#6: It Was All Just A Dream

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  So, you are watching an awesome movie with a huge adventure, tons of developed characters, and twists all over the place.  It is one of the best things you have ever watched by far, until you see the ending.  Turns out all the events in the plot were a dream created by the main character, and none of that really happened.  You then throw the remote at the TV in frustration, having wasted two hours of your life for this.

  Having the events of a story just be a product of a dream is the cheapest cop out any author can use to avoid making a sequel.  Not only that, but it is one of the most frustrating cliches out there.  An audience wants all the loose ends in the plot to be tied up and not to be told everything they saw was fake.  The only time you'll get acceptance by using this cliche is when it is Wizard of Oz related.  In that film, it was okay to use the cliche, as it was a new concept at the time and made sense.  Today, any story that does this will be most likely hated on.

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