Theme: All a Dream Ending

This refers to a series of fantasy films where a series of strange and anomalous events or nightmare happenings are pulled back in an end Conceptual Reversal Twist to reveal that everything that happened was all a dream. (Similar twists appear in works that reveal everything to be a Virtual Reality illusion or a Drug Hallucination).

This type of ending was popular in the era of Silent Films where such dreams often served as morality plays to show the hero the error of their ways. Today this is considered a cliche, although there are still occasional films that use such endings with sometimes novel effect. Another variant is the dreamer awaking from the dream to then find the same or analogous events starting over for real.

For films about precognitive dreams or featuring dream-stalking killers see Dreams.