Characters in fiction are imaginary. Now extend the fact to characters that are imaginary within a work of fiction, and you get Dream People. They might be inhabitants of Dreamland or hallucinations, but that doesn't mean they don't have hopes and fears. If the real characters know about the imaginary nature of the Dream People, they may or may not stop caring about their well-being.
Ghosts are a separate trope, whereas virtual entities are covered by Inside a Computer System, Projected Man and Digital Avatar. Compare Imaginary Friend, Intangible Man. When a character like this manifests in the "real" world, that's Living Dream, and may become a full-fledged Tulpa. See also Dream Land and Dream Apocalypse.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Fairy Tail: The entire Cait Shelter guild ends up being an illusion caused by Robaul.
Comic Books
- Astro City:
- This is the secret origin of American Chibi, dreamed into existence by video game designer Marguerite Li. The Unbodied, a group of eldritch abominations, sent Marguerite dreams of monsters, provoking her to dream up American Chibi to oppose them — which was exactly what the Unbodied wanted. With a creature from Marguerite's dream-world in reality, the walls between the dream-world and reality would weaken, allowing the Unbodied to manifest in the material world as the monsters from Marguerite's dreams.
- The same is true of the Gentleman. He is created by the psychic powers of a girl from idealized memories of her real father, with his Kid Sidekick being her idea of an ideal older brother.
- There's also Loony Leo, a cartoon lion brought to life by a Mad Scientist, whose existence was initially maintained by people's belief in him.
- The Avengers: Hercules falls in love with a woman named Taylor Madison. It is eventually revealed to be an illusionary construct created by Zeus as part of a Batman Gambit to expose his wife Hera's plans to harm his son, knowing that she would target the person Hercules holds most dear. Despite his son's pleas, Zeus erases Madison from existence once she has served her purpose, leading to a violent falling out between Hercules and Zeus and the latter revoking his son's immortality.
- The Old Guard: When Andromeda first began dreaming of Noriko, she thought that she was a persistent dream figment since she'd never considered the possibility another immortal before then. She notes that it took her a thousand years to find Noriko due to the vagueness of the dreams, their initial distance from each other, and the fact that each was moving around during that time.
- Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker has many in the dream city of Genesis, including Ayo who serves as a guide for the Anderson brothers.
- Rogue: In her miniseries, Rogue meets a mysterious man immune to her draining touch who claims to be a "mutant dream". According to him, one day a woman who wanted a baby had a dream about giving birth and woke to a real child crying in her house, raising it in spite of her confusion. He's capable of crossing in between reality and a Dream Land and he seeks Rogue's help in stopping her mother from corrupting it and thus corrupting the waking minds of everyone. When Rogue stops her mother, it turns out that she was just a dream of her after the real one died.
Fan Works
- Dreamer: The dreams that Midoriya visits are populated by Alternate Selves of people that he knows, who act like their real-life counterparts.
- Infinity Train: Wake Me Up: Dreamscapes are populated by an "Avatar", which is what the dreamer themselves looks like within the dream, and then nameless apparitions that serve whatever purpose the dream is about.
- Into the Fog: The Velvet Room's inhabitants live in a space between dreams and reality. Rei even questions if they truly exist, but Igor confirms that they can leave the Velvet Room and enter the human world.
- The Nightmare House, a fanfiction of The Loud House, features some characters exclusive to the characters' nightmares:
- Leni has some talking spiders.
- Luna has a mean old lady.
- Lucy has some possessed-seeming dancers.
- Lana has a Mad Doctor named Dr. Mitchell.
- Lola has a mean judge.
- Lisa has an evil teddy bear.
- Lily has "Mor-Gaj", a Blob Monster based on her limited understanding of what a mortgage is.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: What Came After: The Rowlet and Litten in Popplio's dream appear to already know him.
Films — Animation
- Inside Out: The main characters are Anthropomorphic Personifications of a girl's emotions who live in her Mental World. Others also exist there, most notably Bing-Bong, her old Imaginary Friend.
Literature
- Chrestomanci: In "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream", an author who creates bestselling works based on her dreams gets writer's block when her Dream People go on strike for better working conditions, and has to go into Dreamland to negotiate with them.
- Dream-Land (1844): Anyone who is at home in Dream-Land could be a product of dreams. This includes the eidola, the ill angels, the ghouls, and "sheeted memories of the past". The first three are supernatural beings and they don't have to be native to Dream-Land, but just as well they might. The "sheeted memories of the past" are ghostly figures of people long gone that those visiting Dream-Land once knew. It is uncertain if they are the dead, living memories of those who passed, or mere imagery conjured up by dreaming minds.
- John Carter of Mars: In Thuvia, Maid of Mars, the inhabitants of Lothar can mentally create illusions of the ancient warriors of the city. One of the warriors is created so often that he becomes real.
- The Number Devil: The titular devil can only appear in Robert's dreams. Whenever Robert complains about being too tired for more math lessons, the devil points out that Robert is already sleeping; if he were awake, he wouldn't be having a dream, and the devil wouldn't be able to speak to him.
- Varjak Paw: Jalal, Varjak's ancestor, appears to him through his dreams to teach him the Way.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire: With the reveal in "Curse of the Tiger Women" that the show was All Just a Dream, it means that the only real characters that it has been following the entire series have been Brittas and to a lesser extent Helen. The majority of the staff, whilst based on the people on the train in the real world, have different roles and pairings in Brittas' dream, even occasionally dreaming themselves and having separate plots from Brittas. This doesn't even go into characters who don't appear to have real-world counterparts, such as the staff members who were written out earlier on and, despite their importance in this episode, Carole's twins Jessica and Emily.
- Dexter: Harry Morgan and Brian Moser in later seasons, since the resulting Dead Person Conversations are more to different aspects of his subconscious than the actual people themselves.
- Monsters (1988): "Bug House": May isn't seen or mentioned after Ellen wakes up from her nightmare in the ending, so it may be possible that Ellen never actually had a sister.
- The Sopranos: "Join the Club" and "Mayham": Tony interacts with numerous people in his dreams, including a recurrent bartender, several salespeople going to the same conference as him, Buddhist monks who are suing him, and an old woman whose face can't be seen. He also frequently speaks to his wife Carmela over the phone, but the voice is that of another woman.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- "Shadow Play": Several of the people in Adam Grant's Death Row nightmare are drawn from his real life. For instance, the priest who visits him before his execution is Father Beaman, an actual priest who died when he was ten years old, and the newspaper editor Paul Carson is the younger priest who replaced him. Adam is uncertain where he got the District Attorney Henry Ritchie, speculating that he may have been a teacher or a friend of his father's. Outside of his own life, he got his harmonica playing fellow prisoner Coley from a bad movie that he once saw.
- "Five Characters in Search of an Exit": Discussed. The bagpiper speculates that they are nothing more than characters in someone else's dream.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): "Shadow Play": Several of the people in Adam's nightmare are drawn from his real life. For instance, Father Grant, the priest who visits him before his execution, is his father, who has been dead for years in the real world. In the previous iteration of the dream, he was the judge, while he becomes the foreman of the jury in the next. Mark Ritchie's wife Carol, who is eager to see Adam dead, is his sister, who always hated him, and she is the only character in the dream whose role never changes. Outside of his own life, Adam got his fellow prisoner Flash from a bad movie that he once saw. Some of these become concerned that, when he will be executed, they will cease to exist.
Tabletop Games
- Changeling: The Lost: Incubi, ranging from simple "background players" to more aggressive concepts, such as Succubi, Night Hags, and a sentient play that convinces the actors to kill each other in a fit of jealousy.
- Genius: The Transgression: Manes are the inhabitants of pocket realities called Bardos, and are created from ideas and scientific models that society abandons. They're rather fragile outside Bardos.
- In Nomine: The ethereal spirits of the Marches consist in large part of Dream People. As a rule, every single dream creates an accompanying cast of ethereals, but these are essentially mindless puppets with no self-awareness; they simple act out their roles and vanish when the dream ends. Occasionally, usually by pure chance, one remains behind when the dream ends; these don't gain any particular intelligence, willpower or lucidity just by this action, and consequently end up repeating whatever very specific role they were made for until something stronger scoops them up and eats them for their Essence. The few exceptions, usually born from very vivid or lucid dreams, possess just enough awareness to scurry away to cover and try to find a way to sustain themselves. The most successful either become roving predators of other dreams or manage to tap into whatever cultural image spawned them to sustain themselves off of humanity's collective desires and beliefs. Especially clever, tenacious or lucky members of this last group can endure for a very long time and amass quite a lot of power, eventually maturing into avatars of major cultural concepts — some reached the status of full pagan gods, back in the day.
- Pathfinder: When an especially vivid dream ends, a part of its dreamer's consciousness may be "cleaved off" in the form of a central figure from that night's visions and wander off into the Ethereal Plane as an animate dream. By virtue of their nature, animate dreams are a varied lot and can resemble anything from a gibbering nightmare to a fantastical creature to a random person's relative. Most try to orbit near active dreamscapes to sustain themselves off of their emotions, but they're often bullied into service by more powerful denizens of the plane such as night hags, xill, or nightmare dragons.
- Princess: The Hopeful: The natives of the Dreamlands are spirits of Light essence divided into two categories, one of them basically being ghosts of dead light-attuned humans and the other composed of Anthropomorphic Personifications of the collective imagination of humanity.
Video Games
- The Dream Machine: Part of the game takes place inside dreams. The only people you can interact with for the majority of these sequences are examples of these.
- Eternal Sonata: Depending on the interpretation, practically everyone is one of these. The entire world as well as its inhabitants exist in a world based almost solely around music, which presumably only exists as Chopin's Dying Dream. Though as time goes on, even he begins to question that conclusion.
- Hollow Knight:
- Warrior Dreams and Dream-borne reflections of dead bosses occupy an ambiguous place between this and the souls of the dead. They speak and act like the souls of the dead, but the Seer's description of Warrior Dreams paints them as something more like a dream created in the form of a deceased individual than a "genuine" lingering spirit.
- Zotelings are bizarre Zote-like creatures that occur in exactly two places, both accessed only through the Dream Nail —Bretta's fantasies and a corner of the Godseekers' realm in the Dream World— where they manifest as psychic reflections' of Zote and Bretta's obsessions with Zote's fictitious heroic persona.
- LcdDem: Everyone in the game except Chie and the dead figure at the end appears in Chie's dreams.
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: It turns out that everyone except Link is just a dream of the Wind Fish.
- LSD: Dream Emulator: The strange beings of the game, especially the mysterious Grey Man who intermittently appears from thin air and drifts toward the screen, waking you up if it catches you.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The non-Material Dark Pieces are copies of Nanoha and crew based on their memories, thoughts, and wishes during A's. They fade away upon losing.
- Marathon Expanded Universe: In Eternal 1.3, the first four "success dreams" are populated with apparitions of the Pfhor, the W'rkncacnter somnia from Pathways into Darkness, the Jjaro orbs, and the Jjaro themselves, all of whom show up with 50% opacity (as do players themselves). All of these can attack, but can't damage, players; they can, however, damage each other (or themselves), and players can damage them as well. They also drop items when killed (unless blown up or incinerated). Players can only take damage on these levels from other players (or themselves).
- Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: Practically everybody has a dream equivalent to them, many enemies are only in the dream world, and certain characters such as the Dream Stone's Spirit only appear in dreams. That's not even getting into the Pi'illos themselves!
- Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop: Meena is explicitly stated to be a guide to the Dream World, lives on the dreams of others, and can manipulate the Dream World in ways such as creating duplicates of other characters.
- Sonic Dream Team: Ariem is a resident of the dream world and guardian of the Reverie, a mysterious artifact that turns dreams into reality. As a result of Eggman using its power to bring his dreams to life, she puts him to sleep and sends Sonic and his friends into Eggman's dreams to stop his plans of achieving world domination.
- Yume Nikki: The protagonist spends the enitre game by herself in her bedroom, and the only thing of substance you can do there is go to sleep. This means the only characters you're able to meet and interact with throughout all of Yume Nikki are made-up ones from within the various sub-worlds of her dreams. These are things like walking clocks, faceless technicolor people, walking whistles, deformed bird witches, pixel sculptures, mouths in wigs, ghosts, candle people, and even a few Retraux people. None of them ever speak (at most, just making a sound effect when you interact with them), and only a handful actually do anything aside from standing around, making these "people" more like interactive props than actual characters.
Webcomics
- 9th Elsewhere: Carmen's elsewhere is inhabited by figments, which represent different aspects of her personality, such as Optimism, Vanity, and Creativity.
- El Goonish Shive: During the "Parable" storyline, Arthur turns out
to be one of these while Mr. Tensaided is real.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Zimmy's mental constructs. Disconcertingly, they're not quite people; their faces are scribbles that vaguely resemble QR codes, except not.
Web Original
- This Man is about a mysterious man who, since January 2006, has purportedly appeared in the dreams of over 2,000 people around the world. None of them are connected in any meaningful way and no living people resembling this man have ever been found. There have been many theories about who he is or why they dream about him, but nothing has been definitive. Although it was later found that the whole thing was just an elaborate hoax as part of a social experiment.
Web Video
- Lucids: Notable for being one of the main components of the show: the people inside of dreams are fully sentient, and capable of having dreams of their own. And then those dreams can have people in them, who have their own dreams, and so on.
Western Animation
- Clarence: "In Dreams" takes place mainly within Clarence's dreams, complete with characters who seem to exist only there and try to persuade him not to wake up.
- Martha Speaks: Sometimes when a dream happens, there will be an original dream character who is not a real-life character, although they'll usually be based on real-life characters.
- "Dogs From Space" takes place in Martha's dream, where she dreams up a dog to save from a dognapper and be friends with.
- "Little Bo's Sheep": Bo, the sheep, and the farmer turn out to all be from Martha's dream.
- Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker: The coal shovelers on the train are the only characters who show up that aren't defined in some way as Dreamers.
