Dying to Wake Up

The Dream Lord: Now then, the prognosis is this: if you die in the dream, you wake up in reality. Healthy recovery in next to no time. Ask me what happens if you die in reality?
Rory: What happens?
The Dream Lord: You die, stupid. That's why it's called reality.

— Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"

As anyone who's ever had a nightmare knows, an imagined death isn't always a bad thing: in the event that you're lucky enough to have avoided a dream in which Your Mind Makes It Real, dying in the dream will instantly shock you back into consciousness, whereupon you shoot bolt upright in bed, breathing heavily but otherwise unharmed.

Of course, this is very much Truth in Television: stressful dreams like nightmares trigger the flight-or-fight response and release adrenaline, and because REM sleep isn't very deep, the body is often shocked awake in the process—usually coinciding with a violent death or a fall in the dream.

As such, dying is all too often the Dream Emergency Exit that lucid dreamers make use of if they want to wake up... or, depending on the scenario, it can be something that the characters want to avoid in order to continue their journeys, maintaining the tension in what would otherwise be a zero-stakes adventure. Or, it can be the one rule about dreaming that ends up being subverted or twisted in order to add complications to the story.

In particularly unfortunate cases, may overlap with Dream Within a Dream.

Compare Win to Exit, the other major way of escaping from an imaginary world.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Emnu, Lower-Rank 1 of the Twelve Kizuki and the Arc Villain of the "Mugen Train" arc, possesses the power to put his targets to sleep and put them in a dream of his choice. Tanjiro discovers that dying in the dream world wakes him up, so he deliberately slashes his throat whenever Emnu puts him to sleep. Emnu almost kills Tanjiro when he decides to change tactics by tricking Tanjiro into thinking he's put him to sleep so he can slit his throat in the real world, but Inosuke fortunately puts a stop to it.
• Dreamland: Those who overcome one of their phobias in a dream become travelers, dreamers capable of consciously exploring the titular Dream Land and using a superpower related to that phobia. While both travelers and regular dreamers will wake up just fine in real life if they die in a dream, dying for a traveler means losing their ability along with all their memories of Dreamland and returning to being a normal dreamer.
• Episode 22 of the anime adaptation of Inazuma Eleven begins with Endou having a nightmare about the match between Raimon and Zeus, with a score of 49-0 for the latter. After a Zeus member breaks not only Endou's God Hand but also Endou himself with a powerful shot, he wakes up.
• Played with in the anime adaptation of Paprika: after Dr Shima is infected by the Big Bad's parade dream, Paprika is able to rescue him by melting into his body and making him inflate to the point that he explodes, causing Shima to instantly awaken from his coma. However, it's heavily implied from Paprika's rather suggestive dialog and Shima's blissed-out reaction that what woke the doctor up wasn't merely a death, but a... little death.

Comic Books

• The Sandman (1989): Zig-zagged, normally getting killed in dreams wakes you up, but there are entities in the Dreaming that can kill a dreamer in the waking world too (or, if you really pissed off Morpheus, wake up into another dream, and another dream, and another dream...). In an inversion, when someone's physical body dies while dreaming their soul remains in the Dreaming, which is where Morpheus gets most of his ravens.

Fan Works

• Tantabus Mark II: The only way Moondog can make a dreamer wake up is to kill them in the dream, which she does by hitting them with things like hammers.

Film — Live-Action

• Inception:
  • Dying in a dream instantly wakes Extractors up—either into reality or into the previous layer of dreams, depending on the heist. However, because dreams can be indistinguishable from reality, it's important to recognize the difference between the two before you try to awaken yourself, hence why Totems are so vital—and why you really shouldn't abandon them. In the past, losing touch with reality in this way resulted in tragedy when, after awakening after decades of subjective time in Limbo, Mal became convinced that her real life was a dream and jumped to her death in a delusional attempt to wake up.
  • During the mission to Robert Fischer's mind, Cobb's team have been given a heavier dose of sedative to allow for three layers of dreams, meaning that they won't wake up if they die. Instead, they'll drop into Limbo, leaving them lost in the Lotus-Eater Machine for so long that they'll be brain-dead when they wake up. So, the dream team have to avoid serious injuries until they can use the Kick (the alternative Dream Emergency Exit) to wake up... which becomes a problem when Saito - the group's paymaster and the only man that can save Cobb from getting arrested - is mortally wounded in Level 1, leaving the rest of the team trying to complete the mission before he bleeds out. Fortunately, it turns out that the "dying in a dream" trick still works in Limbo - if you can remember that there's another reality to wake up to, as Cobb and Saito do in the finale.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "Amy's Choice", the Doctor, Amy, and Rory find themselves ensnared by the Dream Lord and plunged into two possibly imaginary scenarios: one the present-day TARDIS, the other an idyllic country town where Amy and Rory have settled after parting ways with the Doctor. Their mission is to figure out which one is reality before the threat of the scenario kills them, as dying in the dream world will wake the three of them up... but if they guess incorrectly, they'll die in the real world. The twist is that both scenarios are dreams, and dying in both is the only way to escape from the Dream Lord's game.
• Farscape: In "Losing Time," Scorpius finds himself on the receiving end of this in his concluding dream, managing to literally unlock the secrets of wormholes in the form of a box in Moya's cargo hold—only for the seemingly defeated Crichton to catch him off-guard and throw him into the open wormhole. Scorpius immediately wakes with a start, sitting bolt upright, equal parts alarmed and irritated. For good measure, this is one of the few times this trope has occurred in the show, with most other instances of death in dreams resulting in real-world death.
• House of Anubis: Senkhara has the power to trap the kids in a Shared Dream, and she uses this ability once to threaten Nina's life. She, Amber, and Fabian all have a dream about the Masquerade Ball being set up by the school, which starts out normal before Nina finds herself in the tunnels under the school. She is then shoved into the chasm by Senkhara, and wakes up immediately after, revealing that it was All Just a Dream. Amber and Fabian also woke up after Nina died, but they're relieved that Nina's death wasn't real. Until the dream starts to play out in real life.
• Medium usually opens its episodes with Alison dreaming of something relevant to the episode. One such opening is shot from the point of view of someone running around the DA's office shooting people. When the shooter gets to Alison, we see the message "Cannot dream your own death. Gave over." flash on the screen and she wakes up.
• Supernatural: In the season 2 episode, "What Is and What Should Never Be", upon finding out the truth about how the djinn 'grants wishes' (by trapping its victims in a mental Lotus-Eater Machine in which their biggest wish appears to be granted), Dean decides to try to escape back to the real world by killing himself, citing this trope by saying "If you die in a dream, you wake up." And sure enough, immediately after fatally stabbing himself, he wakes up in the real world in time to find Sam calling his name and working to untie him from the restraints the djinn had placed him in while he was in the 'wish world'.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): Played with in "Shadow Play". Adam Grant has a recurring nightmare about being on death row and sent to execution. He knows that when they throw the switch, he'll wake up. But it isn't a pleasant experience for him. To the point that he keeps trying to convince the other characters in his dream, who vary in roles from night to night, that he's dreaming and that they'll cease to be when he wakes up.
  Adam Grant: How do you like to wake up screaming every night? That's what I do.

Tabletop Games

• Mage: The Awakening: Dream Walkers in the Astral Realms take damage to their Willpower points instead of Health. If they "die" of willpower loss, they wake up mentally exhausted but physically sound.
• Pathfinder: Harmless astral mindscapes can't affect the outside world, so anyone who dies in one wakes up in their body, no worse for wear. However, there are also harmful mindscapes that can be indistinguishable from the harmless kind to anyone other than their creator, so it's a much riskier option than looking for the Dream Emergency Exit.

Video Games

• Dishonored: In the intro to The Brigmore Witches, Daud finds himself in a duel with Corvo, similar to the one due to take place in the main game... except the blue tint and odd gravity reveal that this clearly takes place in the Void. If the player has imported a save from a High Chaos playthrough, the fight ends with Daud being disarmed and then killed with a single slash to the throat—whereupon he wakes up, breathless and panicky.
• Golden Sun: During the Colosseo sequence: if you die in one of the battles, you wake up in bed and it turns out to have been a dream. Lose three times and the event is skipped.
• Hollow Knight: if the Knight "dies" while fighting a boss in a dream, it wakes up near whatever it used the Dream Nail on to access said fight. Mechanically speaking, this doesn't count as a death—you don't lose Geo, for example.
• It Takes Two (2021): Discussed and Averted; when May and Cody were turned into dolls, May tries to die to wake up. Only to immediately reconfigure herself and realise that they cannot do this.
• Level Up: The boss and only fight is in a dream that's prepared for during the daytime, so losing the fight (in other words, dying in the dream) starts a new day to prepare again.
• Neverending Nightmares:
  • Being killed, either by one of the monsters or by his own hand, results in Thomas waking up... only to find himself in yet another nightmare. As such, the various bedrooms lining the main corridors serve as checkpoints that the player reloads from after a death. Dying under the right conditions progresses the narrative further, resulting in Thomas waking up in increasingly unusual places, including dark forests, hospitals, insane asylums, underground chambers, married life with Gabby , or even a return to childhood.
  • In all three of the endings, Thomas dies one final time after being subjected to the full extent of his neuroses, either by being disemboweled by animated dolls, falling to his death, or being absorbed into a Womb Level... and finally wakes up in the real world. Ironically, the "Wayward Dreamer" ending features child Thomas following up on this by going right back to bed once he's finished kissing Gabby goodnight.
• OMORI: After completing each Headspace segment, which takes place in Dream Land, you wake yourself up by stabbing yourself with your knife.
• Psychonauts: One of the facts established in Coach Oleander's Basic Braining is that being killed while exploring someone's mind will only result in you getting kicked back to reality, a point revealed when Elton gets himself blown up within seconds of starting the course. For good measure, tokens exist in the various dreams that can replenish or even strengthen Raz's astral projection—in other words, extra lives for Raz.
• Riddle School: The events of Riddle School 2-4 are revealed to be All Just a Dream induced by aliens that have abducted the main protagonist, Phil, and his friends. In Riddle School 5 where he wakes up, Phil only got out because he "died" in the previous game, and in order to wake up his other friends, he has to enter their dreams and kill them to successfully free them from their sleep.
• Silent Hill 3: The game starts In Medias Res, with Heather walking around Silent Hill's amusement park. In order to finish the sequence, the player has to kill Heather, either to a lower enemy or on the rolling coaster, prompting her to wake up in the restaurant of a shopping mall.
• Yume Nikki: Implied, as in one area of the dream world, Madotsuki can use the witch effect to fly on her broomstick. Should she fall from the broom in this scene, she'll instantly wake up in the real world, on the floor next to her bed.

Visual Novels

• Cooking Companions: The player has multiple nightmares, one on most nights. The common theme is that most depict scary or surreal events happening to the player, with each one ending in death. Immediately, you wake in a cold sweat.

Webcomics

• Homestuck: Anyone who gets attacked severely or fatally while dreaming in the dream bubbles will wake up. Dave is woken up when the Draconian Dignitary kills him, Jake is woken up when Aranea intervenes with his beatdown on Meenah caused by him mistaking her for her Alternate Self, John keeps getting woken up from being impaled by Meenah's trident (though the last time was unsuccessful as he involuntarily teleported away), and even Lord English's mouth beams that can kill ghosts will just wake up anyone who's dreaming, as Karkat found out.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: At the end of "Puhoy", Finn wakes up back in the pillow fort he and Jake made shortly after he died of old age in the Pillow World, revealing that his experiences there were All Just a Dream.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Win, Lose and Kaboom", the kids are hypnotized into a lucid nightmare by a race of alien brains, and Cindy suggests they try breaking it by jumping into the Bottomless Pit that's supposed to keep them corralled there. It works.
• Batman: The Animated Series: In "Perchance To Dream", the Mad Hatter traps Batman in a machine designed to imprison him in a dream and gives him whatever life he wanted, resulting in a Nightmare of Normality in which Bruce Wayne never became the Caped Crusader. Once Batman figures out it's All a Dream, he realises there's only one guaranteed way out, and jumps to his simulated death from the bell tower.
• Rugrats: In "Angelica's Worst Nightmare", Angelica has a nightmare about having an Enfant Terrible baby brother who becomes a giant. He then eats her alive, and she wakes up immediately afterwards.
• The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "Nightmare Cafeteria," after the teachers become cannibals and have eaten most of the students at Springfield Elementary, Bart, Lisa, and Milhouse get chased across a plank above a giant blender. After Milhouse falls in, Bart assures Lisa that something or someone will save them from their predicament, only for them to fall—whereupon Bart wakes up in his bedroom and is told by Marge that he was having a nightmare.
• Young Justice: In "Failsafe", the cast are ultimately revealed to be participating in a Virtual Training Simulation. Dying was supposed to wake them up, but once Miss Martian lost track of reality and started believing the simulation was real, her telepathic powers changed the rule of the simulation so that upon death, the cast members were left comatose.

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