AND TO THE LIST I SHOULD ADD "QUICKENINGS": I'm a fan of Mad Men, and in some degree or another also of House, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Twin Peaks, Angel Heart, Harry Potter, American Gods, and countless other works of fiction about which I'm set to complain. Because I'd like to declare a moratorium on dreams, visions, premonitions, and hallucinations.
I get why writers and filmmakers use them. A vision or a hallucination can both create and resolve a mystery or a conflict. A dream can conjure a mood, surreptitiously kick a leg out from under a stable reality, or shine a brighter light into particular areas of a character's mind. All of the above can be used to goad the reader into picking sides between the rational world and a character's subconscious instinct.
Usually, though, dreams, visions, and hallucinations are at best parlor tricks and at worst just lazy writing, a way to thumb the scales when the goods themselves lack their own heft. Just because a dream can be a shortcut into a character's psyche doesn't mean that the longer trip isn't worth the trouble (and by the way, if a show or book asks you to choose between the real world and something that happens in a dream or a vision, bet the farm on the subconscious/supernatural). There are some scenes in entertainment and literature that I've seen so many times that they can get no traction any more -- sparring co-workers whose argument dissolves into spontaneous making out; the doctor who surprisingly refuses to help an irredeemable patient -- and I think I've added "self-consciously off-kilter dream sequence" and "future foretold by possibly unreliable source" to that list.
Just ranting, really. By the way, I don't know when or if your Mad Men thread is coming, but this isn't it.
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