Bad Dream Coma Crack

[In Libman]

Thedream kept coming back. Over and over. I was always surprised to see the imaginary town again, surprised that I knew which streets to go down, that I knew how to progress through it. At first, I was living in a house that had no way to get to anywhere at first. there were no subways, and the house had a moat and dangerous animals guarding it.

As the name might suggest, Bad Dream: Coma is set inside a particularly macabre fantasy world which exists in the head of someone in a coma. If Salvador Dali collaborated with Chris Morris and David Firth on a computer game, I imagine it would turn out something like this.

You start off in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world, with junk and debris strewn everywhere. In amongst that debris are a number of newspaper cuttings, which seem to suggest that the best place to head is to a hospital just over a broken bridge. Thus your journey into the inexplicable begins in that direction.

Weren't Alice In Wonderland and Over the Rainbow dream & coma stories? They've held up well, I guess, so apparently if the story is done well enough the unreality of it isn't a joy-killer & the ending is fine.

Then there's the ones where it's revealed that the preceding story was a dream but right at the end something happens that makes the reader question whether it was a dream or if the dream is about to come true.

this is a spoiler but in the manga the mythical detective loki Ragnarok, one of the main character woke up from her sleep, and thinking that she has a strange dream while finding herself crying. Everything else that happened has been real, but her memory was completely wiped out, that kind of ending kinda hit hard for a reader like me.

yea i think its the execution

Like it typically doesnt hold up well because it makes you feel like the journey isnt worth it or you wasted your time, but in wizard of oz she still has the red shoes at the end of the movie which keeps you wondering if it really happened.

I think the most important part is to telegraph it and also show the impact of it. The best ones from memory are the ones where, yeah, nothing truly happened for the character's development, but maybe they learn something in that dream world and become a better person, or gain critical information to solve the "real" plot. When it's just used to be a crazy twist, it's not only making the work pointless, it's kind of mocking you for thinking it mattered, which is why the consequences after are so important.

Yes, there are ways to make a coma/dream to work.

Besides the examples given already, I think of 'Life on Mars' tv show. The MC was a police officer from the present who went to comma and wake up on the past, like in the 80's. Nobody beleive hims and the plots revolt between him trying to understand what happened to him, if he travelled in time, if he is in a coma, or if he is a loony from the past.

From that starting point you can go miles (but I don't want to spoil the series)

Now in your case you should ask yourself questions. Will the MC know that it is in another reality? Will remember the ordinary life? Will aspects of the other side affects the illusion reality? Or vise versa? Will we know what is going on, as in, there will be scenes on the 'normal life', or will be only a final scene?

I ran into the same problems as you did when writing a similar story. I have trouble with the whole "none of it was real" thing, but I saw this movie that gave me an idea to help with it. Rather than one person going into the fantasy world, it's two (or more!). That way, when they both wake up, their experiences with each other were real, and that can't be taken away. I find it hard to argue with.

After: Directed by Ryan Whitaker. With Steven Strait, Karolina Wydra, Madison Lintz, Sandra Ellis Lafferty. When two bus crash survivors awake to discover that they are the only people left in their town, they work together to unravel the truth...

I've never really understood that. If it's a good, satisfying, complete narrative, who cares if it turns out it wasn't actually part of a fictional character's equally fictional reality? Like, whether they're dreaming or not...none of it is real. =/ It's a story...whether it ends with them waking up or with you closing the book, when it's over, it's over.

If the simple fact that it's a dream is so infuriating, then stories where characters travel in and out of dream worlds should provoke the same response, but I've never seen that. So... =/

I think the real reason why this cliche would make people mad is because it's an easy 'shocking twist' that an author can tack onto basically any story to give it artificial depth. So as long as you're not doing it with those intentions, I think you'll be fine.

And to be honest...I've never actually seen anyone use this so-called cliche before. I've never even heard of it being used outside of Alice in Wonderland, and maybe some children's picture books. ._. Maybe it was before my time...my point is, if you're avoiding this sort of ending on the grounds that 'everyone does it', I don't think you have to worry about that.

i've literally never seen an "it was all a dream" that didn't end up cheapening the story and making the whole thing feel like a waste of time tbh. The only "it was all in their mind" story i've seen that pulls this well is Alice: Madness Returns, because you know from the start that half of the story is all in Alice's mind, and so does she, and it's more of an allegory for what she's going through in real life.

It's not a problem when it's a realization of the events are fictional, it's a problem when their consequences are fictional to the story. If a character learns to be less of a jerk in the story, if those things that led them to it never happened... What incentive do they have to keep that up? Sure, there's Alice as a classic and other characters that do take that warning to improve, but in general it starts feeling a bit more cartoonish, especially if someone was greatly hurt or traumatized in that experience that wasn't real in-story.

The ending of the Wizard of Oz film is sort of tacky/cheesy compared to the book. In the book, her shoes are sort of similar to the Seven-league boots and she strides/jumps over the Deadly Desert. This desert appears in the Return to Oz film.

While jumping, she loses her shoes. And in the 3rd book, she is trying to get them back.

The cliche of this comes less from published fiction, and more it often being 'baby's first twist ending'. Like... literally in third grade, we had a writing unit, and multiple kids did the "it was all a dream" thing.

There are interesting ways to do a dream ending, but the question is what it adds. I understand the perspective of "it's a story, so why would you be upset that it's a story in a story", but that's not the way most people experience fiction. Readers cry for beloved character, gasp over twists, want to solve puzzles, want logic and consistency. We see ourselves and our loved ones and our teen bullies reflected in imaginary people. The fun of a story is buying in. "

It was all a dream endings", in their bad form, tend to be the first resort of inexperienced writers who know they want to shock readers and throw a twist, but haven't gotten past what the reader will feel beyond "I didn't realize that!" If it's not used for anything, most readers will feel betrayed, like they've been told to care, then laughed at for caring. It doesn't make all the pieces come together in a way that adds meaning, in a way that makes every action more complex and fascinating in retrospect, it subtracts meaning.

It's complicated because we can buy into framed fiction. The Princess Bride, for example, is framed as fiction in story. The 2006 movie 'The Fall' is powerful BECAUSE it's a reflection of the characters telling it, a wandering tale of a desperate man filtered through the mind of a child.

When the tellers aren't influencing much of the story, like the movie of The Princess Bride, we are buying into two separate stories. First, we buy into the story of a grandfather connecting with his grandson, second, we are buying into a grand adventure/romance with pirates and rodents of unusual size.

When the stories weave together, we buy into one story. The emotions, the characters, become 'real' to the reader. After all, we are creatures that love stories, that try to fit the real world into stories, and so the stories become different facets of a single narrative.

Good dream and coma narratives often follow the rules of woven stories. The dream isn't a second story, it's a place for characters to actually learn and progress. That's why twist ending examples are rarely worthwhile. The 'real world' has no arc or meaning. The dream world is what we've given meaning, and that's just been destroyed. Would Wizard of Oz be satisfying if it was just a girl in a magical land who, at the end, hits her head and winds up in Kansas? The point is that she starts in Kansas, spends the entire story trying to return, and finally does, with a new sense of love for her home.

I don't think it's nescessarily bad.

The best dream stories are the ones where the characters live a fictional scenario and learn a lesson that would have been rather gruesome or emotionaly devastating to learn physically.

So it might serve good to learn our MCs brushes with death (or maybe actual death) were all just a ruse if they come out of it with a different worldview.

At the same time, anything beyond that is cheapened terribly by the 'dream' ending. All the suspense, drama and other elements of the story just vanish along with the dream, and the core of everything else you created loses any direct relatability... BUT... that does not mean it did not have an impact.

If you create a plot based around a central character where only their development matters and everyone else is just a whimsical little sausage that will help them get there then the dream thing can be just as entertaining if not more.

It can also be great at creating rather psychodelic characters that represent entirely abstract things in that characters life that you maybe not want to be literal about... Like it's easier to showcase a characters drug abuse with a metaphorical creature that causes them to feel strange and appears whenever they are anxious.

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