We all know it’s the worst cliched ending you can come up with: He woke up and discovered it was all a dream!
Good authors avoid it. Even mediocre authors usually know better. But after seeing the most blatant example ever, I wondered how many times it actually has gotten into print or on screen. I can think of a few:
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Henry James, “The Great Good Place.” (Actually, this is one of the few times it worked.)
Season eight of Dallas
The Limping Man – not only a cheat, but completely unnecessary and pointless.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus brilliantly subverted this. It was in the single episode of the series that consisted of one episode-long skit - in which Brian Jones (I think) played a mild-mannered, ordinary British civil servant who through a series of wacky incidents ends up in a Soviet gulag, waiting to be marched out in front of the firing squad.
As he lay on his cot in the cell, his eyes fluttered closed, the camera shot dissolved to a new scene and…
He found himself on a hammock in in the backyard of his home in England, safe and sound, with his mother (Eric Idle) bringing him a hot toddie.
Jones: Mother! I’m back home in England! Oh, it was all just a horrible dream!
Idle: (chuckles) No dear. THIS is the dream, you’re really still in that prison cell.
And the camere shot dissolves once again, and Jones wakes up in the gulag…
The entire run of the series St. Elsewhere was revealed to be the delusions of a non-verbal autistic kid. (My late father, who was a doctor and used to scream in fits of agitation when the actors on that show mis-pronounced common medical terms, LOVED that ending.)
And the one where it all started in the first place -Wizard of Oz.
A well done example: the end of Brazil. The office drone finds the literal woman of his dreams, fights off government agents trying to stop them, and… cut to a scene back in the torture chamber, where his (former) friend has reduced him to a happily-drooling shell of himself. The protagonist has “won” by getting beyond their reach.
Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
I also thought that Bradbury’s “The Crowd” was supposed to be all a hallucination while the man lie dying from the first car accident, but that doesn’t seem to be the most common interpretation.
The entire run of the show Newhart was determined to be a dream of Bob Newhart, when he wakes up next to Suzanne Pleschette, his wife from The Bob Newhart Show.
One of the early ones was in the 1930s on the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio series. I’m guessing that many, if not most, radio comedy programs were serial or at least had story arcs. In one, Amos ended up accused of murder, and it ended up being resolved by “it was just a dream.” I don’t know exactly how long that story line went on, though.
John Masefield’s Box of Delights. A complex and engrossing children’s fantasy that involves ancient English myth, mysterious peddlers, sinister conspiracies and a truly terrifying main villain turns out in the end to be the idle dozing of a boy on a train. Weak.
Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland is a series of short stories by George Gamow that illustrate modern physics concepts – Lorentz Contractions, for instance, in a world where the speed of light is 30 mph. Or playing pool with quantum effects. Each one ends with Mr. Tompkins waking up. Still a fascinating book, since the “All a dream” part isn’t a way of resolving the plot.
Son of Rosemary insert barfy, snotty, bloody smiley here. I so loved Rosemary’s Baby, and for Ira Levin to ruin it this way was absolutely, totally and utterly unforgiveable
Living in Oblivion with Steve Buscemi is a series of nested dream/nightmare sequences. It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, but if I recall correctly it forms a strange loop, and none of the “awakenings” take us to the top level of common experience.
The increasingly hallucinatory events in Stay are eventually resolved as a sort of dream of one of the characters. This is still very satisfying as the specifics give delayed significance to many things that initially appear to be random weirdness. (Eg; “Why the heck are Ewan McGregor’s pants so ridiculously short? That makes no sense!”) Very cool resolution.
Not just St. Elsewhere but shows like COPS, the X-Files, the Simpsons, the original run of Mission Impossible, all the Doctor Who’s… they’re all dreams in the mind of Tommy Westphall, the most brilliant child in TV history.
I’m not familiar with that one… but how about Cage’s Christmas movie, “Family Man,” in which he gets to see how his life could have been if he’d given up his high-powered career to settle down with a wife and kids.
Just when Cage is finally learning to love the kids he’s been handed, it turns out that everything he saw was just an illusion. Those kids he learned to love? They didn’t exist and never will.
THAT was a f—ed up ending to what was SUPPOSED to be a touching and inspirational story.
