In Defense of "It Was All A Dream"

PART ONE:

WANDERING TO THE QUESTION OF “WHAT IS THE POINT?”

Imagine this. You’re thirteen years old. You get on iFunny or Reddit. R/ruinedchildhood or something. And you see it. Someone says “What if at the end of Harry Potter, Harry wakes up underneath the cupboard under the stairs, and it was all a dream?”

You nod. “Yo man, that’d suck.”

Nowadays when we talk about messed up fan theories that could ruin media properties, we readily and eagerly roll our eyes at hallucination or dream fantasies. They’re the easy, go to fruits. And they’re boring.

Everyone knows that And It Was All A Dream is a hackneyed lazy ending. It’s an overdone trope… Isn’t it?

Actually, I think it’s a great plot point. And I think we hate it because it forces us to confront our self-concepts.

A lot of us have our first encounters with the trope in children’s media. In a Disney channel sitcom, the Halloween episode finds ghosts and villains haunting us. Or maybe there are aliens. We watch Alice in Wonderland and at the end, Alice finds herself through the door and she wakes up. You watch The Wizard of Oz and…

Well, wait.

The Wizard of Oz. It’s an all time classic movie. In the film version, Dorothy Parker is swept away by a tornado and goes on an adventure to kill a wicked witch and make her way back home. When she finally succeeds and clicks her ruby slippers, she wakes up in her bed.

And you were there. And you too. And…

When we watch The Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy wakes, do we watch the credits thinking, “Well. What was the point of that then?” No, I don’t think so. We think about family. We think about fantasies and what it means to grow up. We think about the music. We think about the wonderful journey and people we met. “Over the Rainbow” has yet to leave the cultural consciousness. From it we got Wicked, the book and the musical. We had that strange plot point on Supernatural where Charlie went to Oz. We got the fun little game Emerald City Confidential. We got

[an image of the movie Oz]

Well, not all are winners.

But, as far as the original film is concerned, it was all a dream.

Often times, dream episodes or seasons on television are ways for writers to retcon their way to changing actors and directors, it lets them put their characters in random situations that wouldn’t make sense in the world of the show and explores it. It’s play. It’s almost fan fiction.

It also often feels like filler. If it was all a dream, it doesn’t effect anything. It’s similar to a concern people start to have when a piece of media has a loose relationship with death. Say a character dies and the peers cry and mourn and seek vengeance. We the audience might cry. Maybe this is a beloved character. And then, they’re revived. Or they never died in the first place. Suddenly the stakes are lowered. Maybe death in this universe doesn’t matter too much. The tension starts to lesson. When characters do permanently die, there’s a different sort of nagging hope, that maybe they’ll come back. Then, if they don’t, we feel set up and robbed of our ability to mourn them, because we came to believe that death doesn’t matter.

The first piece of media that comes to mind when I think “death doesn’t matter” is Dragon Ball Z. People die? Well, it becomes pretty clear that all you need to do is collect the Dragon Balls and wish that didn’t happen. The Dragon Balls die? Well, there’s a planet with different ones you can still make wishes on so…

And yet, despite that, many people still find meaning in the show. I knew Krillin would likely come back when Freeza killed him on Namek. And yet still, part of me felt that rage with Goku. The death wasn’t supposed to matter. The stakes weren’t there. Yet, still, it did. It mattered in spite of its meaninglessness.

On the exact other end, we have telegraphed endings. A couple of years ago, I read a young adult book called They Both Die at the End. The book follows dual protagonists as they deal with the fact that they are living their last day on earth. They are not being hunted. They are not terminally ill. They’ve just been told that today they will die. And the calls that tell them this are never wrong. When I read the book, I knew it was a romance book, and I knew the two boys were likely to get together over the course of the day. They started out quite different and I wasn’t sure I wanted them together. But they bonded. I fell in love with both of them. I read their anxieties, and each new turn around the corner was terrifying. Just as Hitchcock advised, we were told there was a bomb. And each page turned is a page closer to the deadly explosion. Towards the end, I started to hope. I thought maybe this might go the way of YA and prove society wrong. They will change things… And then I turned the page. And one of them died. And then I turned a few more pages. And the other one died. They both died at the end. The title was a promise. We knew the end before it started. It’s a tragedy, and that’s the tragedy of hope. Nothing they did was going to change the ending. No action taken ultimately could change that by the time tomorrow rolled around, both boys would be dead. Their love could only ever last a couple of hours. And then they died. And there was nothing that could have been done.

Yet everything that happened held meaning. They struggled with mortality and confidence, with sexuality and family, with finality, with love, with sharing oneself with another person. It’s all terrifying and beautiful and ugly and human. When they died, I cried. And my tears could not wash away any of the meaning from the lives they lived in those pages.

The title of the novel, I think, is an example of what Bertolt Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt. For my purposes, I’m going to call it the distancing effect. The novel spoils the ending. In doing so, it’s a reminder that you are consuming media. You know before you start exactly what will happen. The pages are dreadful because you know they are pages of a book. You get lost in the world, and then you’re brought out of it. Because you’re always aware.

The distancing effect is a storytelling technique in which you purposefully distance the audience from their passive role as observer. In Brecht’s play, Mother Courage and Her Children, each scene begins with a heading that tells the audience exactly what will occur in the scene. You already know the result. And therefore, you have to engage with the how and why of how it happens, instead of the in the moment wonder and connection many creatives aim for. Perhaps, through distancing, we might be able to engage with our beings while we watch. Perhaps we might feel a call to action when it ends. There might not be any catharsis, after all, because we cannot be released from our state of knowing we exist.

Brecht’s plays tell you they are plays.

In the movie The Hateful Eight, halfway through the film, Tarantino starts a narration sequence. When I first watched the film, this jarred me. It shot me out of my position as an observer, as the camera, and put me back in my apartment bedroom, sitting on my bed, watching my laptop, needing to take out the trash. I am watching a movie. The movie is shouting at me, “Hey. You are watching a movie.” It became harder to watch after that, and I don’t mean that as a negative comment about the film. Chapter cards in movies are effectively spiritual successors of Brecht’s scene headings, as far as I’m concerned. They serve to distance you from what you are watching. You become aware you are consuming art.

We do another thing when we spoil films for ourselves. Have you ever done that? Sometimes I’ll read a plot summary of a film I don’t think I’ll watch or won’t watch for a while. Then when I see it, I already know what’s going to happen. It steals a bit from my ability to fully and truly engage with a first watch. I am, on some level, aware that I am watching a film. I know what will come next, whether or not I actively engage with that information. We do the same thing when we watch the same movie over and over again. We already know the beats. We may discover new things, but we can never truly recreate that original experience of watching it, because we are distanced by the act of knowing, even if it’s not greatly distanced.

In her video on Titanic, Lindsay Ellis goes in-depth on the nature of tragedy in art. When she watches the film, she still roots against the iceberg. There’s a small part of her that thinks maybe this time they’ll avoid the iceberg. But it won’t. And she knows that. In fact, almost everyone knows that the first time they watch it. Then we know Jack dies. But we watch it again. And we actively root against the outcome. Or we despair in the face of the hope we know will lose. But we watch again. We adapt Romeo and Juliet one more time. Hadestown tells us that to fall and begin to sing again is an act of rebellion against despair, against the world, against being beat down, even if the song we sing never changes the ending. It’s a sad song. And in its sadness, it’s happy. Because we train our ability to hope. We distance ourselves and work on our world and we sing our sad songs and do our best to hope. And we return to tragedy. And we despair. And then we hope again. We watch even though we know the ending. And knowing the ending doesn’t change the meaning we obtained. Sometimes, it increases it. Deepens it.

So why do we so often reject “it was a dream” endings? Dream endings are in effect the same as tragic endings - nothing can change the end. It has already been written. In a pure plot causal way, no action and no character can truly make any choice that matters. The story will play out as it always has.

I think the difference in our reaction lies in where the distancing occurs. In a Brechtian play, we’re distanced from the start. He does not draw us into the world. With Titanic, we’re distanced before the start. We already know the iceberg comes. With rewatches, we are distanced by the act of rewatching. When a story ends with the revelation that it was all a dream, and we ask ourselves if none of that happened at all, we’re distanced at the very end. We’ve been ingrained. We have accepted our role as observers. We buy into the world and its actions. We suspend our disbelief. Then, at the end, when we have achieved catharsis or are about to, when we look for our safe place to land or our suspense to draw us in once more, we’re kicked out. We’re denied. This is all a story.

“So none of that actually happened?” we say in frustration. The whole story, all of our investment, it was in something that didn’t hap–Didn’t we already know that? Of course it didn’t happen. When we watch a movie, we are not peering real-time into the lives of someone in some parallel universe. We are watching a movie. We are at the theatre. We are reading a book. We are playing a game. None of this is really real. Even if it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t real. None of it actually happened.

That’s where the problem sets in. We weren’t prepared to be forced to recognize our own agency in consumption. The escape pod doesn’t softly return you to our world. It spits you out and says, “You have nothing to escape for anyhow. You never were anywhere else. You never were anyone else. You are you.” But you didn’t want ejection. We want to be able to step out and decompress on our own. We feel the revelation immature. We are forced to reckon with our existence.

Existence.

That’s the key word. Often when we talk about dream sequences and dream endings, and we come to the “What was the point?” question, we put our ire on the ending so we can evade actually answering the very question we’re asking.

If it didn’t happen, did it have any meaning at all?

I think the answer automatically comes from our consumption of art at all. We already discussed that we know when we are reading a book that we are reading a book. We know it is not real. We know it did not happen. But what we have read, what we have experienced, the act of experiencing, carries enough meaning for us as a species to continue creating art and telling stories. And we always will.

But we often don’t have to confront that question. We ask and answer it in the subconscious. We suss out the meanings we have gained casually and over time as we choose to engage in unpacking our feelings, after we have had time to process them.

When we are told everything has been a dream, the question is screamed in our face.

What was the point of all of that?

This is a video essay. I told you in the title that this is a defense of dream endings. The path I take getting there is long. I set up artifice. I bring up other pieces of media. I turn on a camera. I add music. I talk. I make choices in construction and I wander through. Could I not have told you in a single paragraph? A single sentence? Yes. I could have. So what is the point of all of this?

You are watching or listening to a video essay. Though I exist, the me in this video is not real. This is not actually happening. It already has. I can make no choices to change anything that happens. It already has.

It was all a dream.

PART TWO:

TWITTER’S OBSESSION WITH SEX SCENE DISCOURSE BELIES OUR FEAR OF MEANING AND ITS LACK

Every now and then on one of the worst/best apps ever created, you see some absolutely insane positions and takes. I like to read through it. Some of it I like to blame on the partial downfall of Tumblr and the migration of its userbase to Twitter, wherein they continued the legacy of buckwild takes from their foreposters. It’s easy to write people off as internet weirdos or kids working through adolescence and the formation of their ideas and morality. But that’s also not the most fair position.

One of the most common twitter conversations of the past couple of years is the usage of sex scenes in films and television. On one hand, we have people calling detractors prudes and artless misers. On the other, you have people calling inclusion fetishitic, unnecesary, and exploitative.

So, let’s break it down.

First, and I think we can all agree on this point, there is a sexism problem in Hollywood just as there is in most areas of life. It’s a prevailing prejudice. Absolutely, there are directors, agents, and producers who overbear, exploit, and potentially force nudity and sex scenes on actresses. There are problems on some sets with consent and improvisation, though thankfully the prevalence of intimacy coordinators is on the rise and making things more safe and comfortable.

The belief that that should lead to a lessening or moral coding away from nudity and sex scenes reminds me quite a bit of SWERF takes. A SWERF is a sex worker exclusionary radical feminist–someone whose feminism results in them believing all sex work to be inherently exploitative under any and all conditions. They attempt to argue against pornography, prostitution, and other forms of sex work from a seemingly feminist, nominatively leftist position. SWERFs often won’t listen to the stories of sex workers who enjoy their positions, advocate the decriminalization or legalization of prostitution, who find pornographic work empowering or no more demeaning than any other job. To the SWERF, because so much of the industry is or has been exploitative, the entirety must be thrown away.

Hollywood has often treated women poorly. Sexual abuse and misogyny have not gone away and are still being fought while victims are still being silenced and ridiculed. Sex scenes can be exploitative.

But many aren’t. Men, women, and people between and outside of that binary can all have the agency to choose to participate in or even advocate for sex scenes. Sex is not inherently dirty. It is not a bad action or state of being. It is a part of life for a good many people. Showing it in art is showing part of what it means to be human for a lot of people.

I saw one person thread about their experience watching Crimes of the Future and how it was legitimately uncomfortable and harrowing for them, and that they were thankful for it. I understand that. A couple of years ago, I watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with my then-boyfriend. There’s a violent sexual assault scene in that film. I hadn’t watched any media with that content at that point for over a year, because I was afraid. The first time that boyfriend and I went all the way, I panicked afterwards due to remembering the three times before him. It was a hard scene for me to watch. I could have closed my eyes. He told me we could fast forward. But I sat there, and I watched, and I squeezed his hand. It was painful to watch. And then it was over. And I was still on the couch. And the movie went on. And the world didn’t end.

The movie went on. So did I.

What happened to me was wrong, and not nearly to the level of violence most experience with such things, but in that horrible scene, I could confront those moments. And I could bail whenever I chose. And I could survive. I could hurt and go on.

The film went on. And so did I.

I am terribly grateful for that scene.

The main back and forth you’ll see on the sex scene discourse revolves around importance to the plot. You’ll see detractors point to plot irrelevance and use that to bolster their claims of fetishism or exploitation. The creators forced it in because they wanted to use the actors as sex dolls and get off or something along those lines.

So let’s ignore the very easy counterargument that sometimes sex scenes do move the plot. Let’s even ignore that sex scenes can be integral for character development or tonal setting for a particular piece.

I want to pretend that all sex scenes do not move the plot forward. They are never necessary. Let’s pretend that.

In the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, there’s an elevator scene. No, not that one. In one of the early episodes, Shinji rides an elevator. There is no dialogue. It’s a long shot. And we sit in it. It’s sort of boring. Sort of idyllic. Long.

That shot has sat with me longer than any other shot of any other medium. I can’t even tell you, really, what about it sits with me. And you can argue it serves tonal and character purposes. It shows Shinji’s loneliness, his isolation, how the dreary drags of second to second life can circle in on us. But you could do all of that without this shot. I’ve never really seen anyone talk about it. About the slow, boring elevator ride.

It is a profound piece of art for me. That one single take. I think about that silence a lot.

There’s this odd supposed truism in a lot of art fields that every word, phrase, stroke, divot, note – each one is painstakingly chosen and carries purpose to move something forward. The plot. The character. The tone. The theme. I hate it. And I think it’s a misunderstanding of art and artists.

I belong to a handful of Facebook groups for playwrights, lyricists, and composers. Near the start of 2023, someone asked for people’s opinion on what each line of dialogue should do. Should every line push the plot forward, or should it build the world and immersion? People responded. There was lot of talking of doing both, of everything driving plot or character, or not indulging yourself and writing to write. And, honestly, it sort of depressed me. We have bought into a Cult of Meaning.

When we watch action movies or horror films, sometimes people talk about how the action scenes don’t necessarily do anything. The hero against some grunts… doesn’t really matter. The scenes of excessive gore go beyond the supposed point, beyond the plot and the characters. It’s indulgence.

Indulgence. We use that word over and over. I think it’s a religious puritanian hold over culture. Indulgence is wrong, we think, because it is gluttonous. It is a sin. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure is not holy. Self denial is how we make things. Hinting and pulling back is where the sex is. It’s a love of asceticism, a notion that self-denial is holy and therefore indulgence is wrong.

But. I think it would be a bit dishonest of me to say that’s wholly why I think there’s this hatred of the unmeant, of the un-slaved word, of the casual and perhaps pointless aside, of that which does little for plot or which does not change a character. I think that’s a surface excuse. We buy into it. We say people putting in sex scenes for the purpose of having a sex scene are sexualizing actors and characters, are throwing fetishes, are denying consent, are being indulgent, because it allows us to avoid the question we desperately want to avoid.

What is the point?

When something does not affect the things in the immediate that we can latch onto in art and proclaim its purpose for existence, we have to actually ask the question, and we have mull over it. We can not discard the question with easy, in our face answers.

We cannot have so-called pointless sex scenes because to have them is to confront existence itself.

PART THREE:

LOOKING INTO THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EXISTENTIALISM, ABSURDISM, AND NIHILISM WHEREIN THE FEAR OF NIHILISTIC DESPAIR AND THE DEEP CRISIS OF AGENCY OVER MEANING LEADS TO THE PREMATURE REJECTION OF DREAM ENDS

“Hell is other people.”

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about that quote? Is it something antisocial? Is it about confidence in your own moral superiority? Is it despair over the nature of free will? Is it something solipsistic? Or is it, perhaps, existential?

That line comes from the play No Exit by Sartre. In it, three people find themselves in hell. They’re the only ones in a room, and they cannot leave it. There are no mirrors, no photographs, and no cameras. No reflection exists where they can clearly look at themselves. Their existence can only be confirmed by their sense of self and by the other two people in the room. They don’t particularly get along. In fact, you could say they torture each other. After all, as the quote says, hell is other people. But the point, actually, is nothing to do with any sort of other. Hell is not, actually, other people. Hell is not existing within the self. The torture comes not from the existenec of the other two, but the need to force our self-conept onto them. We cannot see ourselves in this room, and so we are only seen in the eyes of the other two. How they see me are how I am. So I must live determined through the ways in which they see me. My existence, my very self and looks and personality, are determined by the observation of others. Elsewise, all my meaning escapes me. Hell is an inverted form of solipsism, almost.

This is the existential crisis.

When we think of existential crises, we probably think of a group of people getting high and kicking around questions like, “Dude, what if we’re, like, in a simulation? Mathematically it’s improbable we’re not, you know?” What if all of this is a dream? What if this is a snapshot of a dying brain? What if this is hell? What if… what if… what if…?

An existential crisis happens when someone runs up against the possibility of an absurd universe. If the true reality of existence is vastly different from our self concepts and observations, if this life is not real life, then what is the point? Where is the meaning in any of this? If we’re in a simulation, then it doesn’t matter what we do. We’re code. Maybe everything that will happened has already been determined. Maybe nothing is determined, and the universe is cold and uncaring. If there is potential for the universe to be uncaring, to not be ordered, to be by nature chaotic, then does it hold inherent meaning? We call this uncaring and unordered universe absurd. Absurd does not mean funny. It means illogical.

My time on the internet has shown me everyone is obsessed with logic. We need things to make sense to us, and logic is how we have chosen to establish that sense. When we wish to convince or be convinced, a lot of people shrug off appeals to emotion or emotionality at all, because emotions do not carry an inherent logic. We must understand. We worship in the Cult of Meaning.

When people talk about the movie Inception, there’s a lot of conversation and dissection about whether, in the end, we are still in the dream. The top continues to spin. It cuts to the end screen before it would fall. There’s potential to interpret it either way, and people set out to determine which it is. It’s a fun, silly argument. But some people really want to know. Just as they want to work out the specifics of how time works with each layer of the dream if they don’t really get how it all syncs together. What matters is if we’re in a dream in the end. And they’re wrong. Whether or not we are still in a dream at the end of the film does not matter at all. It’s unimportant, and you’ve been tricked into ignoring the actual question. The question begins with a simple premise: this could be a dream. From that premise, we derive the question: so does any of it matter?

Inception is an existential movie. Besides its questioning of the nature of existence, the entire concept comes down to one thing: where is meaning? Where is it not? What happens when one person’s definition of meaning runs contrary to another? If it’s all a dream, does it matter? What does it mean to mean?

If any part of the movie could be a dream, and dreams are by nature chaotic, then the universe of the movie is not one of logic. It is one of disorder. It is an absurd universe. Absurdity gives the death of assumed meaning, because the universe itself does not carry one.

If there is an absurd universe, four general paths open up for us. The first, and the most straightforward, is a rejection of the absurd. The second is to embrace existentialism. The third is called absurdism, and the fourth is nihilism.

So, let’s define some terms. One thing all three share is a belief that the universe is absurd and that there is no inherent meaning in existence. The differences lie in what the next step is. Broadly speaking, for the existentialist, meaning derives from the self. We, ultimately, must determine the existence of our own selves and find confidence and meaning in our wills and existences simply because we are ourself. Hell is other people, because to only find personal meaning from how others perceive us is to reject the existence of the self. It is peril teetering on non-existence. For the absurdist, we derive meaning from creating meaning. The act of rebelling against the absurdity of the universe by creating meaning out of the absurd, to choose to care and put reason behind things, is the beauty of life. For the nihilist, we accept the absurdity of the universe and embrace empty meaninglessness. The self is irrelevant. Caring is irrelevant. Creating meaning is simply delusion.

There are more specific and varied forms, for instance religious existentialism, but those are the three in broad terms. We acknowledge the absurdity of the universe and we must then confront the abyss of nihilism. We either deny or defy it and thereby become existentialists or absurdists, or we fall into the abyss.

Unfortunately, nihilism can only lead to one place: despair. It can only consume, and through its consumption, it creates nothing but more of its self. There used to be a lot of talk around cringe culture and South Park and the idea that caring too much about things is funny and stupid and pointless. Because to care is to embrace meaning, self-created or elsewise, and that is a rejection of nihilism. The nihilist can only bring others to nihilism. I believe that’s either from an annoyant need to spread the abyss or from some small hope that someone might convince them of meaning and pull them out of the sea of despair and into some field of hope and meaning.

When we put the word “crisis” on “existential crisis,” it can almost sound hyperbolic when we use existential crisis to mean musing about the nature of creation. But I think there are two existential crises, and they are worthy of the moniker. The one more closely aligned with the existentialist is the crisis of determining internal meaning versus external meaning. That would be the underlying plot of an many an existential play. The second crisis, the one close to the cultural understanding of the world, is to view the pit of nihilism.

As I said before, existentialism and absurdism are rejections of nihilism. But they can only reject it because they have viewed it. The absurdity of the universe carries with it the whole of nihilism: there is no meaning. There is no matter. And the existential crisis is our fight against nihilism. We must fall into despair or push away from it. To push away from the death that awaits in the abyss, we either turn to existentialism or absurdism, OR we must reject the sight completely and reject the absurdity of the universe.

Often, we reject it by refusing to consider that it exists.

When a story ends with “and it was all a dream,” we wonder, “What was the point?” None of that happened. But if we were to really ask that question instead of scoff at the trope, then we might have to wonder, “What meaning is there in our life?” Because if we were so absorbed in a story, if for a moment we believed in the world and our observations, and then we are betrayed and thrown out of it, told we were observing something that didn’t even happen, we might question reality. What if the existence I am observing in my day to day life is also a lie? Where is the meaning? Would someone read the story of our universe, and throw it away with a grunt and ask, “What was the point?”

If that happened, could we answer?

When a story ends with all the major events having been a dream, to truly engage with the story means to allow it to induce in us an existential crisis. It forces us to see the nihilistic sea. And that is terror. It is despair.

To allow for things to have meaning not because they do anything, not because of any affect or purpose, not for how those things exert their will on others, is to allow for something to have meaning simply because it is. It matters just because. It is there just because. And maybe then we put other meanings on it, build upon it, but nothing can hide that the base is that it matters just because.

But why do we tend to reject absurdity instead of embracing existentialism or absurdism? To be honest, I think it’s complicated. I think some of it is cultural and the influence of religion, of our fear of mortality, or our obsession with logic. I think another part of it is a deep fear of selfhood. If we are the ones creating meaning, whether through the self or through the act creation, then we have incredible agency. Suddenly perhaps the world is the way it is because we have not collectively willed it to be elsewise. Perhaps there is no single way things ought to be. Perhaps everything can be reimagined. Perhaps there are no rules that cannot be broken or changed. Perhaps there is no social construct that cannot be deconstructed or even reconstructed. Nothing is permanent. The Great Work has begun and we will always be moving. We will always be in a state of flux.

And when we waver in existential or absurdist thought, nihilism waits. It waves. It never truly vanishes as a potential. We must continually fight.

And that, too, is terrifying.

PART FOUR:

IT WAS A DREAM. YET IT MATTERED ANYWAY

I actually kind of like endings where the someone wakes up and it was all a dream. I think they’re beautiful in a way. I think it might be because I’m already an absurdist of sorts. When a story ends as a dream, it serves as a reminder that even the brief and fleeting, even the things that disappear without any trace and no memory, are things that mattered. Because I liked the story, and I liked the characters. I enjoyed the ride and I felt feelings. I turned the page or I played the game or I kept the movie on. I observed this story. And then it vanished. And the vanishing does nothing to remove the meaning.

For me, there’s a tremendous amount of hope in that. When Dorothy awakes in Kansas, the tears of the Scarecrow were still shed. The catchy songs still rang in my ears. Love and friendship still came. Even forgot, they existed.

We forget the vast majority of things. Most people, places, things, and events, most of us exist, and then we don’t. We are forgotten. Did we, in the end, further the plot of the story of earth? Were any of us any sort of main character?

But if it was all a dream, and if we choose to believe it mattered anyway, then all of us, forgotten or not, have existed as stories. We are all of us dreams. And we are all of us an abundance of meaning for no other reason than because we are.

Like any trope, it can be done poorly, averagely, and phenomenally. My point is that it is not a bad trope. I think it carries a great hope.

So maybe this is a dream.

And maybe when you wake, and you wonder if you wasted your time with the dream, maybe you’ll ask, “What was the point?”

And I hope you find a satisfactory answer.