Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!
There's nothing better than a dream. In fiction, anyway. In reality, there's a lot of great stuff out there that's much better at being internally consistent or making sense or having a direct tangible impact on reality. But in fiction, there are very few things more versatile and convenient for a writer than knocking a character unconscious. There's no end to the problems it can solve!
If you wanna get a character from Point A to Point B without all the intervening logistics and rigamarole, try the patented Alighieri manuver; just knock the character out and have them wake up somewhere else! If you want an easy scene transition or to clearly signal to your audience that a big dramatic fight is over, just have one of the characters tip over from exhaustion or a previously concealed injury to segue cleanly from high-octane action to a slower more contemplative form of drama. If you want to show why a new powerup isn't going to work as a be-all-end-all problem solver, you can just have the newly powered-up character pass out from the strain, signaling that it's flashy and rad but definitely not good for them!
Knocking a character out is an incredibly convenient way to bundle a scene transition with a smooth narrative justification for the camera to go away for a little while, and you can get away with all sorts of narrative reshuffling while the POV character is conveniently unavailable, shifts and repositionings that don't necessarily make a TON of sense if you think about them too hard. The implied visuals of a character painstakingly lugging a freshly-KO'd protagonist from Point A to Situation B only gets funnier with complexity and time, but you don't have to think about them too hard because they're happening in the coma zone. It's an automatic handwave for all kinds of logistics!
And once the character is unconscious, there's all sorts of things a writer can do. A dream is a direct window into a character's subconscious, which is a goldmine from a development standpoint, but dreams can also be the setting for a non-status-quo-breaking adventure, safely compartmentalized from real-world rules or consequences. In fantastical settings, it can hide a telepathic communication from another character or any sort of psychic infodump that might otherwise be difficult to get them to learn. When a character is dreaming, they might remember revelatory parts of their past that the audience hasn't been privy to yet, or in a nightmare, they can experience all kinds of wild or horrifying things that would be impossible in the reality of canon because they'd have inevitable long-term consequences.
The power of dreams in fiction is almost absolute, which is why the "Surprise! It was all a dream!" ending is such a cop-out, and why the "The Main Character was in a coma all along" theory is pretty much meaningless because it's universally applicable to all fiction. Dreams are powerful things, but they're also inherently less meaningful than almost any other aspect of storytelling, so painting the entire story with the Dream Brush has a tendency to dramatically reduce its impact, whereas peppering in occasional dreams adds some flexible subplot fun to the adventure without undercutting the stability of the scaffolding itself.
And there's an innate drama to the simple act of a character losing consciousness. Aside from being generally a bad thing unless they're literally just going to sleep for the night, if they're among friends, those friends are liable to take care of them, possibly with bonus medical drama if necessary, and nothing makes characters chattier about their deep-seated and carefully-concealed feelings like talking them out to someone who is for sure too asleep to hear them. And if the character is among bad guys, they're likely to wake up captured somewhere, possibly even full-on damseled. In short, writers have all sorts of reasons to potentially wanna clock a protagonist on the head and send them off to Sleepytime Junction, and one such reason is to put them in a Character Development Coma!
A Character Development Coma is, in simple terms, when a character gets knocked out into a prolonged dream sequence of some kind, and in that dream sequence, they undergo Character Development. They work through some lingering issues or conquer some fear or negotiate a truce with their superpowered evil side or otherwise solve an internal problem that was being a nuisance. When they wake up, refreshed and ready, they've resolved this issue without any outside help and have undergone Character Development, completely insulated from any characters that might've complicated the process!
Character Development Comas can be large or small, positive or negative, sometimes the character just has a symbolically meaningful encounter in a dream that makes them thoughtful when they wake up, or they might go on a lengthy internal odyssey through a myriad of highly complex imaginary situations that takes them from one end of their mindscape to the other. They might actually wake up fully-actualized and chill, or might be driven to a frenzy by a nightmare that haunts them into the waking world. Anything can happen in a dream, and that means the character can realistically experience almost anything that might represent or expose an interesting side to their inner conflict.
A Character Development Coma can take many forms, but they almost always follow a clear four-step process.
Step One is to Knock the Character Out. This can be achieved in many ways: Injury, Illness, Poison, Possession, Overtaxing Superpowers, Sheer Exhaustion, Getting Clocked on the head by a Bad Guy… Frankly, it's amazing these guys are EVER awake, considering the myriad of ways they can get knocked into the Easy Writing Zone. The circumstances of this are broadly irrelevant to the Character Development Coma, but writing convention generally restricts this to a scenario where the character us either alone or among friends and allies. Getting knocked out and grabbed by bad guys tends to seque into a different set of subplots and the KO'd character doesn't generally get to dream much in the process.
Step Two is to Get Inside their Head. Now that the character is KO'd, let them really mull over their problems. This is typically done by populating their coma dream with characters, real or imagined, who embody their conflicts or different sides of their internal debate and are eager to weigh in. Some of them might be supportive, others confrontational. The character might find themself dealing with their own past self or a dark reflection. Manifestations of inner anxieties might take the form of known antagonists, guidance might come from dead mentors and parental figures. There can be a degree of ambiguity over how real some of these guys are. It could just be a manifestation of someone's moral compass taking the form of their beloved mentor, or it could be their actual ghost turning up to help out. Just another facet of the unbounded freedom found in the Dream Sequence Zone.
Step Three is to Reach a Conclusion. The Character Development Coma ends when the character has some sort of change of heart. And it's important to note that this change is not always good. The character must wake up with a different attitude than the one they passed out in, but that isn't always a revelation about their character arc or a new understanding of an uncontrollable superpower ir a recognition of a fear or something, Sometimes, it's something dubious, like a bad coping mechanism, or a character tormented by nightmares concluding that they have to protect their friends by doing everything alone or doing something really morally questionable, or stuff like that. But correct or not, these guys reach some sort of internal turning point, and that takes them to…
Step Four, Waking Them Up! The character, having completed their mandatory time off, re-enters the land of real plot developments and physical consequences, now with a newly recalibrated perspective on life and their place in it. They almost never have trouble waking up after they've solved the internal issue, by the way. The coma is basically cosmetic and goes away on its own once they're suitably resolved. They've solved some internal problem or realized something important or gotten a pep-talk from a ghost and they have officially undergone Character Development while safely partitioned away from the real story.
Now, this trope is unbelievably useful, and it's very convenient in a lot of ways. When a character is struggling internally, it can be difficult to clearly show this to the audience while keeping them in-character. Most characters are not gonna be willing or able to give a comprehensive blow-by-blow of their exact internal conflict or their thought process underlying it, no matter how well the writer understands it. The average character is unlikely to talk like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy, and that problem is only worsened when other characters join the dynamic.
The conflicted character's allies might have their own insights into what's going on with them, and those can be interesting and revelatory in their own way, but especially when a character is in turmoil, their communication with other characters is liable to become conflict unusually quickly. When a character is upset and unsure, they might be quicker to anger than usual, or even worse, if figuring out how they're feeling and why, which means even well-meaning and why, which means even well-meaning and potentially revelatory conversations could kick off a communications breakdown and lead to some spicy character drama, but not the desired outcome of getting the character through their character development in a way that's clear and comprehensible to the audience.
One way to work around this is to take a direct peak into their headspace and thought process, which is difficult to pull off outside of prose writing. Not impossible, just not what most visual media is designed for. Prose writing lets the writer directly state what a character is thinking and feeling with a level of fidelity that basically no other art form can match, and unless you want to let the character vocally narrate their innermost thoughts, there are very few ways to show-don't-tell the exact complexities of what a character is thinking. You can usually get across what they're feeling, depending on the acting and visual execution involved, but the audience usually needs to do some analytical work to extrapolate why they're feeling that way and what exactly they might be dealing with on the inside.
A dream sequence is one way to visually portray a character's internal mindset very clearly and unsubtly. If a character is grappling with an existential fear, you can just show them dealing with that fear. If they're stressed or angry or worried, they can have that conversation with a dream character a lot more easily and painlessly than they would a real one. But this powerful tool has that caveat that it only makes sense if the character is dreaming. Most stories won't segue into "imagine spots" without warning and usually restrict themselves to showing what is literally physically happening with only minor symbolic alterations and augmentations. Dramatic or Romatic slow-mo, non-diagetic sparkles and roses around a love interest, stuff like that. Full-blown imagined unrealities tend to be clearly partitioned away from the actual events of the story to avoid confusing the audience, and that means a dream sequence can't just be pulled out of nowhere for a zero-effort peak into a character's inner world.
But the good news is most people need to sleep regularly, which means the writer has a golden opportunity to check in on how the character is thinking and feeling in a clear, visual representation roughly once a day! It's clean, it's convenient, and it's a lot clearer for the audience than any number of Spicy Character Arguments would be. An external problem we expect to be solved externally with a camera pointed at the characters involved and how they interact with the problem and with each other. An internal problem? It makes sense that we'd want to point the camera inside.
Now Character Development Comas do come in a few different varieties depending on the character and the type of development.
The most mundane version is simply to be Chewed Out By The Subconscious, a dream with no deeper underlying reality where the character simply deals with manifestations of their internal fears and pains. This kind of Character Development Coma can happen to anyone with no supernatural factors required, but it can still be very meaningful to get a direct look at what exactly has been stressing this character out. They usually confront their problem directly and wake up better and happier for it, or in some cases, they wake up freaked out and upset from the nightmare and more inclined to do something dumb, which is also a form of character development!
One step up the supernatural scale is the Coma-Phone, a dream where a character is contacted by someone. A deity, a friend, the ghost of a loved one, the Big Bad… The possibilities are pretty much endless. The purpose of THIS character development coma is to give them new information it would otherwise be difficult for them to receive. It's a little shaky on the character development side of things, since broadly it's an entirely external shift, but the character that wakes up with the new information will likely wake up with some new driving purpose or the oomph of a pep talk from the coma-phone buddy, so it still fits the broad shape of the trope.
In more contentious scenarios, we might get a Battle in the Center of the Mind, where the character's coma involves literally throwing hands with something or someone that's invaded their mindscape. This version is most commonly found in cases where the character is being literally possessed or something, but it can also happen if the character is fighting some kind of existential or physical battle. For instance, if they're sick or poisoned or greviously injured, the local healer might say something like "We've done all we can, now the rest is up to them", and it'll cut to the inside of their head where they are punching their dark reflection or a copy of the bad guy or a metaphorical representation of death or whatever, with the implication that if they win, they get to wake up. This can be a metaphorical representation of an inner conflict in a more visually interesting form, or it can be a literal metaphysical conflict with some inner darkness or invading force. This allows the writer to choreograph a potentially completely impossible fight scene in the theater of the mind, which is a rare treat. Also about like, half the time, it turns out the dark reflection inner demon thing the protagonist was fighting was just basically testing them and their will to live and wasn't actually malicious and it'll like…smile proudly when it's defeated. I don't know, it's kind of a thing that happens.
And it can segue into the fourth category, a Powerup Powernap. This is a dream where the character figures out how to unlock some kind of hidden potential and when they wake upm they have new powers, or a better control over the old ones. This can be structured as a Battle in the Center of the Mind, but it has a different purpose; the character winning doesn't just wake them up, it tangibly rewards them with a boost. Now, this is where things get a little bit… Eh… Shaky, I guess? There are cases where this makes perfect sense! Sometimes this character has had a power for a while that they're slowly figuring out how to control or unlock or use safely, and the one barrier of entry seems to be that they haven't figured it out yet. In these cases, Powerup Powernaps make a lot of sense. They sleep on the problem, look at it from a new angle, maybe fight their doppelganger a little bit, and then when they wake up they have a new perspective on an existing power. The power itself doesn't come out of nowhere, their control of it just improves, potentially to the point where they can use it in a completely new way. But… Sometimes… You get stories where a character goes to sleep… has some symbolic dreams… and wakes up with an entirely new power… and no real explanation for how it got there. Now the reason this gets a little shaky is because it feels like it makes sense in the moment. A Character Development Coma can be a very fraught process, the character goes through a lot of internal conflict and suffering. It feels like an arc. It kind of is an arc. But it's not an arc that's happening in the real world. So when we see a character struggle and fight for something and be rewarded by the story with some kind of powerup, it feels like a structure of story telling we're accustomed to, and we can lose track of the fact that we don't actually know… how it happened. Or why other characters can't just take a nap and wake up with superpowers… Y'know?
The Character Development Coma is essentially a character development speedrun. Within the safe boundaries of a dream, the character can sleep their way through a number of revelation milestones, have a moment of self-actualization against a completely hallucinatory threat, and wake up with a greater understanding of themselves and potentially new skills and abilities without having to play all that out in real time or with allies around to potentially contribute or muck it up. They might be visited by an empowering entity or a friendly ghost or, like, a psychic emanationof the bad guy or some other problem. They play out an internal plotline front to back that can be fun to watch, but because it is all a dream, the impact it can plausibly have on the plot around it is limited to the scope of just the character having the dream. And when those developments are limited to the character feeling better, thinking some things through or deciding something they hadn't made up their mind over, that's pretty easy to justify. But it's easy to get caught up in it.
A dream sequence has near-infinite possibility and a character can undergo a very compelling solo arc in there, but if all their problems get solved in the coma zone, that can in some ways deprive the writer and the audience of seeing those problems get solved in the real story, where there are actual stakes and other characters they can be interacting with. For all my talk about how efficient it can be to speed through a character arc in a dream sequence, a lot of stories aren't built for efficiency, and sometimes half the fun of a character arc is exactly how long it takes. And it can be fun to let a character work through a bunch of stuff internally, then turn around and have to apply that development to a more complicated and potentially unforgiving reality, to see how the internal lessons they learned help them with messy interpersonal dynamics or large-scale villainous threats.
A Character Development Coma can solve an internal problem, but stories are made of lots of problems, internal and external. And a solution that makes sense in the hypothetical theater of the mind might struggle when it comes up against the complexities of a messy reality. You can get a lot of drama out of a character who thinks they've worked out all their character development problems, because no matter how clean and pretty their dream sequences might have been, there are always more problems to solve.
Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.