Due to the nature of this trope, expect spoilers.
Daydream Surprises in Live-Action TV series.
- Andy Richter Controls the Universe had this almost as a reoccurring theme, to ridiculous lengths. The show even started with an extended one. They were also lampshaded A LOT.
- In one of the later episodes of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Tigh shortly after finding out he's a Cylon, shoots Admiral Adama in the CIC. Everyone panics. Then he looks up and it turns out that was all in his head.
- This occurs at the beginning of two episodes of Banjun Drama. "Sweet Room" opens with Chae Rim and a masked man during a romantic ball, only to reveal the scene is her daydream. In "Three Wishes", the opening scene shows Jae-suk being boldly confronted by his (one-sided) love interest, Yoo-jin, in an elevator, followed up by him waking up from bed and revealing the sequence was a dream.
- The Batwoman (2019) episode "A Narrow Escape", opens with Kate Kane playing Mortal Kombat 11 with a sane version of her twin sister, the supervillain Alice. The building lights keep flickering intermittedly until Alice suddenly wakes up strapped to a chair in Arkham Asylum as a doctor gives her electroconvulsive therapy.Dr. Butler: Let's try this again. You live in a fantasy. Fantasy is not reality. This is your reality, Alice.
- The Big Bang Theory:
- In The Big Bang Theory S 9 E 2 The Separation Oscillation Penny is still upset after Leonard confessed he made out with another woman. Sheldon suggests Penny balance the scales by kissing another man, then reminds her that he is single. They make out passionately... and then Leonard wakes up in a cold sweat.
- In "The Infestation Hypothesis", Penny gets a chair that was thrown away and Sheldon becomes obsessed with getting rid of it. Penny convinces him that she had the chair cleaned, so he takes a seat, and is suddenly swarmed by cockroaches. He them wakes up from his dream.
- In the episode where Penny asks about Sheldon's "deal" regarding his sexuality, one of the theories they have is that Sheldon reproduces asexually, and that one day he will eat too much Thai food and split into two identical copies. The Stinger depicts just that, which turns out to be Leonard's nightmare.
- On "The Recombination Hypothesis" one of these takes up the entire plot, as Leonard imagines the ramifications of hooking up with Penny again. In the end he decides to go ahead anyway.
- One scene depicts Sheldon passionately kissing Amy. This, of course, was Amy's daydream.
- Played with, probably not intentionally, in the series finale. When Amy is giving her Nobel acceptance speech, Sheldon's attention wanders and when she finishes she has to call his name. Because she is no longer speaking into the microphone her voice is not amplified and sounds normal, and for a split second it seems like Sheldon is going to snap back to reality and find that the whole Prize scenario was a daydream. Fortunately, it isn't.
- The Brittas Empire: Brittas has one of these in “UXB” where Laura declares her love for him and snogs him. Naturally, the audience don’t find out that this is a daydream until it immediately cuts to the door opening again and the real Laura coming in.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Played for Drama in "The Body". Buffy imagines that the paramedics are able to revive her mother, rush her to the hospital in an ambulance, and get the "good as new" seal approval from the doctor; cut back to shot of Joyce lying dead on the floor.
- Used as a Love Epiphany in "Out of My Mind". After yet another double-cross Buffy turns up at Spike's crypt determined to stake him once and for all. A pissed off Spike rips off his shirt to expose his manly body and tells her to get on with it, whereupon they start making out passionately as Spike tells Buffy he loves her... only to wake up in bed with an expression of horror on his face.
- Seen from the outside in "The Dark Age" - Buffy walks into a computer class as Ms. Calendar says "Okay, guys, the first thing we're going to do is - Buffy!" Xander sits up saying "What, did I fall asleep just now?"
- In the spinoff to Buffy Angel, "Soul Purpose", featuring a tidy resolution of all of Angel's problems, emotional personal or supernatural, turned out to be a fantasy constructed by a spell to orchestrate the removal of his soul.
- Burnistoun: In the first sketch of the first series, Scott is harassed by a pair of thugs who threaten to pull a knife on him. He responds by chucking a bottle of ginger at them and perfectly hits one in the head. This leads to him being featured on a TV programme and making it into the Guinness Book of World Records. At the end of the sequence, this is revealed to be in his imagination, and when he actually tries to chuck the bottle of ginger he spills it all over himself instead.
- A trailer for Castle sees Beckett and Castle at a trendy pool bar, Beckett wearing a very figure-enhancing red dress and sexily flirting up a storm with the very appreciative Castle... until Beckett snaps Castle back into reality. Turns out they're at a murder scene, involving some poor bastard who's been impaled on a pool cue, and Castle was just indulging in a fantasy.
- Charmed: In the season 2 episode, "Animal Pragmatism", Leo gives Piper a Valentine's Day card. He put it in her purse, where he was sure she would find it. Although Piper still had feelings for Leo, she was still going out with Dan Gordon. In the card Leo stated he was not going to give up on Piper because the two of them belonged together. After reading the card, Piper walks across the room to Leo and kisses him passionately, before the scene fades back to reality revealing it was just a day dream. She then looks at Leo and they smile at each other.
- Used frequently on the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas, most notably in the fourth season finale, which plays out as if it's the final episode of the entire show, with characters moving away, character arcs being resolved, a Bittersweet Ending and the eponymous gas station being taken over by a megacorporation as Dog River goes from being a small town to a proper city...before it's revealed that all of this is just a prolonged daydream sequence on the part of Hank.
- A Crime Story episode ended with idealistic public defender David Abrams representing the street thug who beat up his (Abrams') girlfriend. While questioning him in his cell, Abrams pulls out a gun and empties it into the guy...then he snaps out of it.
- Criminal Minds has this occur several times, but a prominent example is the episode "Sniper Sniped": The Scary Black Man protector of the UnSub's target we had followed throughout the episode was in reality the UnSub himself, a mercenary Cold Sniper using a kind of "focusing technique" so as to keep alert until the time the victim exposed herself.
- Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa starts off with Himura murdering someone in cold blood, only revealing after the fact that it was only a nightmare — one that Himura regularly experiences.
- In an episode of Dark Angel, a Mook pulls a gun on Max. She effortlessly knocks the gun away and defeats her opponent, then goes home to celebrate. While she's in the middle of having sex, she starts to feel a pain, then collapses from being shot in the chest by the mook.
- Dexter:
- Dexter figures out Miguel was playing him for a fool all along, he screams in rage, knocks his computer monitor off his desk, and throws his chair through the lab window—in broad daylight, in the middle of the police station. Then the camera cuts, and he's sitting calmly at his desk, waving cheerily to Miguel. For all his charm, Dexter is a sociopathic murderer—that's a moment when we see what's often going on inside his head.
- In another episode, Debra's therapist points out that she's always talking about how much she loves her brother, and that they're Not Blood Siblings, and wonders whether she has feelings for him that way. She tells her therapist to fuck off... later that day, there's a scene between the two of them that's full of Incest Subtext. Then it... rapidly becomes text. Then it turns out Deb was dreaming it. Quoth Deb, upon waking up: "fuck".
- Diagnosis: Murder: One episode focuses on a couple planning to kill the bride's father during their wedding and frame her stepmother. The first act appears to show the whole thing play out perfectly for them, with Mark and co falling for everything. Then after we see them arrest the stepmother we cut to the couple in bed, revealing the whole sequence had been them discussing how their plan would go down. As per the Unspoken Plan Guarantee while they successfully murder the father the frame goes badly wrong.
- Dickinson: Emily is seen apparently going to bed with Sam, then it turns out she's just imagining this.
- Euphoria: In "Trouble Don't Last Always" we see Rue with Jules in an apartment happily together, and so the audience can think very briefly that they got back together after Season One. It's very quickly shown to be, as you'd expect, just Rue imagining this however as she gets high.
- Glee featured one in an episode with Artie getting out of his wheelchair and finally dancing. A 'Daydream Ballet', if you will.
- In season one of House, Dr. House tells Vogler that he has a stage four cancer before suddenly waking up. The small, sad, disappointed noise from the audience was heard three and a half kilometres away.
- How I Met Your Mother:
- One episode had a Running Gag of a character saying something sensible, then the film stops and the narrator says "...is what (character) should have said", and the scene starts over with what the character really said, which wasn't sensible at all.
- One episode has Ted finally rage out on Stella for what she did. Then the camera snaps back to him in the cab with his friends, who cheer him for the speech he has planned out. When he gets out of the car, though, he sees her with her daughter and Tony and can't bring himself to do it.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Dennis has one of these in "Mac & Dennis move to the suburbs." After weeks of psychological torture involving a noisy pool filter, bad morning commute traffic, and weeks spent in Mac's company, Dennis completely snaps on their friendly next door neighbor (who is implied to be a figment of Dennis' imagination, anyway), stripping completely naked, delivering an absolutely chilling threat, and screaming like he has been demonically possessed.Wally: Hey, buddy. Haven't seen you for a bit. You've probably been staying inside to avoid this, uh, heat wave, huh? Boy, it's been hot.
Dennis: It's hot, huh? Yeah. It is super hot. Yeah. It's getting real hot around here. So hot, Wally. But you don't really know what hot is, do you? Hot's a storm. You ever been in a storm, Wally? I mean, a real storm? Not a thunderstorm, but a storm of fists raining down on your head. Blasting you in the face. Pummeling you in the stomach. Hitting you in the chest so hard you think your heart's gonna stop. You ever been in a storm like that, Wally?
Dennis: (prolonged horrifying scream of primal rage) - Janda Kembang:
- In episode 5, Salmah visits Malik's shop and he proceeds to hold her hand tenderly. Without a warning, the scene is revealed to be Malik's imagination and he is actually holding another customer's hand.
- In episode 24, Rais wakes up in front of Neneng's shop who acts unusually nice to him and even assures him that it's not a dream. Surprise, it is a dream, as revealed when Kemal throws water at Rais who is actually sleeping in Kemal's home.
- Pretty much every Lifetime Time Movie Of The Week centering around a Yandere Villain Protagonist will have a scene of this nature where it at first appears that the object of their obsession is declaring their love to them, only to reveal it as a fantasy.
- Lost plays heavily with dreams and reality, such as Kate's vision of Claire in the season 4 finale, or Eko's vision of Ana-Lucia immediately following her death. Another form of the trope was the teaser for "Catch-22," in which Charlie is killed by an arrow to the throat. This turns out to be one of Desmond's precognitive "flashes," which will actually occur later if he doesn't prevent it.
- A nice little incidental use of this in the Series 1 finale of Mad Men contrasted Don's hopes for his family with the reality of his isolation from them.
- In the Masters of Horror episode "The Screwfly Solution", Alan heads home on a flight, and arrives there at night. He and his wife Anne put their daughter to sleep, and then make love to each other. Alan becomes violent, starts strangling Anne, and pulls a knife on her. Then he wakes up back on the plane. Alan then realises he's been infected by the virus he's investigating which turns sexual feelings into violent ones.
- Miranda (2009) has this occasionally, with events such as Gary suddenly walking into the room, proclaiming his undying love for her, and kissing her... only for it to snap back and reveal Miranda's just daydreaming. Subverted on one occasion in which Miranda kisses Gary, and then realises she wasn't daydreaming and actually did that.
- Murdoch Mysteries used it quite often (together with Imagine Spot), regarding Detective Murdoch and Dr. Ogden's Will They or Won't They? and on-again-off-again relationship:
- In the episode "Still Waters", Murdoch stumbles over saying, "Can I ask you a question?" and when Dr. Ogden says, "Yes?", he kisses her. Cut to a moment later, and Murdoch actually asking to have his bathwater back.
- In the Season 3 finale, Murdoch steps out of a jewellers with a ring, heads for the infirmary, and asks Dr Ogden to marry him. Then it flashes back to the jewellers, and Murdoch really does go to the infirmary, only to find she's already left for her new job in Buffalo.
- In season 4 when Julia is engaged to Dr. Garland, she meets William in the morgue and they discuss the case that was just solved and which involved Hemo Erotic and Kiss of the Vampire craze. Julia gets aroused and they end up violently making out. It turns out it was just Julia's fantasy.
- Happens in one episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, when the client mentions Nero Wolfe's daughter:Wolfe: I have no daughter. This is flummery!
Archie (narrating): At least, that's what I thought he'd say. What he actually said was this:
Wolfe: I have no daughter. She died. - The NewsRadio episode "Daydream" is a series of these as the characters deal with a broken air conditioner with a series of heat-induced hallucinations.
- Used for dramatic effect in an early episode of Outlander where it appears Claire tells Mrs. Fitz that she's a time traveler and Mrs. Fitz accuses her of witchcraft. Claire then snaps out of her daydream and realizes that telling anyone the truth could have disastrous consequences.
- Used constantly on Passions. Part of these scenes would usually be used in the next episode preview.
- In the pilot of Profit, G&G security chief Joanne is walking down the company's hallways when suddenly Jim Profit walks up to her from around the corner and shoves her up against the wall as he strangles her. Joanne quickly startles awake from her nightmare.
- A Season One episode of Pushing Daisies sees waitress Olive Snook realize that a customer had been proclaiming his love for her just before he returns to the Pie Hole and sweeps her off her feet. Blink, and she's back holding his left-behind coffee cup.
- In the Red Dwarf episode “Blue”, Lister has a dream where Rimmer (who had gone off to be Ace) returns and acts friendly towards Lister, culminating in the two kissing. Naturally, the audience isn’t shown that this is a dream until after the kiss.
- Royal Pains did this in the Season 1 finale, with Divya imagining standing up to everyone at her engagement party and breaking it off, but really going through with it.
- The Sandman, "The Doll's House": On a transatlantic flight, the recently widowed Lyta strikes up a conversation with the handsome man seated across the aisle. After she mentions her recent troubles, he asks how she's holding up, and she says that clearly she's not holding up very well, considering she's having an impossible conversation with her dead husband. Then a flight attendant wakes her up, and we see that the seat across the aisle is actually occupied by someone else entirely.
- Scrubs:
- It makes liberal use of both Daydream Surprise and the Imagine Spot. J.D. is quite the Mr. Imagination.
- Subverted in the episode "My Best Laid Plans". On a date with Molly, when he's in a relationship with Kylie, J.D.'s Inner Monologue says he knows exactly what will happen if he brushes the hair out of her eyes, and we get a speeded up sequence of them kissing, leaving the bar, going back to J.D.'s place and they're just about to take their clothes off when we snap back to reality, and J.D.'s monologue says "But I didn't". Then, when he accidentally lets slip to Kylie he was seeing Molly, the inner monologue says he knows exactly what will happen if he doesn't say the right thing, and we get a similar speeded up sequence of them arguing, and J.D. leaving and going home. Instead of another snap-back, the monologue just says "And that's what happened."
- This was subverted in one episode where Dr. Cox punches out Dr. Kelso. Both the audience and J.D. expect this trope, but are surprised when there's no snap back to reality. The event actually happened!
- In "That's My Dog", Season 4 of Six Feet Under, David imagines the hitchhiker he's picked up coming out to him, calling him cute then propositioning him for an on-the-side relationship. Blink and it cuts back to him offering David a drink of water, saying to the daydreaming David: "Hello? Where did you go?!"
- In The Sopranos episode "Long Term Parking", the viewers see Adrianna driving her Ford Thunderbird out of New Jersey with her suitcase, but then a few seconds later we realize that she was daydreaming, and is back in Silvio's car on the way to her execution.
- Sorry!: The episode "Curse of the Mummy" has a scene in the middle of the episode where Timothy falls down the stairs as he's trying to escape from his mother with Muriel. From there, the episode gets more bizarre, ending with a sequence where the train is pulling away with Muriel on it and without Timothy. It is only then that we find that everything since Timothy fell down the stairs had been All Just a Dream and he had never left the house at all.
- Done frequently in Spaced, starting with the second episode, when Tim wakes up, finds the flat is bright and airy and his ex-girlfriend (who chucked him out) is making breakfast. She laughs at his dream that "you dumped me and I moved in with a girl I hardly know"...and then a monster attacks him. He wakes up for real, and the awful truth hits him.
- Stargate SG-1:
- An instance in the episode "Grace".
- Done confusingly at the end of "The Other Guys", with the end of the episode having a fake kiss between a main character and the Non-Action Guy the episode was based around. The confusing part is that they forgot to mention if it was the entire episode that was the dream, or just the kiss at the end. It took Word of God to sort that one out.
- Used several times in "200", in which the show parodies itself by featuring the writer of an in-universe show loosely based on their exploits. In one notable scene, the Stargate starts acting up, and the characters run around trying to fix it with no success, ending with the entire SGC blowing up. Cut to SG-1 complaining about how contrived that would be; the actual problem was solved with minimal difficulty. The opening sequence could also count, as the last recap is from a fake episode where SG-1 meets the Ewoks — er, Furlings — which somehow leads to their planet exploding. Sam interrupts the recap by complaining, "Now that never happened!"
- Star Trek: Enterprise:
- The "stinky" scene. Malcolm Reed images that he's lying in Sickbay after being rescued from a shuttle accident, and is about to snog T'Pol when he wakes up back in the shuttle.
- T'Pol dreams she's having a Shower of Love with 'Trip' Tucker, only to suddenly turn into a Trellium-D zombie and attack him. This is a sign of her breakdown in emotional control as a result of the drug.
- A variation of this occurs in the pre-title sequence of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Hollow Pursuits". Reginald Barclay is initially portrayed as an arrogant tough guy who scares his superiors and is popular with women. Then he's called in for duty outside the holodeck that this scene takes place in, and it turns out that he's actually quite meek. It happens again at the end of the episode when Barclay announces he's "leaving" the crew and it turns out he's instead speaking to the holographic version of them, as he is determinedly breaking away from using the holodeck recreationally.
- The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" has The Doctor (no, not that one) upgrade his program so he can dream like humans, but a glitch in the algorithm causes him to spontaneously daydream on duty.
- Supernatural. Sam has a dream where Bella knocks on his hotel room door, lampshades their sexual tension, slips out of her trenchcoat to reveal she's wearing lingerie, and snogs him until Dean snaps him out of his fantasy. Bella then knocks on their door wearing a trenchcoat, causing Sam to go wide-eyed when she takes it off...but she's just wearing her normal clothes.
- In That '70s Show, episode "It's All Over Now", Jackie comes to the Hub, and when Hyde asks how she is, she says she wants to marry him. He replies he does too, and everybody dances in joy. Next scene: everybody except Jackie is sitting, and Hyde asks her once more how she is.
- Possibly best known from the The Twilight Zone episode "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (adapted from the short story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce), in which a Civil War prisoner being hanged from the eponymous bridge manages a miraculous escape, makes his way across miles of hostile countryside to his home, stumbles inside to the welcoming arms of his loving wife... and finishes his drop on the end of the rope and dies.
- Ugly Betty:
- When Wilhelmina is privately meeting with Connor and he offers her a drink, she daydreams that he then starts kissing her, jolting back to reality when he asks why she's staring into space.
- Happens twice in one scene when Betty imagines asking Bobby out, and then pushing him against a car and ripping open his shirt. Both times it's revealed to be a daydream and she asks him something much more tame.
- Happens a lot in Unfabulous, once where Addy throws excrement at the popular girls for teasing her.
- In Wolf Hall, Cromwell at one point reaches out to stroke Anne Boleyn's chest after he solves a problem for her, but a moment later we see it's in his head. The series finale starts with a particularly dark one, though, with Cromwell hosting a banquet where the Duke of Norfolk starts complaining he's famished. The servers start laying out food, and then the main course appears: Anne Boleyn, being dragged along the length of the table and smiling dissonantly at Cromwell as he picks up the knife to carve. He plunges it at her face; the scene switches to him lost in thought while eating an ordinary breakfast with his own household.
- In an episode of Workaholics, Adam, high on bath salts, painkillers and alcohol, sings (pretty well, too) a song at Karl's Wedding, dedicated to his new homeless girl, complete with backing from Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers. Only the song cuts out after a minute, the lighting changes and we're back to reality, with Adam drunkenly moaning and yelling at the wedding guests.
- Young Sheldon: In "Babies, Lies and a Resplendent Cannoli", Georgie telling George Sr. about Mandy and George losing his temper turns out to be just Georgie imagining what would happen if he did tell him.
