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There’s a trope in writing and even a little in the visual arts of television and film that also annoys me when it pops its head over the battlements but to unpack it, I must first talk about the way I experience dreams.

Dreaming while asleep apparently appears across species and while nearly universal are also powerfully idiosyncratic. I had one friend who described that as a child and into his teenage years every nightmare started in exactly the same manner; he was belly crawling through the tall grass of his backyard and suddenly he would come across a hideous stone idol, bats would fly, and then the scene would change as he fell into the terrifying dream his subconscious had cooked up that night.

I myself will sometimes have dreams in which I do not appear, but play out like movies with close-ups, cuts, and even recognizable stars playing parts in what are often frightening horror stories that my mind conjures up for its own amusement. Those dreams are uncommon, and the more generalized dream is one that plays out entirely from my own point of view, I am there experiencing the events and sensation of whatever the dream has crafted. And no matter how outlandish or at odds the dream is with reality, be it that I am having a grand time at an amusement park with a dear friend who in real life had passed away some years earlier, or the strange shifting scenery when walking around a corner and I find myself in a location that could not possibly have existed around that bend, such as walking from a school hallway and directly into the deep desert, the dream presents, at that moment, as absolute and uncontested reality. If something makes me question the events as impossible, that is the moment sleep slips away and I awake in my bed. Dreams, while they are playing, are unquestioned. They are what is.

That very unquestioned nature, that aura of total acceptance, bring us to the trope that annoys me so very much.

When a character in a book or in a show or movie finds themselves suddenly confronted with events that are far beyond their daily life and who mutters or exclaims ‘I must be dreaming,’ my suspension of disbelief shatters. That’s not how it works. If you are dreaming you do not know that you are dreaming and you accept it. So this trope, not only is it tired and worn, something that should be rejected on those grounds alone, it also breaks character for me and I would be so very happy if I never ever come across it again.