All Just A Dream

Your surefire plan to make your audience hate you!

When a character is about to die, has an experience too good to be true, or things shift into an otherworldly setting and they catch on to it just being a dream. That or the dream suddenly ends right as something (usually life-ending) is about to happen. It's mainly used as a means of showing things that either cannot happen in this world or non-canonical occurrences. All Just A Dream can be Negated if we're shown the dreamer falling asleep before the dream begins so then we know that their future experiences are, in fact, only a dream.

On UnTrash Wiki, All Just A Dream is used as a measurement for low-tier, borderline pure bullshit UnTrashes like this or this as it's believed to be the lowest of low standards by many.

The reception of All Just A Dream is terrible to an ungodly degree. Many claim this UnTrash to be "the most clichéd and poorly-written bullshit ex machina trick any writer could ever pull in his work". And it is. All Just A Dream can be a quick fix to any situation a person cannot get themselves out of. It doesn't need to make sense, it needs no explanation, and it's easy to write in.

How does it work? Simple. First, you have Guy running through a forest holding, let's say, a valuable gem that acts as the forest's heart. Without it, the forest will surely die. Guy is running away from the forest's natives who want to seize the gem and restore life to their slowly dying home. Guy continues running up to a point where there's a large canyon. Even though it's a large fall, Guy could still make it. All he has to do is believe in himself and he'll masterfully glide over to the other side of the canyon. Guy tries to go for the jump. He's going, he's going, he's... plunging towards his inevitable demise. Guy only has seconds before he becomes Guy stew. The ground's closing in fast, the air's rushing even faster... jeez, were those jagged rocks always that jagged''? ''Doesn't matter anymore because Guy's just Mere Moments Away from deathundefined. And—Guy flashes awake to find himself spring out of bed, being the Morning Screamer he was destined to be. He looks around to see that he was just having a bad dream. Unless...

Now you can show your precious character going through a perilous adventure without putting them in harm's way! Let's forget that Guy could have miraculously been saved by one hell of an Ex Machina by having his friend swoop in and save his life, keeping Guy from being killed and allowing the story to be part of the canon. Yes, that'd be annoying, but not as annoying as pulling an All Just A Dream Moment on your audience.

Examples of All Just A Dream
Real Life - Dreams in real life. This might've happened to you at least a few times before reading this page. You could have had the most realistic and consistent dream of your life, wake up, and find that it was All Just A Dream. This might annoy you even more if it's Reinforced with you having a nice, lucid, or nice lucid dream and abruptly waking before you could do something you always wanted to in a dream. Now you'll have to start all over by trying to focus on causing a lucid dream tonight, only to fail and have to try it the night after, then the next night, and so on until you've finally got it three years later.

SpongeBob SquarePants - Doing Time [Justified]. SpongeBob is on another test for his driver's licence with Poppy Puff. After accidentally obliterating Mrs. Puff's driving school, the pineapple-dwelling quadrilateral and his puffer fish teacher drive off a cliff. As the two are falling, they find themselves in a warp tunnel that leads to a truck filled with cherry-flavored fruit punch that they then crash into. Hilarity Ensues, but then Mrs. Puff gets arrested by the police who were following her and SpongeBob through the warp tunnel. Later, Poppy gets arrested for reckless driving and is sent to jail. Meanwhile, SpongeBob and Patrick go into Mrs. Puff's jail and make several attempts at breaking her out, failing with each effort. Finally, as Mrs. Puff "goes insane" and is put in a safe room, she then warps back to falling in the tunnel with SpongeBob. She then realizes that being put in jail was all a dream. The ending of this episode plays around with this UnTrash a little before Mrs. Puff gets sick of that nonsense. Due to the ending, this Justifies All Just A Dream thanks to there being dreams within dreams.

The Simpsons - Treehouse of Horror V. One of the stories in this episode is "Nightmare Cafeteria" in which children who would misbehave would be sent to detention then be made into food for the staff and living students who, unlike the staff, are unaware of their fellow schoolchildren being prepared for consumption. Near the end of this story, as Bart and Lisa Simpson are about to fall into a giant blender (RIP Milhouse) Principal Seymour Skinner, Lunchlady Doris, and Teacher Edna Krabbapel force them to back into, Bart wakes up screaming in his bed safe and alive with his family at his side.