: Re: Can dream reveals make good climaxes for a POV’s internal struggle? Dream twists just spoil our senses of disbelief. I can see how that can be excetuted carelessly, but if done for the need

@Kaufman555

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I'd pull back from the "dream gotcha" because it feels like a red herring. There are audience gotchas which are the cliche of all bad television, and there are character gotchas where the character had everything wrong and now it is too late to change.

To be an effective character moment, Adrian needs a more profound reaction than "Oh whew! It was all just a dream." That would definitely be anti-climactic. To treat the moment as something the reader should care about, runs the risk of painting Adrian as a bigger victim. "I felt so bad when I imagined that everyone else was brutally murdered, why did this happen to meeee?"

That would be tone-deaf in my opinion, valuing Adrian's vicarious worry as narratively more important than the other characters being clinically depressed, being homicidally paranoid, and (potentially) getting murdered by their brother-in-law.

This should be a call to action, not a gotcha. One way that could work is if Adrian has actually been avoiding thinking about that nightmare outcome, then ignoring it, and then repressing it. The dream would not be an audience gotcha because there would be cracks in Adrian's world the reader can see, but it could be a character gotcha where Adrian is confronted by the thing he has been denying.

There are other ways to show this event to Adrian that don't involve a television-style dream-sequence. Adrian could experience it as a waking dream (an hallucination or PTSD trigger). He could hear about a real incident and be convinced it involved his wife and brother, becoming inconsolable. Or his fear could grow slowly, as he sees warning signs in mundane exchanges between the family that point to disaster. He could also be briefed on an unrelated court case handled through his law practice, where the parallels are all too clear. Any of these would feel more "psychologically grounded" and less deus ex machina.

There is the added benefit that Adrian is perhaps also suffering from his own issues (maybe he is a good lawyer, but a lousy husband and brother), and maybe it's not too late for him to change his role in the family situation.

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