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 from the beginning that their future experiences are, in fact, only a dream.

On UnTrash Wiki, All Just A Dream is used as a Measurement Ball for pure, low-tier Brain Acid UnTrashes like this or this as it's believed to be the lowest of low standards by manyundefined.

The reception of All Just A Dream is terrible to an ungodly degree. There are many claims that state All Just A Dream is an extremely cheap Plot Ex Machina trick that any writer could pull in their work. And it is. All Just A Dream can be a quick fix to any situation a person cannot get themselves out of, such as a Near-Death Experience, using time-efficient or possible means. It doesn't need to make sense, it needs no explanation, and it's easy to write in.

It's simple how All Just A Dream works. First, you have Guy running through a forest holding, 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, and, aaaaaand... Guy flashes awake and springs 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 an Ex Machina moment being played by having his friend Hugo swoop in from a vine or come in on a ladder to a helicopter and save his life, keeping Guy from being killed and allowing the story to be part of the canon. That'd be annoying, sure, but not as annoying as pulling an All Just A Dream moment on your audience.

All Just A Dream-type scenarios may end with the dreamer waking up and looking around them to see the people who made an appearance in their dream. They'd say something along the lines of, "I just had the wildest dream. And you were there! And you! And you!". Note that they'd likely be pointing at the people as they're saying "and you".

There may be instances when All Just A Dream does not involve an actual dream. The experience may turn out to be a coma, simulation, or a showing of an alternate timeline that could happen if a character is to do something that changes the futureundefined.