Mouth Of Madness Through most of the film (That British guy. Sam something I think. He was in Jurassic Park and the Madness Of King George) is convinced that everything he’s experiencing is part of an elaborate publicity campaign by a publishing company. It takes seeing a man blow his own head off with a shotgun to convince him it’s real.
I swear, more than any other Twilight Zone episode, this one is burned into my memory. I used to interject randomly with, “You’re looking at a tableau of reality: Objects of dimension, of physical material: a desk, a window, a lamp. These things exist and have substance…”
Of course, I was frequently high at the time.
Ah… The Forced Protocol…
Best way to watch the Zone! 
A Bug’s Life - arguably the main character is Flick, and he knows the fight is real, but thinks the circus performers are fighters. But all the performers think they’re hired for a circus act, not to take out a bunch of bad-ass grasshoppers.
W
character minimum
Well, if we’re including TV episodes, the new Doctor Who has done this sort of thing a couple of times. In “Human Nature”/“Family of Blood”, English schoolteacher John Smith has recurring dreams in which he is called “The Doctor” and travels around in a magic blue box and doing impossible things. In “Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead”, a little girl learns that her waking life is an illusion and her nightmares are real (sort of).
He is a child psychologist. He’s mistaken about some other things, but certainly not that.
Michael Douglas’s character in The Game goes through the “is it real?” “is it fake?” process several times throughout the movie.
In Short Time, cop Dabney Coleman is under the false impression that he is dying of a terminal illness, so he takes every outrageous risk imaginable, hoping that he’ll die in the line of duty so he can get a better pension for his family before his imminent retirement.
Thanks Bryan Ekers— I saw it on TV several years back, and had promptly forgotten it, then remembered it (sort of) when I read this thread; now I have been trying to remember it all day long, with no success…
Matthew
Has that been made into a movie?
If we accept The Black Bird as a legitimate sequel, then The Maltese Falcon counts. Sam Spade thinks the statuette is fake, but the sequel establishes it’s real.
In the Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode “The Never Never Affair,” the audience in a theater is watching a war film and thinks the gunshots are fake. But the theater is actually the location of a gun battle between U.N.C.L.E. and T.H.R.U.S.H. and some of the shots are actual bullets.
In F/X, Bryan Brown thinks he’s part of an elaborate hoax and goes through a couple of iterations of “real or fake?”
Moon over Parador
Dave
Not sure if they qualify as the protagonist in both film is part of the charade.
The Last Starfighter
Does Dirty Rotten Scoundrels count, in the sense that though the characters thought they were running a ridiculously elaborate con, it turned out they were the targets of an even ridiculouser elaborate con?
Some of the X-Files episodes, would fit, I think. Especially those with David McKean as the “Man in Black” whose job it is to make up ridiculous stories that only fools could believe are true, and of course are about just the sorts of phenomena Mulder and Scully dealt with on a weekly basis. Not to mention that the stories are cover for even weirder stuff the government is really working on.
In particular, I remember a soldier dressed in an alien costume, smoking a cigarette, rocking back in forth and repeating (IIRC) “This can’t be happening.” This, of course, is a result of shock from his recent alien abduction and implied (?) probing.
I don’t think so. Dead people don’t have professions. Sigmund Freud’s ghost would not be a psychiatrist, though he might think he was.
Why not? Their knowledge doesn’t go away.
[nitpick] It was a faked trip to Mars. [/nitpick]