: What constitutes misleading the reader I'm as novice a writer as one can get so please bear with me. I have read many times that a writer shouldn't mislead the reader otherwise the reader

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To add to the excellent answers already given, here's a simple way of thinking about it:

As long as the reader knows just as much about what's going on as the point of view character does, it isn't misleading.

For example, if the character is in a dream, and doesn't know they're dreaming, and the story is written from a limited point of view, there's no reason for the reader to know that the character is dreaming either. It's fine for there to be confusion about that by the reader, because the character in the story is experiencing the same thing.

On the other hand, if there are things that the characters know about that the reader doesn't, or if the reader has been led to believe something that the characters know isn't true, that would be misleading the reader. If the point of view character knows something, and it's pertinent to the current story, the reader should know that thing as well.

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Note: I upvoted Mark Baker's excellent answer, but wanted to add this as well:

The issue with misleading the reader is often not confusion, but betrayal. A lot of people don't mind being confused in a story, but a betrayed reader is an angry reader. Consider The Wizard of Oz, the entire storyline of which is (at least in the famous movie version) revealed to be a dream. What makes it work is that the narrative arc has already reached completion. Even within her dreamworld, Dorothy has defeated all the foes, and achieved all her goals for her friends, so the story feels fulfilled. Imagine instead if Dorothy had awakened right before her climactic fight with the Wicked Witch of the West. The viewer would have felt betrayed.

An extended, unreal episode in which nothing real happens, nothing is overcome and nothing is gained (or lost) is a bad idea. When it turns out to be illusionary, the reader thinks "what a waste of my time!" But that same episode could be doing good and valuable work for you instead of just taking up space. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the main character spends most of the movie inside his own mind and memories. But he has a real goal, to save his memories of his ex-girlfriend; he learns something real, how much she really means to him; he grows and changes, symbolically letting her into to his most secret self; and he even gains something valuable he can take back to the real world, the secret of how to reconnect with her. So the viewer doesn't feel cheated that the majority of the narrative isn't "real."

Similarly, in the work of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the reader and the characters (and possibly even the author himself!) are often confused as to what is real and what is not. But because the main impact of the books is psychological, the confusion and the superficial discontinuities are not off-putting (at least not to the millions of readers who made Murakami an international best-seller).

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"Don't confuse the reader" is one of the rules that exist to be broken. As usually, "when to break the rule? When you know what you're doing."
In this case, straighten it out immediately after he wakes up.

No branch, no tree, no sky. Just murk of the cavern, drip of water.
He shook his head to get rid of the last of sleep, and tried to recall the scraps of the dream, fleeting from his mind rapidly.

Deceiving the reader for no good reason is not good. But a small deceit that goes right hand in hand with protagonist's confusion, straightened out as soon as confusion vanishes, is good to improve immersion. A big deceit may make for a great plot twist, but it must be carefully engineered, both with foreshadowing and with clear reason. Definitely don't deceive the reader if the reader is the only one getting deceived - you may follow up with the same deceit the rest of characters fall for, but if there's an elephant in the room and everyone can see the elephant, don't inform the reader it's a gazelle, and then at the end laugh "ha ha, it was not a gazelle in the first place, it was always an elephant!"

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