In Doctor Who, dreams don’t tend to be a good thing. As something with an otherworldly quality we struggle to understand, they’re far too tempting a topic for Doctor Who. The meaning of dreams in Doctor Who generally falls into three categories: manipulation, premonition and suppressed identity.
Manipulation is the most common and the biggest one. The two episodes that focus on dreams (Amy’s Choice and Last Christmas) both use dreams as weapons of manipulation for the antagonist. The Dream Lord traps his victims in multiple dreams and forces them to choose “reality” when in fact all of it is a dream. The dream crabs induce a dream state as a form of anaesthetic to trick their victims into dreaming fake realities so they don’t realise they’re dying.
In the Shakespeare Code, the Carrionites plant ideas in Shakespeare’s head as dreams that will lead to their release. In Victory of the Daleks, the Daleks plant false memories in Bracewell to make him think he dreamt them up so they can disguise themselves as Ironsides. In Name of the Doctor, the dream isn’t the manipulation but rather the product of the manipulation as Vastra tricks Clara into entering a dream state by reading her letter so they can communicate. Interestingly this raises a point about dreams in the Doctor Who universe that Last Christmas also uses: time travel is possible in dreams.
In Day of the Moon, Madame Kovarian checks on Amy and comments that she thinks she’s dreaming. Amy’s adventures in the first half of Series 6 are all “dreams” in that Kovarian is tricking Amy (and the Doctor and Rory) into thinking Amy is really there when in fact she is actually pregnant and captive at Demon’s Run. This also leads us onto the second purpose of dreams in Doctor Who - dreams are used to give hints and glimpses of a character’s true identity when they are living a lie.
This is first introduced in Human Nature when John Smith dreams “quite often” that he’s the Doctor. Of course this is in fact his real life. It’s an effective and moving tool for the writer to compare and contrast John Smith with the Doctor that works all too well resulting in a story where the ‘death’ of John Smith will move many to tears. The Next Doctor revisits this idea (and many others) with Jackson Lake having nightmare flashes to his real life before he deluded himself into thinking he’s the Doctor.
The Snowmen refers to Simeon as a dreamer and his snowmen as a dream (“You poured your darkest dreams into a snowman and look! Look what it became” - the 11th Doctor. “Now the dream outlives the dreamer and can never die. Once I was the puppet - Now I pull the strings!” - The Great Intelligence) Here the ‘dream’ isn’t revealing a suppressed identity but hiding one - hiding from Simeon that he himself is the Great Intelligence. The most tragic example of this comes in Asylum of the Daleks where at the end, the Doctor realises Oswin Oswald has dreamt up a new reality for herself “because the truth was too terrible.” All of Oswin’s perspective in the episode is a “dream” and she is actually a dalek.
The other use for dreams in Doctor Who is as a dark warning or premonition. It’s an obvious use that the show only deploys in the biggest of situations. The End of Time has nightmares foretelling the Master’s return “bleeding through”. In the Pandorica Opens, Vincent van Gogh has nightmares/visions that lead him to paint the TARDIS exploding as a warning for the Doctor. Interestingly, in the Pyramid at the End of the World: Bill explains the events of Extremis to Penny as a dream the Doctor had as the easiest way for her to understand. Extremis is basically a premonition/warning of the Monks’ imminent invasion so it works the same way.
There is a way that dreams appear in Doctor Who as a positive force (albeit rarely) and that is when they don’t actually appear. The concept of dreams discussed in Doctor Who can be positive: in Day of the Doctor, the Doctor tells the audience that he dreams of home. Even here though the message is tainted and arguably a premonition since his actual return home in Hell Bent is not a happy experience for him.
Dreams are the enemy in Doctor Who. Clara tells the children in the Snowmen that the Doctor’s job is to stop all the children in the world ever having bad dreams and this sums up his relationship with dreams pretty well. The only people allowed to have nightmares are monsters and they have nightmares about him (Girl in the Fireplace.) The Chibnall era has yet to touch upon dreams so it would be interesting to see whether his approach remains as negative or if he finds a new purpose for dreams.
Note on Listen: Some of you will have noticed I didn’t mention Listen at all when that deals with dreams. The 12th Doctor theorises everyone at some point has the same nightmare about something under the bed. It doesn’t seem to fit into any of the three categories (although it is certainly a negative look at dreams) and this is perhaps for one simple reason: there is no dream. The only version of the dream we ‘really’ see is the Doctor’s as a child and it isn’t actually a dream - it’s Clara under the bed! It does however gives us once again, a positive way of talking about dreams: “this is just a dream but very clever people can hear dreams.”
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