Best Dream Sequences From Television Shows

Dreams are a great way to help develop your mindfulness and personal growth.

We know lucid dreaming often features things that matter to you, and by using our app, you can leverage them to help with your personal mindfulness. A dream can be uplifting, revelatory or just enjoyable.  Quite often these feelings from lucid dreams last well into the day, and even for life.

Dreams are not only interesting to individuals, but TV companies as well. A dream sequence within a television show presents an opportunity for the viewer to suspend disbelief for a moment and see scenes or interactions that entertain without directly impacting the plot. Just as in life, a dream sequence on a television show can be enjoyable, interesting but without repercussions for the others involved!

Plenty of producers and directors have used such sequences in hugely popular shows throughout television history, and we have selected some of the very best for you to enjoy before you drift off into your lucid dreams this evening.

Dallas

The only place to start with a dream sequence from television has to be Bobby Ewing’s return. This wasn’t a dream sequence, rather an entire season that was effectively erased from history. In season nine, the producers made a horrible mistake, killing off Bobby and almost doing the same to the show. When he emerged from the shower in the season finale, Pam claimed the whole season had just been a lucid dream, albeit a bit of a long one. Dallas was a massive success, drawing 50 million viewers regularly, and 36 years later, this is still the nadir, or pinnacle of dream sequences, depending on your stance.

Friends

Some of the comedy in Friends hasn’t aged well for a modern audience, but it is still a pop-culture juggernaut. People still refer to Ross and Rachel being on a break, and the symbolism is often still used today. A Foxy Games feature on TV shows explains how imagery such as Ross’s monkey and the La-Z-Boy armchair are remembered by fans long after the show has been retired, cementing its place as the king of the nineties sitcom. That made this dream sequence even more entertaining, as it pitched two much-loved characters together in Joey and Monica and developed a plot outside of the dream. It wasn’t the only time; Joey dreamed about Rachel in a later series, too. Could he be any more lucid?

Game of Thrones

Some people might have hoped for a Dallas-style dream sequence at the end of the finale, saving us from the horrible conclusion to HBO’s otherwise wonderful fantasy romp. Like Friends, Game of Thrones became massively popular and drew massive numbers from around the world. If you can forget the finale and the infamous all-black episode from the final series, then you have a wonderfully crafted series with many, many layers.

One of the best storylines featured Khaleesi and her relationship with the animalistic Khal Drogo. In one touching scene, she dreams of them losing a child, asking if she has passed over to the otherworld. He replies that maybe he refuses to pass over without her; it is very touching and adds another layer to the character motivation, which was so sadly destroyed with the lazy final series. The Verge describes it as moving ‘startlingly quick’, which effectively rushed the story arcs to some central characters, including that which had been carefully crafted for the Queen of Dragons.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad used a dream sequence and a call back to a much earlier episode to create sympathy for one of the central characters, Jesse Pinkman. He was a rather sorry protagonist, a petty criminal it was often difficult to feel sorry for, but one early story broke viewers’ hearts; he spoke of making a box in his youth that filled him with pride. He gave the box away, but a dream sequence later showed him crafting the box again in his mind before he woke to find he was still captured by a rival gang. It was a sad, longing dream, and the kind we’ve all had about something we’ve lost.