Oddly enough, I am playing around with that ending at the moment - albeit at the very start of a story.

I once read this pseudo-educational book about a boy going into some caves in France, only to find himself amongst Cromagnon men, and living caveman style for a while. That book had the "it was all just a dream" ending (as the writer had written himself into a corner that the boy could not escape from), and I never forgave it.

I am playing around with that ending at the moment - albeit at the very start of a story.

That sounds like perfectly acceptable subversion!

I can't vote without being an lj user. FWIW, my answer is "the devil's own work", but ISTR that in Alice it's flagged up in the sort of way you can recognise when you go back and reread. So perhaps that instance is more idle and disappointing. My copy has gone AWOL. That is one weird book; the ending is the least of it.

Damn, I'll see if I can fix the voting thing; I'd have thought they'd allow open ID. But I'm very bad at techie stuff.

- no, it won't work for non-lj-ers. Sad.

I think, like everything else in writing, it depends on the author's intent, skill, and fairness to the reader.

In 'Alice in Wonderland' for instance, the story being all a dream was a perfect ending for it, IMO, because it made me think 'oh, yes, of course, that is just the sort of dream a very literate young girl would have'.

But sticking it on the end just so you can say 'the preceding events in which the reader has an emotional investment didn't exist' is very, very seldom satisfying to the reader.

I did use the 'it was a dream' tactic not at the end, but somewhere near the middle of a B7 story-- however, I laid a bit of foundation by having the dreamer previously having awakened from unpleasant dreams. I *think* it worked.

I do think in B7 there is some leeway with this one, because we already know this is a world where minds are routinely monkeyed with. As you say, that's different from not laying any kind of groundwork.

*nods* Groundwork makes a big difference.

As in the example given by another commenter of a boy going into caves & finding himself amongst Cro-magnons-- if at the beginning the boy had been shown to be a daydreamer or one given to seeing visions the reader would have had a hint. Or at the very least, a falling rock hits him on the head and he passes out, only to 'wake' to see a cro-magnon.

I still would have rather the kid fell into an isolated valley where cro-magnons somehow survived & have the kid escape, but be unable to ever remember the exact path back to the valley.

If anything other than 'it was a dream' fits the needs of the story, you're better off using it.

I'm with entropy_house in this. "Alice" works for me, because it's consistent with the story the book has been telling, and is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) signalled from the start. In some ways the book is an exploration of dream logic, so it makes sense for it to be explicitly shown to be a dream.

"I can't think of a proper ending", on the other hand, is the work of the devil.

Well, I can't talk... one of my longest B7 stories, A Christmas Canto, was a rewrite of the Christmas Carol, which was a dream...

Or as series of them, which may make it all right.

I find it OK as along as [a] the fact that it's a dream is flagged reasonably early and [b] the dream has a definite and satisfying effect on the dreamer in question... i e the pay-off is worth it.

I'm sure I read Alan Garner - otherwise a huge fan of Masefield - fulminating about this ending, and hinting darkly that JM had been forced into it somehow, against his will. When I have time, I'll chase up the details.

I would be really interested in that! I love his first children's book, The Midnight Folk, by the way.

It's here. You need to scroll right to the end for the relevant bit.

That's fascinating - thanks so much!

I found Alice so freakily disturbing as a kind that it was a huge relief to me when she woke up at the end and it all turned out to be a dream. On the other hand now, as a grown-up, I can't stand even dream sequences, let alone whole books that turn out to have been dreams. An exception is Iain Banks' The Bridge, but that's up-front about the fact that it's one big coma dream, and the dream is at least coherent. On the other hand the "made-up" dreams he intersperses it with seriously get on my nerves.

You should try the Svankmajer movie version... disturbing is not the word for it, and it really couldn't, you realise at then end, not go that way, to explain it earlier or to explain it away would actually have spoiled the film.

But surrealism is something else...

I remember when I was in grade two or three, I wrote a story that I got to read aloud to the class - they hated my ending, which happened to be a 'and it was all a dream' one. -g- Unless its intensely disturbing or the implication that the dream could come true is there, I think most people are going to be irritated by that sort of ending.

"It was all a dream" endings -

depend on the book, I think. Works OK in _Alice_, probably because Carroll shows a fair grasp of dream logic.

That said, I recall as a child being hugely disappointed by the end of The Box of Delights: because the narrative, while fantastic, isn't altogether dreamlike, by any means. And because I didn't want the story to be a dream.

Oh, yes! And I forgot I wrote 'The Coma Avon Nights or Kiss of The Avon Lady' as one long dream. But then, the reader knows upfront that it's not reality, but all a dream and it's not remotely serious.

It got quite favorable reviews, actually.
http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/Fanzines/Maverick/ComaNights.html

Edited at 2009-11-14 05:26 pm (UTC)

You can do anything in a spirit of humour, I think, especially when you're so good at it!

I feel in a mood to play devil's advocate.

I'm offering two points:

1. Literature is filled with dream narratives so we ought to be alert to the possibility that any narrative is all a dream. Anyone brought up on the bible and classical literature (not so usual now) is familiar with dream narratives and knows that one of the conventions is that the reader should be involved in interpretation. For instance (leaving aside the bible and classical epic):

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.
Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene --
That I was in a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where.
A[c] as I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft trieliche ymaked,
A deep dale bynethe, a dongeon therinne,
With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of sighte.
A fair feeld ful of folk fond I ther bitwene --
Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh.

and

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?

The possibility that something is a dream seems pretty well established in Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, which ends:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

Obviously the groundwork is laid in these but surely over time the convention might become more allusive and assume readers' familiarity with it. (I thought of citing The Taming of a Shrew, which begins as a dream, but I hate that play. However it could well be argued that A Midsummer's Night's Dream turns out to be a dream - even that it is "Bottom's Dream.")

2. There are times when a writer wants to go beyond the conventions of literature at the time. The dream format might just allow the writer to do this and explore questions that can't be resolved in any other way. Sometimes the subject is in such tension with the form of literature that it really can't be resolved in any other way.

I may be pushing this too far but just at the moment I want to question received wisdom. (It might be bloody-mindedness or it might be beer.)

The thing about Piers though, is that it is upfront; it uses the dream, from the outset, as a narrative framing device; it doesn't spring it on you at the end as a get out of jail clause.

Also as someone else here said, I think "dream" as part of a story is way different from this trope that effectively says to the reader "April Fool! The whole thing was a dream!".

The writer Ann Drysdale said in another space that she felt it amounted to a lack of faith in one's own fiction, the "creative lie", which I think I would go along with.

I appreciate the difference but perhaps, when dream in literature is so common, we should have moved from the upfront declaration that it is a dream to recognition that it is a possibility.

OK, I admit that as an adult I wouldn't do it and see it as cheating but I wonder whether that is necessarily the case or whether denying the dream ending may in some way be denying a creative possibility.

I'm fascinated by novels that are unsatisfactory because they break the conventions of the form (a good example if Mark Rutherford's Revolution in Tanner's Lane - and much else of his work). Reading critics like Raymond Williams (his essay "The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists") and John Barrell (his argument on balance in poetry - I can't recall the title of the book), I'm starting to wonder how much formal conventions actually prevent or attack certain kinds of content.

I think "Alice" is the only time it really works, because the things that happen do have a dream nature. Apart from that I feel so cheated by the trope. It's basically wasted my time.

I was furious when a BBC play did that. A drunk was hit by a car, disoriented, and taken into a house for alcoholics by the kind yet tough nun who ran it. The play explored their pasts and how they related to each other--then at the end was revealed to be a dying dream as he lay in front of the vehicle that hit him. Nothing but his past was true. I wanted to throw things at the screen in the absence of having the writer to abuse.

Almost as bad is the wiping of memory as with Donna in Doctor Who, and the children in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series. That doesn't cheat the reader in the same way, but it cheats and damages the characters, who lose everything they learned from their experiences, any growth and self-knowledge they gained. It makes me feel so angry in their behalf.

That doesn't cheat the reader in the same way, but it cheats and damages the characters, who lose everything they learned from their experiences, any growth and self-knowledge they gained. It makes me feel so angry in their behalf.

Did you think it was a bad ending, though? Especially in the case of Donna. In terms of how it affected the character I thought it was awful beyond words, but in terms of the writing I loved it.

I'm more ambivalent about the Dark is Rising books, though. It did make me sad for the characters, but on the other hand it was fairly strongly established as the way that world worked, so I was okay with it.

I completely hated what RTD did to Donna. I'd rather the result had been that she could never move through time again and thus was confined to earth and now; at least she would have been left with her memories and her self-esteem.

How was memory wiping established in the Dark is Rising world? I can only think of the Welsh farmer who was offered forgetting his wife, but the children weren't given any choice. I wish I'd just read the first book; I never liked Will anyway with his adult mind in a child's body, and I don't think the last book was anywhere near up to the standards of the first one and Greenwitch.

I'd rather the result had been that she could never move through time again and thus was confined to earth and now; at least she would have been left with her memories and her self-esteem.

I think that's why I loved it. I really cannot think of anything worse to have done to her -- it would've been less distressing, I think, to have killed her off, because what happens is such an utter violation of all the laws of narrative justice. Doing it too often would get old very fast, but done just the once, I found it heart-breaking.

How was memory wiping established in the Dark is Rising world?

It's done several times to ordinary humans who see things outside the normal world. Paul and the rector have their memories of the events in the church erased away by Will in The Dark is Rising, and at the end Mary's memories of the Dark Rider are taken away, too. Near the beginning, James loses his memory the rooks attacking, although that arguably could be done by the Dark. (Who also do a fair bit of messing with memories, albeit with less charitable motives.) Then Will wipes away Stephen's memories at the start of Silver on the Tree, I guess partly to establish in that book that it can be done. They alter people's memories in smaller ways, too, like John Rowlands being made to think that he'd only dreamed seeing Merriman.

That, combined with catching people out of time to stop them witnessing things in the first place, seems to be the Light's main line of defence for keeping knowledge of the supernatural away from humans. The Light are consistently very high-handed about it, so I wasn't surprised by it happened at the end of the last book, although it was sad.

Edited at 2009-11-15 02:17 am (UTC)

Ah yes, now you reminds me of those events, I do remember them. More reasons to dislike Will, though I didn't mind Merriman as much because he really was ancient and wise.

I'm just not a fan of tragedy. :-P

I'm just not a fan of tragedy. :-P

I'm not, either. I'm a totally fluffy bunny at heart. :-) But the Donna ending was just so completely 'Wait, no -- you did what?' that I can't help admiring it.

I'd rather have something like The Cooler, though, which takes all the genre expectations for a gritty Vegas mob film, and then makes another kind of film entirely.

I think it entirely depends on the writer and the story. It might be harder to do well than other things, though, and the longer the dream goes on, the trickier it gets. I'm trying to think of books other than Alice where I liked it. I do think it's perfect for the Alice stories, though.

Huh. There's an 'it was a dream!' scene in one of the Administration stories, and it never occurred to me that some people would object to it purely on the principle that it is a dream. Maybe it's so short, and so obviously OTT and flagged up as a dream, that no one cares.

I don't think short dream sequences bother people. It's when the whole story is one.

Like others here, I think that the 'it's all a dream' ending depends very much on what the rest of the story was like. If the story was following a dream-like plot and imagery, like Alice in Wonderland, then it almost /has/ to end with a waking up. Mind you, I then sometimes wonder if there should be a sequel, where the person is no longer dreaming.