Adventures in Comaland

Harry Potter: Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?
Albus Dumbledore: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

— Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

A character is unconscious and near-death, and has an abnormally realistic dream. The world may be completely different from our own, but the kicker is that what you do in the dreamworld is critical to whether you wake up in the real world. This can be a result of magic, divine intervention, or purely symbolic of their struggle to remain alive, but it will rarely be addressed since it's more fun to leave it up to the audience as to whether it was real or not. Having this be the premise of a story or sequence allows writers to have the benefits of a Dream Sequence or All Just a Dream story (it doesn't have to impact any other characters or the world in general, it can be much weirder than usual, and it can explore the character's mind in a more visible way) while avoiding the problem of the sequence seeming to not matter since it didn't really happen — if the character has to make an effort in the dream world to wake up, then the effort really does make a difference.

Compare Journey to the Center of the Mind, Vision Quest, Talking in Your Dreams. Adventure may possibly happen naked. See also Lotus-Eater Machine, Schrödinger's Butterfly. For the sleep version, see Dream Emergency Exit. For the fictional video game version, see Win to Exit. See also All Just a Dream, (for the unwinnable version) Dying Dream, and Dream Episode. If the character dies, this may be The Journey Through Death.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Hekikai No Aion Seine is put into a Lotus-Eater Machine by one of the mermaids. In there she revives her happy years with Simon. Tatsuya then has to go into her dreams to wake her up, but if he suffers something that could kill him, he would die in real life.
• Near the end of I"s, Ichitaka is knocked into a coma. In it, he relives his school days from earlier in the series with Iori, only with the knowledge of the future. He's awoken by Iori through The Power of Love.
• Sword Art Online invoked this in the Aincrad arc, trapping thousands of players against their will with no chance to escape from the virtual world unless they beat the 100th floor.
  • Played more straight in the Project Alicization arc, where Kirito awakens in a virtual world with no memories of his real self that makes him question if he is an AI or the real deal. The truth is that he was fatally wounded by being injected with a deadly virus that injured his brain, putting him in a coma, and was subsequently taken under Rath to heal him through their technology by forcing him into the virtual world, while also using his unconditional help to discover why the virtual world they have created is operating on its own rules.
• X/1999:
  • Kakyou Kuzuki pulls this, since he is comatose in the real world but his Dream Weaver powers allow him to dive into the minds and dreams of other people. That's how he met Hokuto Sumeragi in the past, and later befriends Kotori Monou in her brief non-Ophelian moments towards the end of her life.
  • In the TV series only, the aforementioned Kotori manages to pull a similar feat. Instead of becoming The Ophelia, her body falls into a coma while her mind reminds more or less stable, so she starts using her own Dream Weaver abilities instead of going crazy, and it leads her to meet Kakyou and strike an Inter Generational Friendship with him.

Comic Books

• Action Force, the UK version of G.I. Joe. Lady Jaye is badly wounded by Destro and falls into a coma. She experiences a vision quest in order to regain wakefulness and mobility.
• Joe the Barbarian is about a diabetic boy going through a serious hypoglycaemic attack who, as he struggles through his house to get to his emergency fizzy drink before he passes out and dies, hallucinates a grand fantasy psychodrama.
• Luke Skywalker gets these a few times in Marvel Star Wars. The first time it's in reaction to encountering Darth Vader, and he has to conquer a Vader-shaped manifestation of his fear in order to wake - meanwhile, he's captured and Strapped to an Operating Table but conveniently gets up and fights his way through a whole lot of enemies while unconscious. Later, when afflicted by the magical plague called the Crimson Forever, he has another dream of facing a Vader-shaped manifestation of the disease. Ben's spirit shows up to tell him not to fight and he lets 'Vader' kill him, which means his body enters a state of near-death but persists until the other characters can resolve the Crimson Forever through other means.
• Tellos is all about this and an attempted bodyjacking at the same time.
• Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story: While Artemis is laying unconscious after Theseus nearly beat her to death she hallucinates her patron goddess Cybelle calling her back to life. The voice resolves itself to belong to Findabar, who is treating her wounds.

Fan Fiction

• In Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic The Greatest Betrayal, both Amy and Silver end up in a coma where they are in an endless black desert, and have to get out, with the encouragement of 'Shadow', who insists it is real. Amy, suffering from trauma, is given help to leave by Shadow, who pushes her away. Silver, who is implied to be near death, is advised to use his telekinesis, and he flies up and out through the stars - as he does so, in the real world the hospital room goes into turmoil from his telekinesis. The walls have so much glass in them that they shine like starlight, and when he escapes, his breath is condensed with ice crystals and his skin is described as being as cold as the space between the stars. Unlike Amy, he remembers it all.
• A Thing of Vikings: While unconscious, Stoick has a talk with Forseti, the Norse God of Justice.
• The Loud House fanfic What You Wish For turns out to have been all in Lori's head after she passed out from breathing in noxious fumes.
• During Zero Context: Taking Out the Trash, Callista briefly blacks out during a fight due to the severe pain she was going through. While in this state, she briefly sees and speaks to a sibling who had disappeared under unknown circumstances years before. The heart-to-heart that results leaves her in a state of contentment, the effects of which carry over when she regains consciousness.

Film — Live-Action

• In Awake (2007), while Clayton's doctors plot his death unaware that he can hear them, Clayton can do nothing but relive his memories that led up to this point, scrutinizing every detail to try to understand what's going on. After the transplant "fails" while he remains hooked to the bypass machine, everything in his dream world grows dimmer and dimmer, until finally fading to pitch black.
• Most of the second half of The Blood of Jesus. An angel appears, and the spirit of Martha joins her. The angel sends Martha off on a journey that is supposed to end on the crossroads between Heaven and Hell. Judas, sent by Satan, lures Martha into a life of debauchery that involves jazz clubs and prostitution. Martha eventually finds her way, and is redeemed by the blood of Jesus falling from the cross.
• The plot of Isn't It Romantic is that Natalie, a cynic with low self-esteem who is very critical of romantic comedies, is knocked out after being mugged in the subway and wakes up...in a romantic comedy. She figures that in order to escape this world, she has to play as the leading lady in this movie and get a man to fall in love with her. But eventually what gets her to wake up is learning to love herself. In reality she was in hospital in a medically induced coma for 18 hours to prevent any brain damage after the mugging.
• The whole plot of the movie Monkeybone.
• Older Than Television: In The Poor Little Rich Girl, said poor little rich girl (played by Mary Pickford) gets overdosed with a sleeping potion and then has a fantastical coma dream. She ends up meeting The Grim Reaper, who offers her "eternal sleep", but a sprightly fairy who seems to be the Reaper's Good Counterpart lures her back to the side of life.
• The film version The Wizard of Oz may have been this for Dorothy. Uncle Henry thought for a moment that she was going to leave them. There may have been an unstated choice to return to Kansas and live, or stay in Oz and die. Averted in the books, Oz was actually real.
• Almost all of Wristcutters: A Love Story takes place in hipster comaland and the protagonists can only get back to the waking world via the magic wormhole in the car's footwell (Zia) and also by the People In Charge helping (Mikal)

Literature

• In The Avatars Trilogy, Diana has to go through the underworlds of the various mythologies in order to wake up.
• In the BattleTech novel Grave Covenant, Victor Steiner-Davion has one of these after an assassination attempt on him. He finds himself having a conversation with his fathers and his father's fiercest rival (both deceased), ends on a note of telling them to their faces that he has his own life to tend to and destiny to make regardless of their approval or lack thereof, and not too surprisingly wakes up in the hospital for the first time right at the end of the same chapter.
• Tbe Firefly novel “Ghost Machine” has a phlebotinum device put the crew into coma-like states where they dream of ideal lives. Mal and Inara have kids on Sihnon, Zoe and Wash run a successful transport flying corporation, Simon is a doctor in a big hospital and Kaylee runs a successful mechanic business with her dad. Then the dream worlds fall apart and become nightmares. River is the only one awake near the end and she eventually manages to get Mal conscious so he can disable the machine and everyone else can wake up. It’s fortunate, since they were seconds from crashing into a moon by the time Wash wakes up and gets in the cockpit.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry Potter suffers a temporary case of death and has a chat with Dumbledore in the afterlife.
• The whole plot of If I Stay is about teenager Mia Hall made comatose by a car accident, wandering in Comaland, deciding whether to live or go to the great beyond.
• In the German time-travel romance novel Man Of My Dreams, Tristan proves to be a 21st century military historian in a coma following a vehicular accident, who is now living a whole live as an acquaintance of Napoleon Bonaparte, his former research object.
• The entire plot of Catherine Webb's Mirror Dreams depends on this trope. Renna is a dreamer, a coma patient. This allows her to exist in the dream-world for much longer than normal dreamers, and also makes her more "real" in that world. In the end her choice (and the actions of the protagonist) allows her to die, save the world (both of them) and preserve her own existence.
• Jayfeather in Warrior Cats has the ability to enter into other cats' dreams. During the events of the third arc, a cat named Poppyfrost falls deathly ill, so he has to enter her mind so that he can find her and bring her back to reality.
• In the book "Bylo nás pět" (We Were a Handful) by Czech author Karel Poláček, the last section of a book (which, up to this point, was filled with fairly realistic happenings) sees the children leave their town and go on a whimsical trip to India. It's eventually revealed that the main character and narrator of the book got a nasty case of scarlet fever and the adventure is a product of his feverish mind.

Live-Action TV

• In the Angel episode "Orpheus", Faith and Angelus dream of Angel and Angelus' past after Faith takes Orpheus and feeds herself to Angelus. Faith has to choose to keep fighting in order to live.
• Babylon 5: In "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari", Londo has a heart attack, and is brought face to face with his past and its consequences in a series of encounters leading to an intense confrontation with G'Kar.
• Beyond: Holden (and other coma patients) traveled into another world called the Realm during their comas. Some didn't make it back, as it's very dangerous.
• After being diagnosed with a brain tumor on Bones , Booth lies in a coma for several days, during which time Brennan sits by his hospital bed reading aloud the book she's writing. Booth imagines an alternate life in which he and Brennan are married and expecting a child. He's confused and disappointed when he awakens.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Faith spends most of "This Year's Girl" having semi-lucid dreams as she struggles to awaken from her coma.
  • In "Nightmares", a comatose young boy gets the entire cast into this trope as his dreams begin to infect the real world.
• Community: In "G.I. Jeff", Jeff goes into a coma after taking "youth pills" and drinking scotch. He dreams that he and his friends are in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.
• Covert Affairs
  • When Annie is shot in the middle of season three, she experiences a series of odd dreams while in a coma. She is given a polygraph test by her sister and Joan, who both question her loyalties, she has a conversation with the woman who shot her, and she encounters a seeing Auggie, whom she slow dances with and even kisses, leaving no doubts as to how real-life Annie feels about her handler.
• In Criminal Minds
  • After Agent Elle Greenaway is shot by the Serial Killer of the week she is left unconscious and bleeding to death. Throughout the remainder of the episode while emergency workers attempt to resuscitate her, she is in a dream version of the BAU jet, where she is visited by her police officer father who died when she was a child. During their conversation Elle's father tells her that the decisions she makes in the plane will make the difference as to whether she lives or dies in real life.
  • When Hotchner is critically ill after the scars George Foyet's attack cause problems. He dreams he is a theater with his late wife Haley and Foyet, who killed Haley. Haley sends him back to raise their son Jack and gives him her blessing for his romance with Beth.
• CSI: NY: In "Near Death", Mac is shot in the back and left, well, near death. While he is being operated on, he journeys through a limbo that looks like the crime lab where he meets and has conversations with his friends (and his dead wife).
• In The Drew Carey Show, Drew once had to choose his real life over his idyllic-for-him coma life (he would have died if he'd stayed.)
• In the particularly bizarre Farscape episode "Revenging Angel", D'Argo accidentally seriously injures John during an attack of hyper-rage. Most of the episode is then spent inside John's head as he tries to fight his way back to consciousness, including animated Looney Tunes parodies with him as Road Runner and D'Argo as Wile E Coyote.
• Hemlock Grove: Roman spends more than an episode in a coma, where he faces various inner demons represented by people from his life. His good-hearted sister appears as a guardian angel of sorts.
• House is shot and enters a coma hallucination in which the man who shot him shares his hospital room during recovery. He wills himself out of his coma.
• Played with in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (2008), though in different ways. Alex's 1981 is not Sam's 1973.
• The MacGyver (1985) episode "Passages" had Mac put in a coma by assassins. He found himself on a cruise ship piloted by a guy claiming to be Anubis where he managed to talk one last time to his dead parents and just deceased grandfather before escaping.
• The Magicians (2016): Quentin is put in one due to a magic spell which makes him think he's still in a mental institution.
• On My Name Is Earl, Earl spends the second half of the third season in a coma, during which he dreams he's in an old sitcom like the ones he used to watch as a child.
• An episode of Mysterious Ways involves a woman named Paloma waking up from a 16-year coma, completely healthy, and describing an island where she and other people in comas from the same hospital lived together. It's not completely clear if their actions on the island determine whether they wake up, but Paloma is able to re-enter the coma world and bring out a little girl so there has to be some controllable mechanism of escape involved.
• The Odyssey: The central premise of the series. An 11-year-old boy falls from a tree house, ends up in coma and dreams about a Crapsack World with no adults.
• In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Tommy had to do unmorphed battle with his past Ranger identities. After proving his will to live, he woke up, his powers restored and with a new Super Mode.
• The Professionals. In "Discovered in a Graveyard", Doyle is shot in his own home by an unknown assassin. While Cowley and Bodie track down the shooter, Doyle has surrealistic coma dreams where he argues with his friends over whether it's worth holding onto life in a world of violence.
• The Sopranos: After getting shot by a delirious Uncle Junior, Tony spends a few episodes in a coma dream sequence. He was in a distant city, where he'd accidentally switched his wallet and briefcase with a man named Kevin Finnerty, and everyone else thinks he actually is this man. Curiously, in this dream, Tony's heavy New Jersey accent drops significantly and his posture is better.
• In an episode of So Weird, Fi is somehow able to communicate with a young woman who has been comatose for several years. In the woman's dream, she's still a little girl, and she's lost in an unpopulated version of her hometown and can't find her way home. Based on her descriptions of her surroundings and her family's corroborating details, Fi is able to put together a map of the town as it was back when the girl first fell into her coma and uses it to guide her back to her house. Finally home again, the girl walks through her front door and wakes up back in the real world.
• One episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had Bashir trying to fix the titular space station (a representation of his own damaged mind) with the help of several of the senior officers (representations of various bits of his subconscious personality) while a weird psychic alien (a representation of the damage the real alien inflicted on his mind) tried to tear it apart.
• In one episode of Star Trek: ST:TNG Deanna has to enter her comatose mother's mind.
• In the mid-season finale of Supernatural season seven, most of the episode takes place inside of Bobby Singer's head as he fights for his life after receiving a bullet to the head.
• Possibly the case of Audrey's situation in Twin Peaks: The Return. It was mentioned that she ended up in a coma after getting involved in an explosion in the season two finale, and all of the other characters (including her own son) rarely mention her and none of her scenes involve any characters from the original series. Her final scene in which she suddenly appears in an all white room and facing a mirror in shock can be interpreted as her symbolically waking up from the coma.
• Yellowjackets: In "Qui" Shauna goes unconscious during the delivery of a stillborn child. She dreams she had her baby son and even managed to breastfeed him despite months-long malnourishment... only to discover her fellow survivors ate the baby. When she wakes up, she is unable to accept reality.

Music

• The whole story of The Human Equation by Ayreon, where an amnesiac man in a coma speaks with anthropomorphic representations of his own emotions and lives back key moments of his life in order to understand how he ended up in a coma in the first place, fix things in his life, and try to become a better man.
• 911 from Lady Gaga. Turns out that the elaborate white world seen throughout the video is a dream-like representation of what happens in reality where Gaga is knocked out following a traffic accident.
• The album Deloused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta focuses on the protagonist entering into a week long coma after attempting suicide with a mixture of morphine and rat poison.
• Could have happened in Len Kagamine's New Millennium series (Vocaloid).

Theatre

• In Cirque du Soleil's Crystal, the bulk of the story is implied to be a near-death experience by the eponymous protagonist after she falls through the ice while skating on the local pond. At the end, she regains consciousness and resurfaces a changed woman.
• Jasper in Deadland often makes it seem like Deadland is a physical place, with water that Jasper and Agnes can drink, objects they can touch, clothes they can wear, and monsters that can kill them. However, it is shown at the end that Jasper and Agnes never physically entered Deadland, as their bodies are still wearing their original clothes instead of the clothes they changed into while in Deadland.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Desmond Miles' mind has been so traumatized by the events of Brotherhood's ending and the Bleeding Effect that he went into shock, after which he was put back into an Animus - through which he'll have to "explore" his, Ezio's, and Altair's remaining memories and piece back together his fractured consciousness if he's to awaken. Desmond also needs to find a synch-nexus buried within those memories — a single moment that connects him and both his ancestors. This will provide the catalyst for the repartitioning and will allow Desmond to wake up.
• The Scarecrow sequences in Batman: Arkham Asylum probably qualify.
• In Drawn to Life, the entire Raposa world is all just a coma dream. Maybe.
• The entirety of Dreaming Sarah is the titular Sarah's coma dream as she recovers from a car accident. Only at the end of the game does she wake up.
• Driver: San Francisco has the city of San Francisco itself as the Comaland following a bad car crash, hand waving Tanner's ability to teleport between cars. It even influences the gameplay, with Tanner's condition slowly improving as the justification for more sections of the sandbox unlocking.
  Tanner: Next coma, I want a yacht. I want deep-sea fishing and a goddamn yacht.
• The Magicant sequence in EarthBound (1994) is a fantasy landscape made up mostly of Ness' memories.
• The world of Eternal Sonata and everything in it is the dream of Chopin, who is on his death bed and having a fever dream.
• Near the end of Fable II, your character has one of these after Lucien shoots you in the face (again!). Your character is a child again, apparently safe at home with your sister Rose... which is a pretty good clue something isn't right, since Rose died at the start of the game and the two of you grew up as orphans in the streets of Bowerstone, not on a quaint country farm.
• Final Fantasy XV Platinum Demo takes place during Noctis' childhood, during an incident in which daemons attacked him and his father. Noctis - guided by Carbuncle - must find his 'safe place' somewhere in the dreamscape in order to wake up. The safe place in question is his father's car, the Regalia.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's 4, it's heavily implied you're playing as the victim of the infamous "Bite of '87", and everything that's happening is a terrible hallucination as a result of his head being crushed by an animatronic's mouth. Sometimes when you look back at the bed, you'll see an I.V. drip bag and pills on the bedside table, implying he's in the hospital.
• The Psychiatric Ward in the Gamehouse Original Heart's Medicine: Doctor's Oath. After failing to save Sophia, Heart enters a comatose state in the ward, with the playable ward an "ideal world" overlayed on top where the bad things that happened (the ambulance crash from Time to Heal, Sophia's death) are not acknowledged, and the situation in reality only worsens. Cracks start showing halfway through, culminating in Heart realizing something that gives her one of her trademark Heroic Second Wind moments; the delusion could be taken as a metaphor for the rejection of the medicine.
• In Hotline Miami, it is eventually revealed that the scenes in the dilapidated apartment where the three masked figures speak to Jacket are these.
• Kagetsu Tohya, a sequel of sorts to Tsukihime, is a mixture of this and Lotus-Eater Machine. Shiki hits his head after saving the cat-familiar Len, and is put in a coma by her in order to keep him alive. He then has to try and figure out a way to wake up before Len's mana reserves run out and the two of them die.
• The entirety of Labyrinthine Dreams occurs while the protagonist is deathly ill.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The ending reveals that the entirety of the game is a collective dream of both Link and the Wind Fish. He manages to wake up, however.
• Both Max Payne games have Max in the nightmare world at certain points.
• Day ???: The Lockdown in Not for Broadcast entirely takes place in the protagonist Alex Winston's head after they were knocked unconscious after playing the last advert on Day 153: The Tempest. The country has been invaded by Mrs. Snugglehugs toys, and so everyone is sending their camera feeds from their homes and you have to edit it. It's a very surreal level, but depending on your choices in your personal life and during the level itself, things either get even wilder and surreal, or take a very, very dark and macabre turn.
• Most likely the setting of Penumbra: Requiem, as this is what happens to people when they contract the Tuurngait virus.
• In Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, Ratchet ends up in a surreal hallucinatory dreamworld at one point. Interestingly you can collect ammo in the dream that carries over to the real world.
• Saints Row (2022): In the endgame mission "After Party", the Boss is stabbed and left for dead by the Nahualli. This is followed by them being guided through a spectral river by Team Pet Snickerdoodle the cat, then playing a giant version of the board game they were playing earlier in the game, which turns into a nightmare invaded by the Nahualli that the Boss has to fight their way out of.
• Sanitarium not only has the protagonist navigate a surrealistic world, but has them piece together real events basing on recurring symbolic elements.
• The Hospital Ending of Silent Hill: Homecoming has Alex awaken screaming during electroshock therapy in an insane asylum.
• In The Simpsons Arcade game, the family ends up falling off of a waterfall after fighting a bear, having just exited Moe's Tavern^note It's a videogame. This makes sense. and they are all knocked unconscious and have to fight through a dreamworld, with nightmarish versions of themselves.
• In the Slender Mansion map of Slender, the main character is in a coma due to "Slender Sickness" from being stalked by the slender man. He is being chased through a house in his mind as he collects mementos. If the player fails to collect the mementos in time, is caught by the slender man, or can't escape the dark house, the main character dies in the "real world."
• Stories Untold involves four separate episodes, with different gameplay elements and settings to each one. As every episode goes on, however, parallels slowly emerge, and the fourth episode reveals that the previous three were coma-induced dreams from the main character, following a car accident. The fourth episode also plays with this, with the character's therapist having him retrace those dreams again, in order to uncover what actually happened before the accident.
• Roadkill's ending in Twisted Metal II has him insisting that the entire tournament isn't real and his wish is to "wake up". He's absolutely right: He awakens in a hospital and a doctor (Calypso) tells him he's the only one of the 25 people involved in a massive accident to awaken from their coma, and the camera zooms out to show all the other combatants still unconscious. However, the last shot shows Calypso's eyes and his insane laughter...

Webcomics

• Champions of Far'aus: Hypnoron traps the group in a dreamscape he made, in story #6, “Sweet dre - NIGHTMARE”, and tasks them with getting to the end to win their freedom & wake up. If they don’t, their souls are his.
• Erfworld:
  • Parson Gotti considers the idea that his trip to Erfworld is just a coma-induced hallucination. There's evidence both for and against this theory.
  • In the "Inner Peace Through Superior Firepower" prequel series, an enemy sets her garden of magical drugs on fire, flooding the hex with toxic gasses that induce a Mushroom Samba. Jillian must try to hunt down the fleeing enemy while in a drugged dream.
• Looking for Group has a variation: Richard is banished by magic, and endures a trial of his soul. Unfortunately for him, it's a Kangaroo Court of lesser demons where he has no defense, and his crimes are betraying his alignment of Chaotic Evil. Except it turns out to be an actual place. In the second, they munchkin the proceedings.
• Mr. Boop: After being shot by Sonic the Hedgehog, Alec has a dream about a reality where he isn't married to Betty Boop.

Web Original

• The Creepypasta "Ash's Coma" postulates that Pokémon: The Series never got past the first few episodes, and the whole series is Ash's hallucinations, which is why he has a new female partner every season and why he and Brock never age.
• The Magnus Archives When Jon falls into a coma-like state at the end of season 3, he communes with The Eye and stalks the nightmares of the people who he's personally collected statements from.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-6778 is a saloon straight out of the Old West which exists solely in the minds of coma patients.
• A Creepypasta known as The Lamp involves a man dreaming of having a wife and kids after being beaten into a coma and almost left to die.

Western Animation

• Seasons 8 through 10 of Archer involve the title character's dreams as he lies in a coma after being shot in the chest and left face-down in a swimming pool in the seventh season finale.
  • Season 8, aka Archer Dreamland, is a 1940's Film Noir where Archer is a detective investigating the death of his partner.
  • In season 9 the dream turns into Archer Danger Island, a 1930's adventure serial with Archer as a pilot on a tropical island being invaded by Nazis. In the season finale Archer falls into a volcano and "dies", only to wake up on board a spaceship.
  • Season 10 becomes Archer 1999 with the cast as the crew of said spaceship who are struggling to make ends meet. Towards the end of the season "Captain Archer" starts seeing flashes of his crew as their real-world selves and in the finale he finally wakes up for real.
• Arthur: In "Operation D.W.!", D.W. has to go under anesthesia to have tubes placed in her ears. She dreams about being Super Ear Girl while she's under, and she becomes quite popular with the magical creatures in her fantasy. Her dream lasts until she wakes up, by which time she's back in her hospital bed.
• Futurama: In the episode "The Sting", Leela has a strange experience when where Fry dies from being stung by an alien bee and she has strange dreams and hallucinations about him being alive. It turns out that it was all a dream induced by the venom, because she was stung as well (he's perfectly okay).
• Looney Tunes: Daffy Duck punches himself out accidentally while reading a Dick Tracy comic book (The Great Piggy Bank Robbery) and enters a dreamscape where he's Duck Twacy trying to solve the crime in question.
• In the Thunder Cats 2011 "Trials of Lion-O" arc, the Spirit Stone forces young hero Lion-O to undertake a Vision Quest in a Mental World to prove his worth and overcome his personal issues, so that he might earn the right to be resurrected.

Real Life

• Artur Lundkvist wrote an entire book about his adventures in Comaland, called Journeys in Dream and Imagination.
• Claire Wineland, who had cystic fibrosis, was put in a medically induced coma to fight a life-threatening infection. She interpreted real events with bizarre, beautiful imagery; when doctors put her feet higher than her head to reduce brain swelling, then asked her to hold her breath, she thought she was on a giant underwater Ferris wheel, and when they applied ice packs she dreamed of traveling with her family (actually in the room) to beautiful mountains in Alaska (where she'd never been). She also heard and remembered everything that was said, even though her family had been told that was impossible. Back among the living, she typed into Google a description of what she'd seen and was given images of Sitka, where she finally made the journey for real.
• In contrast, Colleen Kelly Alexander, a cyclist from the United Kingdom, frequently experienced horrifying dreams of being violated while in a medically-induced coma after being brutally injured when a truck ran over her and inflicted near-lethal injuries to much of her lower body. Over the course of her recovery, Alexander came to realise that what she had experienced was most likely her semi-conscious brain reacting to doctors and nurses cleaning her wounds and changing bandages.
• While in a coma after his vampire dragster crash, Richard Hammond experienced a vivid dream of a mountain range in the Lake District where he'd walked many times. After feeling a strong sense of forboding, he turned back at a certain tree, evidently symbolic in the dream of the boundary between life and death, and woke up. It turns out that him turning back in his dream directly coincided with his wife, in real life, screaming at him to live. He explains his experience in this video while sat next to the very same tree, noting that he finds it comforting to know that such a beautiful place is where his soul will pass by when he eventually dies.

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