Sorta kinda.
When Gage is killed his father realizes that it was a nightmare and Gage becomes all the more precious to him, then eventually becomes star athlete and all but at some point Gage removes his hat and his brains spill out and Creed realizes the death was real and the ‘it was a dream’ part is a dream (the reader being way ahead of him of course as the whole scenario gets progressively more surreal).
I always said that 12 Monkeys works just as plausibly if you assume Cole was a genuine time traveler or if you assume he was an insane man who hallucinated he traveled in time. There’s evidence in the movie to support both intepretations.
Then how do you explain him showing up in stock photography from WWII and such?
Well, Satoshi Kon’s films are somewhat notorious for at least questionable reality - most notably Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. Each one is made of an ever-changing combination of “real” reality, flashbacks, dream-like sequences, and even what may be hallucinations - and often it isn’t clear where any one scene might fall on that spectrum.
24 posts and not a mention of Vanilla Sky?
Or it’s better, Cruiseless predecessor, Open Your Eyes.
But not Cruzless, thankfully.
Normally I despise the “it was all a dream” trope (even started a thread about it a while back) but in these two instances it works beautifully. It’s not bad or lazy.
Maybe not exactly what the OP was asking for, but the parody version of Harry Potter gets about half or two thirds through the book, when it’s revealed that everything you’ve read up to then is being filmed on a set. Then after some more narrative, Harry gets the idea of writing a book-the book the story is taking place in. Things start becoming self-referential and… well, reality sort of falls apart at that point.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is the definitive example of this.
The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock is one of those is-it-real-or-an-hallucination stories.
James Branch Cabell kind of took it in the other direction–he wrote himself into a fictional family tree as a descendant of one of his characters.
I think it was more of a last minute gag then anything else.
What about The Usual Suspects (to a point)
Or
Sixth Sense
Or maybe even Saw 2
Just glancing at my bookshelf shows me two other books where reality is a bit flexible, Galactic Pot Healer and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Then there is Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, where God turns out to be a hack writer in a dirty bathrobe.
I thought of Maze of Death, which seems to have a sort of bog standard twist at the end (a world where everyone dies is part of a group dream made up by a computer to keep the crew of a crippled space ship sane) until someone really does do a little warp out of reality.
The Others sort of fits here.
Unreliable reality is sort of the whole point of Rashomon and Courage Under Fire.
Looooong before “Newhart” and “St. Elsewhere”, Monty Python parodied the “It was all just a dream!” scenario. In the skit, Michael Palin is a hapless British twit stuck in a Soviet jail-cell, awaiting execution. He closes his eyes, the shot gets wavy, dissolves, and…
…He’s back in his yard in merry ol’ England, being served an ice tea by his dear ol’ mum (played by Eric Idle).
Palin: Mother! I’m back in England! It was all just a dream.
Idle: (Chuckles) No dear. THIS is the dream. You’re really still in that cell.
Suddenly, the shot becomes wavy, dissolves, and…
Palin is back in the Soviet jail-cell.
Anyway, “the Wizard of Oz” fits the bill for an unreliable reality. I mean, a world in full color??? Everybody knows the world is sepia-toned!
Memento is kind of like this. Throug most of the movie we seem to be fairly certain of what is going on, albeit in a fascinating way, but in the end it is put to question.
The “Red Dwarf” episode “Back To Reality”? The gang wake up to discover that they’ve been playing the total immersion virtual reality game Red Dwarf for the past 4 years, and are horrified to discover that the “real” selves that they’ve apparently been escaping all these years.
“Red Dwarf” often had similar reality-warping episodes involving time paradoxes, senile computers playing practical jokes, and suchlike.
I guess we know where he got the idea for the end of Brazil.
Allen Steele’s A King Of Infinite Space. At the very end of the book he changes, well, damn near everything about the characters’ motivations (and identities). It’s very lame and comes off as though he wrote himself into a corner and needed a way to wrap it up while simultaneously tacking on a segue to an (as yet, thankfully unwritten) follow-up. The book is based on a short story (Working For Mister Chicago), and I imagine the author thought he was being rather clever by upending the reader’s expectations, but it was just so soap-opera. This was the book that made me give up on Allen Steele. On second thought, no, that book would be Coyote. Don’t let his recent decline turn you off, though, because his Sex And Violence In Zero G is one awesome collection of hard sci-fi short stories, better than any of his novels, in fact.
Total Recall. Arnold’s adventure might be real, or it might be a memory implant. The audience never finds out.