I know that Dallas did it first and is probably the most infamous piece of fiction that took place in a dream, but it’s done best in Mario 2. It wasn’t intentionally done well, because dreams in any piece of media is a horrible idea and the sign of a person who isn’t creative. With hindsight, Mario 2’s story is brilliant, the whole idea of them scraping the real Mario 2 because it was too hard, then taking another game in Doki Doki Panic and just putting Mario characters in it, it just all seems like a bad dream, doesn’t it? If you want to go even deeper, the second Legend of Zelda was that weird side scroller that was just odd and not really that good. So maybe that is a dream too? Nintendo has a weird thing about sequels, Starfox 2 on the SNES was never released, even though the game was fully finished.
Breaking Bad was the opposite of the Legend of Zelda 2. It was a beautiful piece of art with an even better ending. Everything about the ending was nearly perfect, I could wax poetically about it for ages, but our very own Dave Walsh has done that enough on here, plus I don’t want to steal his thunder. There joke going around about how Walt would enter the witness protection program and he started his life as Hal in Malcolm in the Middle, that was funny, the first time I heard it. It was then beaten into the ground and everyone would begin to pass it off as their own joke, if you were one of these people, I hope you’re only allowed to drink store brand soda for the rest of your life. Anyways, it appears that the fine people of Breaking Bad have caught onto The Malcolm in the Middle joke and borrowed a story writing cliche in the “it was all a dream” plot device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVxWS7dudCM