When a character tries to rationalize the weird things occurring to or around them as being just a dream. Sometimes they pinch or slap themselves to attempt to wake up before eventually coming to the conclusion that this is all real and they are very much awake.
Compare with All Just a Dream, which the character is trying to invoke. Note, however, that it very, VERY rarely will turn out to be a dream. Also compare with Dream Deception, That Was Not a Dream, and No More for Me, which is when a character believes that what they're seeing is a hallucination from too much drinking. Contrast with In the Dreaming Stage of Grief, the Darker and Edgier version of this trope, which is when a character tell themselves they're dreaming more out of fear and trauma, and not because of the weird inexplicable things they're seeing. Also contrast with Dream Reality Check.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time and Darkness, the frightened Piplup saw a talking Chimchar and thinks he must be dreaming. He pinches himself just to make sure.
Fan Works
- You Were My Best Friend: When Bloom gets transported to the fairy realm of Andros, she blames her hyperactive imagination. After all, she's just going to her "happy place" by losing herself in dance. The real reason is that her fairy magic, which she doesn't know about, is fueled by positive emotions and thus has been accidentally activated. Since she's a kid, she doesn't really think much about it. Funnily enough, as a teenager and after discovering that fairies are real, she still thinks her encounters with Princess Layla were just products of her imagination.
Films — Animation
- Bee Movie: When Barry talks to Vanessa for the first time, she brushes it off as her dreaming, even though she doesn't remember going to bed. After stabbing her own hand with a fork, she realizes that a bee really is talking to her.
- Coraline initially assumes that the Other World only exists in her dreams as she only visits it in the middle of the night at first, and wakes up in her bed in the real world the next morning. She is instantly convinced it's real when she opens the door during the day and the portal is there.
- Pinocchio: When Geppetto discovers late at night that his wooden puppet has come to life, he assumes he's dreaming in his sleep and douses himself with a pitcherful of water to wake himself up.
- Return To Never Land: Wendy's daughter Jane doesn't believe in her mother's stories of Peter Pan. After she is kidnapped by Hook and taken to Neverland, Peter rescues and frees her. Jane is in complete disbelief, but quickly brushes it off as she must be dreaming, still insisting that Peter is not real.
- Corpse Bride: Victor faints after meeting Emily for the first time. He comes to in the Land of the Dead, surrounded by walking, talking corpses in varying states of decay, and with one of them insisting she's his wife. Naturally, Victor assumes he's dreaming and bangs his head on the bar in an attempt to wake himself up.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie: When Mario first arrives in the Mushroom Kingdom, he asks Toad to clarify that this is not a dream. Toad hits him with a stick and asks him if it hurt.
Mario: [angrily] YEEES!
Toad: Definitely not a dream. - In Turning Red, when Mei turns into a giant red panda for the first time she initially thinks that she is just having a bad dream. Ironically, she had just woken up from a bad dream during which her panda form was bestowed.
Films — Live-Action
- Alice in Wonderland (2010): Alice spends most of the movie assuming Wonderland and everyone in it is just a dream, regardless of how long she's been in the world for. She eventually realizes it's real when she's reminded of her previous visit as a child.
- Back to the Future: Marty McFly tells himself that it's all just a "very intense dream" when he travels back in time to 1955.
- Glorious: Wes assumes at one point that he's passed out and that this omnipotent voice he's talking to isn't real. Ghatanothoa very quickly snaps him out of it by yelling at him.
- Done for drama in Inception: Main character Dom Cobb's wife Mal is revealed to have killed herself this way, by accident. When experimenting with "dream-sharing", the two entered a state known as "Limbo", where they could warp and manipulate their subconscious into impossible scenarios, also experiencing subjective time at an extremely dilated pace. Mal is unable to think rationally after the incident, so Cobb surreptitiously shares a dream with her one more time and implants an idea that her mind is not experiencing reality properly. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect: Mal thinks that one more "kick" (a method of awakening a dream-sharing individual) will finally bring herself into true reality, but, as she is already awake, she does not realize that it will actually kill her. To Cobb's horror, he watches as she jumps out of her high-story apartment window to her death.
- Invoked by Tom in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) when he tries to kick Sonic out of the car after their first fight with Dr. Robotnik, trying to dismiss the strange experience with a blue alien hedgehog as a dream.
Tom: Hopefully I'm gonna wake up in a hospital bed and the doctor will tell me that my colonoscopy was a big success, okay, so goodbye.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990): April O'Neil is absolutely horrified when she wakes up and sees the Turtles, instantly assuming she's dead. She briefly calms herself down by rationalizing that she's dreaming. She explains away Splinter as being representative of the rat she saw earlier in the parking lot before she got jumped by the muggers from the beginning of the movie.
Literature
- A Christmas Carol: Scrooge initially assumes his visit from Marley is a bad dream caused by indigestion.
There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!
- In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the protagonist is magically transported to a strange land, and believes he is dreaming, in part because his leprosy is gone and he can feel again. Unfortunately, this leads to him raping a woman, thinking she is just a figment of his imagination.
- In G. K. Chesterton's The Ball And The Cross, the Devil tempts Turnbull with a vision of Socialist revolution. Turnbull, seeing the revolution turn into a massacre of innocent civilians, decides that this is a dream, and that he'll wake himself up by jumping out of the airship he's travelling in. It works.
- Fantastic Mr. Fox: Mr. Fox and his children subvert the three farmers' plan to starve them out by breaking into Boggis's chicken house and stealing three plump, juicy hens. He sends one of his children to take the hens back to their weak and starving mother, who thinks she's dreaming when she sees them.
Mrs. Fox: I'm dreaming.
Small Fox: You're not dreaming, Mummy! They're real chickens! We're saved! We're not going to starve! - Old Kingdom: When Lirael and the Disreputable Dog rescue Nick, Lirael transforms into an owl and the Dog grows wings, so Nick — who's feverish and doesn't know magic is real — assumes he's dreaming. Consequently, they have to remind him to get dressed before he goes with them, which mortifies him when he realizes who his rescuers were.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire: Whilst exploring a strange tunnel underneath the centre in "The Disappearing Act", Colin ponders if he and Brittas were in a dream, even wondering if he was in Brittas' dream or his. Hilariously, whilst Brittas tells him to shut up, "Curse of the Tiger Women" reveals that Colin was right all along, the whole show being just a dream of Brittas.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The episode "Nightmares" is all about the character's, well, nightmares coming true. At one point, Xander's clothes completely disappear and he's standing in front of the classroom in his underwear. He tells himself that he's dreaming and pinches himself to no avail before running away screaming.
- The Curse: Asher attempts to rationalize his gravity being reversed and him falling upward into the atmosphere as a dream. Unfortunately, it's not, and he ends up dead after a few more minutes.
- Farscape: In the pilot episode, Earth astronaut John Crichton goes through a wormhole and ends up on an alien spaceship, where he gets knocked unconscious by D'Argo's tongue. When he wakes up, he pleads for his situation to be just a bad, twisted dream. He then realizes he's naked inside a holding cell.
- The Good Place: Being a rationalist, when Simone arrives to "The Good Place", Simone assumes the afterlife is simply her brain processing her death, and acts bizarrely for her own amusement. Eventually, Chidi convinces her to take things seriously, in case the setting truly is real.
- Lost Girl. In the first episode a rapist tries to drug and rape Kenzi, only for Bo to intervene and kill him with her Kiss of Death. Kenzi is relieved when she wakes up and is told by Bo that what she witnessed was a drug-induced hallucination. That is, until she plays the video she took of the incident on her cellphone, whereupon she freaks out.
- One Foot in the Grave: In "The Man Who Blew Away", Victor finds to his horror that his car, which had been stolen, has been found. He desperately hopes that it's all a bad dream, but Margaret has to tell him that it isn't.
Video Games
- ALTER EGO (2018): In the ID ending, Es concludes that both the player and Ego Rex are figments of her imagination, only there to serve as a Good Angel, Bad Angel duo that fuels her conformity/impulse conflict.
- Dot's Home: Dot time-travels back to key points in her family's past to learn about the housing discrimination they suffered as Black people. As entering the past involved using a magic key to enter a trippy hallway, Dot swears that she's dreaming all of this. Except that she wasn't because all the advice she gave her relatives in the past ended up influencing the present.
- Kingdom Hearts: When Sora first leaves Destiny Islands and ends up sleeping in an alley in Traverse Town, Pluto the dog finds him. Sora, still groggy, initially assumes it's a dream before Pluto pushes into him, bringing him to his senses.
- Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 1: In the "Sleep Tight" ending, Ruby dismisses Mr. Hopp being alive (and demonic) as a nightmare and goes back to bed. Mr. Hopp is then seen looming over her, implying that he'll kill her in her sleep.
- Silent Hill 4: The Room: When Henry first meets Cynthia, she states her belief that the Otherworld they're currently trapped in is a particularly bad dream. Tragically, she sticks to this belief even as she's dying, and Henry goes along with it.
- The Stanley Parable: In the "Mariella" Ending, Stanley gets stuck in an Unnaturally Looping Location and begins to question the nature of his reality, such as his lack of feet and the narrator discussing his every thought and action. He comes to the conclusion that he's dreaming and even goes lucid, floating through a starscape. The narrator then insists that he's awake and Stanley tries to prove it by waking himself up... Only for his effort to fail. He then goes into a panic and freaks out, trying to convince himself that he's a real human being. The final cutscene is ambiguous as to whether or not Stanley was hallucinating, as he's next found dead on the street after screaming about being real, despite having originally been inside the office.
Web Animation
- In the pilot for The Amazing Digital Circus, the main character Pomni comes to the conclusion that she's dreaming after putting on a strange VR headset that's gotten her stuck in the titular circus, and that she just needs to play along with everyone until she wakes up. Her fellow prisoners don't have the heart to say it's Not A Dream, with Jax humoring Pomni just to mess with her. It takes a futile, traumatic attempt to escape for it to finally sink in for Pomni that she's really not leaving.
Western Animation
- Parodied in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius episode "I Dream of Jimmy." Jimmy goes into Carl's dream to help him get over his nightmares. He keeps trying to convince Carl that they're in a dream by pointing out all the strange things happening, such as talking llamas and people being able to pull their brains out of their ears. It takes seeing Jimmy kissing Cindy — something completely inconceivable for him to donote — for Carl to realize he must be asleep.
- The Simpsons: In the second Treehouse of Horror, Homer dreams that Mr. Burns gets his body crushed underneath a giant robot. When Homer wakes up, he finds Burns' head has been stitched on to his shoulder. He tells himself that it's still just a dream, but Burns insists it isn't.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Born Again Krabs", Mr. Krabs get sick from eating a rotten Krabby Patty and gets a visit from the Flying Dutchman who threatens to banish him to Davy Jones' Locker if he continues to be a cheapskate. Upon returning to work, Mr. Krabs starts giving a lot of things for free, causing a huge drop in profits. When SpongeBob and Squidward confront him about this, he rationalizes that he is still in the hospital and having a bad dream. His tone immediately changes when presented with proof that he checked out of the hospital a while ago.
