During a particularly heavy and seemingly never-ending OR session, the personnel of the 4077th do their best to catch some much needed sleep whenever they get the chance. Unfortunately for all of them, with sleep comes dreams. Or would that be nightmares..?
In a show that wasn't exactly afraid to feature grim plots and occasionally fairly graphic imagery, this episode stands out as among the most disturbing and is often cited in general to be an unending source of Nightmare Fuel both in-universe and out.
Attention, all personnel! The following tropes are going to get some sleep before the next batch of wounded arrives:
- Accidental Hero: Klinger is woken from his troubling dream by Nurse Kellye, who needs him to handle important business. He's so overjoyed that he thanks and kisses her, much to her confusion.
- All Just a Dream: The only comfort anyone has after their respective nightmares.
- And You Were There: Col. Potter turns up in B.J.'s and Klinger's dreams, Klinger turns up in Winchester's, the entire camp turns up in Father Mulcahy's, and Winchester turns up in Hawkeye's.
- An Arm and a Leg: In Hawkeye's dream, he's being quizzed by a lecturer on the procedure of reattaching a limb. When he fails to give a correct answer, his arms are removed. He is then seen floating on a boat in a lake of amputated arms and legs.
- Attending Your Own Funeral: Of a kind. Klinger's dream ends with seeing himself be operated on with the implication that he won't survive.
- Badass Boast: A rare nonverbal example - in Charles' dream, he imagines himself as a great magician, able to perform all kinds of tricks and illusions to the adoration of Klinger and the other enlisted personnel, and indicates that he'll be able to use his magic to save a dying patient. He fails.
- Bait-and-Switch: At the start of his dream, Potter goes horse riding, only for a grenade to be sent his way and suggest a true nightmare is about to happen. Potter simply swats the grenade away, and it goes off like fireworks, indicating this will be a much happier dream than what the others experienced.
- Big "NO!": Hawkeye's scream to the heavens when he's asked to perform surgery on a wounded child when he has no arms left.
- Bittersweet Ending: The deluge of wounded has passed and everyone is finally free to relax and sleep. Too bad none of them feel much like sleeping anymore...
- Bookends: The episode begins in the mess tent as an announcement comes that another batch of wounded are on the way. It ends back in the mess tent with an announcement that the deluge of wounded has now passed.
- Broken Ace: Both Hawkeye and Winchester have dreams that essentially revolve around this perception of themselves. In Winchester's dream, he's a flashy magician who ultimately fails to save the life of a patient, and Hawkeye's dream ends with him sitting completely helpless in the middle of a river filled with limbs while choppers are heard above him...
- Children Are Innocent:
- In what is probably the only remotely happy dream in the episode, Col. Potter dreams about a calm and peaceful moment from his childhood. It's hinted that this was one of the last times before he came to know about war and its effects.
- Hawkeye's dream has a young Korean girl waiting at the lakeside as he floats by limbless, only to reveal the colorful pattern on her robe is a bloodied wound.
- A Degree in Useless: Mulcahy's dream reinforces his earlier feelings that, no matter how high in the church he got, his ministry would only go so far in healing those broken by war.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In Hawkeye's dream, the punishment for not knowing the answer to a question is having one of your limbs removed.
- Downer Ending: The ending of all the dreams in the episode, except Potter's. Margaret's beau leaves her and goes off to war, while she is left with a chaotic stack of wounded soldiers groaning in pain; Peg leaves B.J. for a group of other men after he is distracted by a question about a wounded patient; Charles' patient dies while he can only perform magic tricks with an increasingly distraught expression; Klinger returns to a deserted Toledo and finds himself on an operating table; Mulcahy's sermon as Pope is interrupted by the figure of Christ on the Cross turning into a wounded soldier; and Hawkeye is left adrift with no limbs in a rowboat as another group of choppers arrive.
- Foreshadowing:
- Hawkeye's dream ends with him helpless in a boat - almost exactly one season later we'll find out about a traumatic incident from Hawkeye's past that involved a boat...
- Klinger's dream is all about his fear that even if he were to go home to Toledo, he'd still be bound to Korea through his experiences there. Cue the finale, and Klinger does indeed end up bound to Korea - though in a much happier way.
- Funny Background Event: As Father Mulcahy falls asleep, the patient he's currently meant to be hearing the confession of slowly slips into talking complete gibberish, shifting in and out of comprehensibility as Mulcahy nods off and awakens.Patient: But fringes are girble.
- Ghost City: In Klinger's dream, his hometown of Toledo has apparently become this in his absence.
- Happily Married: B.J. and Peg in B.J.'s dream certainly start off this way (and are definitely this outside the dream as well). Unfortunately, his insecurities and fears that he'll always prioritize his job over his family soon take over the dream.
- Here We Go Again!: Hinted at in the end, but ultimately defied when the group decides to try staying awake instead.
- It's All About Me: Father Mulcahy and Charles both have dreams that reveal their fear of indulging in this attitude too much will end up with them ultimately failing in their respective jobs.
- Love at First Sight: Margaret's dream begins with her instantly falling in love with an unknown man only to have him leave to join a line of soldiers heading off to war.
- Married to the Job: All the dreams reflect this to some extent, but B.J.'s in particular, to the point where he ends up (in the dream) losing his wife because of it. Margaret is literally in a wedding dress but forced to help with surgery.
- Mood Whiplash: In an unusual turn for the show, the scenes where everyone is awake, including the scenes set in the OR, are relatively light-hearted. As soon as someone begins to fall asleep, however, prepared to be either disturbed or distressed in very short order. The dreams themselves are prone to this, with Margaret's, B.J.'s, Mulcahy's and Winchester's all starting out relatively light before very quickly descending into increasingly dark territory.
- Compared to the other dreams, Potter's is downright cheerful: he hits a grenade into the air where it becomes a firework, then sees himself as a child on horseback being summoned by his mother to dinner. The only sad part is that he was woken up before he could relive the memory of his mother's blueberry muffins.
- Oh, Crap!: A mass one at the end when the group are all finally given the opportunity to relax...Charles: Ah, to sleep. Perchance to dream.(pause as everyone thinks about their recent dreams)Hawkeye: I think I'll have some more coffee.
- Sanity Slippage: Once again, we're given a hint as to the level of deterioration of Hawkeye's mental health, but this episode is also one of the few before the final season that explores the effects of the war on pretty much every main character's sanity. It's not pretty.
- Skyward Scream: Hawkeye.
- Stranger in a Familiar Land: Klinger's dream seems to suggest this, showing him getting home to an empty Toledo with the war still following him.
- Symbolism: All over the place. Everyone's dreams (apart from maybe Col. Potter's) are essentially symbols of their greatest fears.
- Margaret finishing her dream in a blood-covered bridal gown symbolizes her fear that she will never find personal fulfillment and will be forever Married to the Job. Her husband joining the men marching off to battle and the wounded men in her wedding bed also symbolize how the war destroyed her marriage.
- Peg walking back to the dance floor with other men as B.J. performs surgery symbolizes his fear that his obsessive dedication to his job and their time separated while he's in the army will result in his marriage collapsing.
- Charles performing magic tricks as a wounded patient dies a slow, painful death symbolizes his fear that behind his boasting about his surgical prowess, he's powerless to actually save lives.
- Klinger returning to Toledo, only to see himself on an operating table as a wounded patient, symbolizes his fear that he will be haunted by his experiences in Korea for the rest of his life.
- Mulcahy's sermon as Pope being cut off by the statue of Christ turning into a wounded soldier symbolizes his fear that however far up the Catholic hierarchy he rises, he's not doing anything meaningful to help the wounded. His reimagining of Christ on the cross as a wounded soldier could be seen as a reminder to him of the innocent youth being sacrificed during the fighting and that his role as a Chaplain is to serve them.
- Hawkeye being ordered to remove his limbs and then being left adrift in a rowboat while choppers bring in more wounded symbolizes his fear of figuratively falling apart in the face of the horrors of war and being unable to do anything about it.
- Potter's dream could be seen as a rumination on the loss of childhood innocence, since he mentioned that he enlisted in WW1 as a teenager and has been in the military since then.
