(This is from Wikipedia….. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is the best example they could come up with?)
A dream sequence is a technique used in storytelling, particularly in television and film, to set apart a brief interlude from the main story. The interlude may consist of a flashback, a flashforward, a fantasy, a vision, a dream, or some other element. Commonly, dream sequences appear in many films to shed light on the psychical process of the dreaming character. For instance in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the purpose of Pee Wee’s dreams is to inform the audience of his anxieties and fears after losing his bike. Other times major action takes place in dreams, allowing the filmmaker to explore infinite possibilities, as Michel Gondry demonstrates in The Science of Sleep.
Audio or visual elements, such as distinctive music or coloration, are frequently used to signify the beginning and end of a dream sequence in film. It has also become commonplace to distinguish a dream sequence from the rest of the film by showing a shot of a person in bed sleeping or about to go to sleep. Other films show a dream sequence followed by a character waking up in their own bed, such as the dream sequence George Gershwin composed for his film score to Delicious. Certain Surrealist and neo-Surrealist directors such as Luis Buñuel and David Lynch refuse to distinguish between waking life and dreams in many of their films, mixing the two states as they please.
The dream sequence that Atossa narrates near the beginning of Aeschylus’ Athenian tragedy The Persians (472 BCE) may be the first in the history of European theatre.[2]
Similar to a dream sequence is a plot device in which an entire story has been revealed to be a dream. As opposed to a segment of an otherwise real scenario, in these cases it is revealed that everything depicted was unreal. Oftentimes this is used to explain away inexplicable events. Because it has been done, in many occasions, to resolve a storyline that seemed out of place or unexpected, it is often considered weak storytelling; and further, in-jokes are often made in writing (particularly television scripts) that refer to the disappointment a viewer might feel in finding out everything they’ve watched was a dream. For example, the entire sequence of the Family Guy episodes ‘Stewie Kills Lois’ and ‘Lois Kills Stewie’ are revealed to have taken place within a virtual reality simulation, upon which a character asks whether a potential viewer could be angry that they’ve effectively watched a dream sequence. The TV show Dallas revealed that an entire season of the program was a dream.
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