to "it was all a dream" as the reason one didn't like a work but, really, what one didn't like was the cheap writing and they would have disliked that cheap writing no matter what form it took because it was, well, just cheap. Just make things out of love and respect. If you honestly feel like you're telling a good story then, as a general rule, you're probably doing good.

For the game I'm talking about I actually really liked the writing and worldbuilding, which was why I'm so mad that the "psych, it's a dream!" invalidated it all. I was so much more invested in the fake dream world than I was in the real one that we briefly got to see at the end, and I feel like I got cheated because the story I came for (which was actually just a fake dream I guess) wasn't the story that ended up being delivered (because they copped out at the end with the dream BS). I get what the author was trying to do with having their guilt over the fake happenings in the dream world be a reflection of the guilt they felt for a real happening irl, but I still would have preferred they just stuck with the dream world story and left the irl stuff out. TBF the later irl stuff could have been an interesting separate story on its own, but by trying to merge it with the fantasy dream which had a completely different tone the ending just kind of fell apart imo.

I totally know what you mean. I tend to be hesitant to say that something is 100% good or bad in every situation or to say that something can never work, but if you're spending time getting invested in a world and its characters only for the writer to suddenly replace the world and characters with new ones...? That seems like it would almost always be crappy. If some of the characters were still around after waking, or if the old characters disappeared but the MC woke into the old world rather than into a new one, or if, after waking, you spent a significant amount of time in the new world to the point where it started growing on you, or if waking into the new world wasn't a surprise because it fit extremely well with the narrative and felt natural, or if the dream world actually was and continued to be a real world that the MC got pulled from, or SOMETHING, then that could be something else, but... yeah... I totally see what you mean. A writer better have a really good reason for taking so much away from the reader and, even when they do, the result can still very easily be iffy at best. I can only really think of a few rare examples that get this to work well... The visual novel

Little Busters

does it well. And an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called "Remember Me" (Season 4 episode 5) does it pretty well in my opinion. But... yeah... I get not being a fan of the world and characters you've grown to love suddenly being ripped away from you.