It was all a dream
/I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.
That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:
One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:
Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.
Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.
It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.
But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:
It is heavily foreshadowed.
Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.
The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.
Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.
Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.
Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.
On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:
The dream is thematically relevant.
The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.
I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.
