The other night I dreamt that I woke from a dream. I was surrounded by family members, all of whom seemed inordinately pleased. When I asked why they were all there, as well as why I was in a hospital, they cheerfully informed me I’d been in a coma for several years, so consequently an ill-defined portion of my life had been all in my head. I believe that the revelation had come hot on the heels of a more fantastical dream, where I attempted to evade a series of unpleasant reptilian creatures, one of whom had a disturbingly anthropomorphic face. This no doubt had contributed to the join-the-dots forehead-slap lucidity of my subsequent ‘awakening’, so my life becoming a lie made an awful kind of sense.

I spent the next unknown period of dreamtime adjusting to this news. Everything that had happened, the people I had met, perhaps even the university I went to, was just an invention. It certainly went a way to explain the lack of direction or consequence to my life. I’ve gone from a well-paid job in Whitehall to over a year of unemployment. My degree in Media Arts yielded little headway into the industry. The rate at which I accepted this explanation is now frightening to me. It was only when I tried Googling a friend of mine, only to find she didn’t exist, that I started to fight against this new status-quo. I simply couldn’t believe I had made someone like her up, I’m just not that creative. Sure enough, I finally woke up for real, but spent the remainder of my time in bed in a state of utter confusion. I didn’t know what time it was, what reality I was in, or whether or not I was asleep. I suppose I could have simply gotten out of bed, but I didn’t want to jeopardise my health with a truncated slumber.

Anyhow, this was all a roundabout way to lead me into the most recent special one-off episode of Red Dwarf, more specifically the choice of story that no doubt influenced my night of confusion. At the very least, it inspired a similar bout of emotions that accompanied my ethereal stay in the hospital. Confusion, betrayal and a vague sense of disappointment that after all that had happened, it ultimately came to this. For those that didn’t watch, the plot concerned the aging inhabitants of the mining ship Red Dwarf finally locating the means to travel back to Earth (or at least, a parallel Earth). As it transpires, the Earth they travel to is apparently the ‘real’ Earth, and Red Dwarf is nothing but a fictional sci-fi comedy series being repeated ad nauseum on ‘Dave’. Upon being brought up to speed of their own fictional nature (via no less than the blurb on the back of their own DVD box) the crew head on to locate their creator, who has an incongruously Blade Runner-esque death planned, in order to appeal for more life.

As a childhood fan of Red Dwarf, when details of the plot started to emerge that suggested this premise, I couldn’t help but wince. After the underwhelming final series, it seemed a rather ignoble return. Not to mention that it was wholly similar to the comparatively recent ‘The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse’, which also featured established characters discovering they were fictional, tracking down their creators and appealing for longevity. That was also met with mixed reviews and a divided opinion amongst the fanbase. Yet, as reticent as I was, I still remain fascinated as ever by that particular premise. Metafiction is a broad term, covering stories within stories, stories about stories or simply stories that exhibit some kind of awareness of storytelling convention. In amongst this spectrum are those that explicitly break the fourth wall, flippantly or otherwise, and feature characters aware of their own fiction, interacting with ‘reality’.

There was a time where that concept was not only inherently fascinating to me, but also somehow revelatory. Never mind the fact that Daffy Duck got there 50 or so years before me, or that the Gods frequently intervened in ancient Greek adventures. It still seemed a kind of postmodern trumping of a conventional template, allowing for a whole new wave of storytelling possibilities. All this led to was me writing a slightly pretentious mess of a short film, thereby fulfilling my main duty as a student of Media.

In spite of recognising what an intellectual folly it can be, I’m still to this day hopelessly intrigued by the central idea. Most likely, and to an extent similar to the previous entry about ‘time loops’, it’s a tidy metaphor for modern (or postmodern, if you prefer) anxieties involving social identity. In the various cultural reforms or ‘revolutions’ that occurred in the latter half of the 20^th Century, there was many an age-old institution that had their legitimacy reappraised, critiqued or restructured. Not to suggest there hadn’t been previous ideological disputes involving marriage, church, the law or the monarchy. At the very least, heads began to turn to the point it profoundly affected the upbringing of the subsequent generation. Couple this with the stark shadow the Atomic Age left in its wake, and humanity effectively had to adjust to a world where not only every system is potentially fallacious, but every living thing in our surroundings, including ourselves, could be eradicated in the blink of an eye. If we discovered that our lives were not real, after a certain period of reasonable denial, we would probably accept, as I did, that it did indeed make an awful kind of sense. Of course, this is a slightly reductive assessment of modern life, and much of these anxieties are fairly typical to the human condition. It’s that niggle, that sense of a rug about to be pulled from underneath us, that contributes to the legitimacy of the premise.

So what is it about this idea that pisses us off so much?

It’s hardly surprising or uncalled for, especially nowadays, to greet such an upcoming plot synopsis with at least a wince, before quietly getting on with whatever it is we do. After all, it’s ultimately a variant on the ‘dream ending’, where the protagonist simply does a Pam Barnes and the status-quo is overhauled. It’s a shifting of narrative goalposts, where any ongoing plot concern is effectively severed, albeit succinctly, before promptly getting dispatched within a pocket of a now-redundant reality. It differs from the dream ending in that the ‘awakening’ is generally met with a kind of grieving process, alongside some metaphysical soul-searching. The waking from a dream is usually met with a brief moment of re-acclimatisation before unilaterally accepting the new state of affairs. There is also less of a requisite to provide a solid causality for earlier events, as ‘dream logic’ is inherently tenuous.

There is also the accusation of self-indulgence. If an author wishes to provide a believable ‘real world’ for the characters to escape to then, generally speaking, the more specific and detailed the world, the better. Unfortunately, this require more and more focus upon extraneous mundanity, as well as the minutia of the author’s own intentions regarding the story and characters, now rendered achingly explicit. It’s the sign of a writer who believes themselves to be inherently fascinating, transforming any story into one big studious navel gaze, squandering the dynamic and potential of the characters in the process. The writer may try and combat this by portraying themselves in a humble or derogatory light (as in ‘The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse’ in which they play themselves as bland non-entities against their more colourful conceptions) or write themselves out altogether (in the recent Red Dwarf special, remaining writer Doug Naylor envisions the ‘creator’ as a blinkered, egotistical hack, obsessed with Blade Runner and empty drama).

It simply isn’t nice to be reminded that our favourite fictional characters aren’t real. What would be the purpose of taking, say, Harold Bishop, long-term denizen of Australian soap opera ‘Neighbours’, and having him confront his own fictional nature? Well, he’d probably be a bit shocked, depressed even. You could maybe get a bit of mileage out of making light of various quirks of his existence. Yes Harold, it was a bit funny how you veered from a genial stick-in-the-mud to a lascivious sex pest and homicidal sociopath. Yes Harold, it was slightly odd how you formed such convoluted bonds with the people in your immediate vicinity. And yes Harold, it was a little weird how people would come in the house just as someone else was leaving and no one seemed to go to the loo. Not to mention his altercations with the Russian Mafia. Perhaps there could be a scene where he meets Ian Smith, the actor who portrays him, and they look at each-other rather dumbfounded. Perhaps he could meet the writers of ‘Neighbours’, yell at them for giving him a stroke, or giving his wife cancer, or making several of his family members die in a plane crash, or giving him prostate cancer. And then…….well……he could maybe find a house somewhere, settle down, put it all behind him, you know? Yeah, perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea after all. Perhaps bestowing such a grand metaphysical conceit on a comparatively diminutive character like Harold (or the population of Royston Vasey, for example) only serves to undermine the mechanics of their world, abandoning an environment fertile for their brand of adventures and thudding them into ours, where nothing ever gets to happen.

My favourite comic by quite a long way is Grant Morrison’s 26-issue run on ‘Animal Man’, a comic very much with fourth wall manipulation at its backbone. The story concerns Buddy Baker, a D-list superhero with generic animal-based powers, attempting to restart his career after time away from the fold. Amongst other subplots, the disparate nature of comic book continuity is explored, with Animal Man becoming more aware of the incongruity of his existence. This partially culminates in a peyote-inspired desert hallucination, whereupon he breaks the fourth wall in the most direct of fashion:

‘Animal Man’ successfully avoids the pretention or indulgence associated with the concept, as the journey our hero takes is similar to that of the reader. There is no dramatic irony being mined, instead we are more or less left just as much in the dark as poor Buddy, with his gradual realisation reflecting our own understanding of the direction the story is taking. This means when Animal Man finally meets his destiny, it is less of a callous rug-pull and more a succinct, moving culmination of the themes that had been running throughout. It recognises the pitfalls without overcompensating, instead applying it to concerns such as violence in popular media, the trajectory of modern comics and the responsibility of a designer to their design. It also manages to achieve this without sacrificing action or characterisation.

Tune in next time for a bit about dream endings.