Unpopular Opinion

I don't think this is a particularly unpopular opinion when it comes to this story twist being used in a lazy way. The most common version of this is in running TV shows where the episode is sort of a "what if" that wants to go wild without having any actual lasting impact.

In the other hand, one of the earliest versions of this trope in the story 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' is haunting because of the ending. There is an actual point to the dream sequence, instead of it just being a lazy reset button. Lesser imitations of course will fall short. Though sometimes there are masterful beats using inspiration from the story like the emotionally powerful 'An Incident at Owl Creek' episode of American Dad.

It's not an unpopular opinion. It's amongst the easiest cop out in existence. The equivalent would be saying "it depends" when asked any question.

This is like....one of the most hated tropes in storytelling. It's so universally disliked that people use it as a punchline

Least popular opinion on c/UnpopularOpinion

But seriously, no one likes feeling like their time is being disrespected, and it's hard to convince the audience that "all just a dream" is a good resolution to a story they've invested in.

There are stories that can justify having a large sequence as a hypothetical/"what if" scenario, but often this trope is used as a crutch when writers either want to ignore canon to effectively write fanfiction for a while, or to retcon something that didn't land well by deciding it didn't happen after the fact.

Alice in Wonderland is the example that first pops into my head. And yes, it is really lazy and annoying.

I gotta say, I don't think this is an unpopular opinion at all. I've been in a dozen or more writing groups, and this was the single most universally detested trope. Nobody, in any of those groups supported the trope at all.

The closest I've ever heard anyone come to defending it outside of writing groups is a few that said Dallas did it first, and everyone else just copied it.

I'm fairly confident that your opinion is a very common one.

I've held this opinion ever since I saw the movie Next. I remember sitting there after it ended and thinking it was all just a waste of time.

Exception:

When the dream world ends up having impact on the physical world

"Yes, this was all just a dream. Dreams are real. Those monsters in that dream are trying to escape"

Though I suppose that's more Isekai Via Sleeping than It Was All A Dream

family guy said that at the end of Stewie Kills Lois / Lois Kills Stewie

Brian to Stewie: this whole thing happened in a simulator? isn't that like a giant middle finger to your audience?

I’m not sure what you mean by your spoiler….

Maybe I misinterpreted the ending wrong, but I thought just the last couple of episodes were a dream?
If the whole thing was a dream, that’d suck. But I thought everything else in the show happened?

wait what! Did I miss the actual last episode? Wan't the ending him sending the text message or such.

Generally, I think this is true.

However, two fairly distinct examples come to mind where I would argue it does work well.

1. The Spongebob episode(s) centering around Mrs. Puff having various nightmares/hallucinations around Spongebob ruining her life.

2. The movie Shutter Island.

Basically, its possible to do well if you write and block/frame scenes well enough that what you end up with is a story that seems to be plausible in-universe ... until continuity cracks begin to show, some of which will not even be noticed by most of the audience at first, but eventually these faults become more numerous, more glaring, and eventually the main character becomes, to some degree, aware of these discontinuities and then reacts to them, and is either heavily implied or outright shown to be struggling with their grasp on reality / trauma thereafter.

I think a key element is the contrast, at the end of the story or story arc, between an actual real reality, and a character realistically affected by their hallucinations/nightmares, continuing on in a real world while trying to reconcile it with their experiences that they now know are not real.

Whereas, usually in the more bullshit versions of 'it was all a dream', the entire reality of the show either resets afterward, to some point in the past of the show's timeline, or the entire storyline is shown to just be completely fantasy, thus the entirety of everything up to that point is meaningless, and then it just ends.

I have not seen Mr. Robot, but an example I have seen of doing this poorly comes from Archer.

Its been a while, but as far as I can remember, the last few seasons took place entirely inside Archer's coma induced mind, and this is basically because the writers wrote themselves into a corner.

There are many more examples of a show where some other kind of 'writing yourself into a corner' situation happens, and the show runners need to somehow keep the show going for more episodes or another season, and yep, the 'it was all a dream' type bullshit is basically just done to retcon and what i guess we would now call 'soft reboot' the show, within itself.

But! There are instances where this is actually handled very well. So I would not agree with a blanket statement that this is always a bad mechanic to have in a plot, it is just that it takes significantly better writing to pull it off well.

Spoiler much? I haven't seen that yet (it's on my watch list).

Can’t think of a rebuttal but Mr. Robot is my favorite show of all time 😢

Oh, but what if you do the opposite? A character goes to sleep in the beginning of the story, sees amazing things along the way, and the audience expects all of it to be just a dream. Right at the end it’s revealed that due to some crazy sleep magic, the dream world is the real world.

Here’s how that could work out. When you sleep, your mind is magically transported to another planet in a different galaxy, which allows you to experience weird stuff that would be impossible on Earth. When the protagonist was sleeping, they triggered a ma magical one way portal, which transported their body to this other planet. When they wake up from the dream, the mind returns to the body as usual, but this time neither of them are on Earth. The protagonist is permanently stuck on an alien planet where strange dream physics is the norm.