False Awakening - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

False awakenings are sometimes used as a device in literature, and especially films, to increase "shock" effects by inducing a feeling of calm in the viewer following something disturbing.

Two Calvin and Hobbes Sunday cartoons feature Calvin experiencing false awakenings:

• The November 20, 1987, strip features Calvin tossing and turning in bed in a futile effort to get to sleep; in the final two panels, his mother wakes him, revealing to him that he had been dreaming about being unable to sleep.

• The November 19, 1989, strip features Calvin waking up from a dream, getting dressed as usual, leaving his house, tripping over a rock, and falling off a cliff, screaming as he descends. He then wakes up, finds that he had been dreaming, gets dressed as usual, and steps through the door of his house, whereupon he falls screaming through the air again. Calvin then awakens yet again, this time to the sound of his mother asking whether he is getting out of bed. He clutches the blanket fearfully, reluctant to leave the bed at all, likely because the second fall occurred earlier on his route than the first one, leading him to worry that if the pattern continues, the bed itself may be a cliff.

• A twist at the end of the horror film Dead of Night (1945) is an early example of a re-occurring false awakening.

• A scene in the "Lisa's Rival" episode of The Simpsons sees Lisa faint after a Saxophone battle for First Chair with her rival. She awakens and is informed she "made it", believing she made First Chair, in which Mr Largo responds with "No, you regained consciousness. Alison got First Chair." Lisa wakes up a second time, concluding the former experience was a dream, and the same events as the dream follow, in addition with "and believe me, this is not a dream!"

• The film Waking Life deals with dreaming, lucid dreaming and false awakening.

• The film Vanilla Sky begins with the main character having a Type 2 false awakening, achieved cinematically with "empty city" effects.

• The Twilight Zone episode "Shadow Play" involved a man having a dream in which he is sentenced to die, with the various roles (judge, jury foreman, attorney, fellow inmates, etc.) being played by people from his past. At the moment he is executed, the dream re-starts, with the characters shuffled. The episode was part of the original series, and re-made as part of the 1985–89 revival.

• In the first volume of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel Sandman, the newly freed Morpheus, lord of Dreams, punishes his captor, Alexander Burgess, with endless false awakening nightmares.

• In Joan Baez's "The Dream Song", the lyrics discuss a dream-within-a-dream resulting from her apparent awakening. The lyrics end "When I really woke I was frozen in between; I didn't know who I was, it was a dream inside a dream; It's all a dream."

• In the film Inception the dream-within-a-dream and the false awakening are central to the plot.

• The Rugrats episode "In The Dreamtime" features Chuckie experiencing a false awakening.

• The plot of the South Park episode "City on the Edge of Forever" is revealed to be a dream within a dream for Stan Marsh; he undergoes a false awakening as Cartman within his own dream.

• In Hugo the main character has a nightmare involving a train accident that he caused. When he awakens he finds that the key is still in its place; however, he has become a machine like all the clocks around him. Reality sets back in when he finally awakens to the real world.