A club for those who write fantasy of any sort to chat about anything and everything.
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Life is but a Dream
I just finished ... well, to avoid spoilers, let's just say I finished playing through a point and click adventure with horror elements that released fairly recently. The ending was presented as ambiguous, with no clear evidence as to whether the protagonist was actually seeing the strange things and places in her adventure, or if she was just completely out of her mind and hallucinating the whole thing. Even if you don't know what game I'm talking about, I'm sure you've seen this in a story of some entertainment medium ... likely Inception, but I can think of a few others that toyed with this theme, not to mention numerous theories about series such as Adventure Time and so on. I find in such situations, people tend to split off into those two sides; those who think it was all a hallucination or a dream and those who think it was all real. That's fine, as far as I'm concerned; I'd imagine that was the whole point of having that kind of ending. I could go on about the usual jerks who assume their side is the truth and belittle others for thinking otherwise, but we're all writers here; surely we can talk about this in a civilized manner and leave the trolling to the trolls, as it were. As such, on which side do you stand? What are some stories that use the dream/reality question that you'd recommend to us, and how do you interpret their ending?
by Michael Wilbur | Sep 18th 2015, 08:42
I'm going to post a response to your question to test my theory that this place is dead. This means I'd be happily surprised if someone saw this.
I am not a fan of open endings, which i see as the writer's abdication of his or her responsibility to give us a complete tale. I am also not a fan of the "everything was a dream" genre, so the combination of the two probably wouldn't sit very well with me.
A famous writer used a similar gimmick in one of his books and it made it to Hollywood, so I guess some people must like it.
ReplyN. R. Nazario | April 4, 2018
I have to agree too. I think that making a story all a dream is not the best plot twists. There are so many other ways that you can give us a strange and unusual ending. I was always told to not rely on dream sequences too much in a story, especially if it doesn't move to story along. If the entire story was a dream then what's the point. You've been on the fantastic adventure with a character that's grown by overcoming what seemed to be very real obstacles only for you to find out in the that it wasn't real. It just seems like a let down to me. Most readers want something finalized for their ending, and you can still get that finalized ending that leaves you with questions.
ReplySarah Relja | April 10, 2018
Someone saw this!
I am happily surprised. :-)
Yes. In my book, (figuratively speaking) one does not simply promise something to the reader and then fail to deliver it by saying it never happened. And on the matter of open endings, I think they can work, sometimes, if the work satisfies the reader in other ways, but a lot of the power of a story lives at the end, so by not ending it , an author diminishes his or her own story.
Since I see story as a way to present a moral dilemma, I am most interested in how the character(s) will resolve it, whether they "win", "lose" or get a mixed result.
ReplyN. R. Nazario | April 10, 2018
Glad to know I'm not the only one who feels this way, even if I had to think a bit to remember what I was talking about when I posted this. The game was Fran Bow, by the way, and to be totally fair, I do feel the game ended well.
ReplyMichael Wilbur | April 11, 2018
