It’s All A Bit Dreamy-Weamy…

Guest contributor Dom Townsend looks at Moffat’s use of dreams and ponders a theory.

‘It’s a dream, Oswin. You dreamed it for yourself because the truth was too terrible.’

When we were first introduced to the lovely Jenna Coleman all the way back in 2012 as the enigmatic, cheeky and unfortunately Dalek Oswin Oswald, we were also introduced to something else – the theme of dreams. Since then, this theme hasn’t always been obvious, rather lurking, hiding in wait, and coming to the forefront more recently in Doctor Who. Of course, this theme isn’t new to the show: the last human beings at the end of the universe dreamed of Utopia and their salvation; the Doctor’s darkness manifested itself in the Dream Lord, who used this darkness to manipulate the Doctor and his friends into making an impossible choice. The theme itself isn’t altogether revolutionary; however, I feel its significance grew with the introduction of our latest companion.

‘Clara sometimes asks me if I dream…’

It’s a question that’s never been put to the Doctor before, and an interesting one at that. A small point, but interesting. Back in The Doctor’s Wife, Rory asked the Doctor whether he had a room, as in a bedroom. It’s an odd thought, but one would think that with a ship that can travel through all of time and space and stretches on indefinitely within the four walls of a 1960s police box, the Doctor would find time between episodes to settle down and have a kip.

However, the question was left unanswered, the concept of the Doctor’s own sleeping and therefore dreaming left ambiguous, until the final scene of The Day of the Doctor, when we were all reduced to hopeless fangirling one more time as the Doctor stepped out among his past selves and stared off into space with that silly grin of his. However, in this case I believe the Doctor was referring to a broader sense of the word ‘dream’ – he dreams about where he’s going, the same as everyone else. If, from this moment on, he’s been dreaming about Gallifrey, then this scene could become even more pivotal and significant with a certain theory of mine…

‘I think everybody, at some point in their lives, has the exact same nightmare.’

Now we reach Series 8. Billed as a darker series for a darker Doctor, it did indeed have a darker and more focussed tone than that of, say, Series 7B, and no episode made this more apparent than the critically-acclaimed, and personal favourite of mine, Listen. In this 45 minutes of almost utter perfection (seriously, I love this episode), the Doctor becomes fascinated by the concept of nightmares; in particular, one that he believes every single person on Earth has at some point. This fascination leads to him wanting to explore Clara’s timeline to discover the exact night she herself experienced the nightmare, an experiment which naturally veers off-course into young Rupert Pink’s orphanage bedroom.

Even after the Doctor has abandoned this nightmare concept to go searching for the very creature he believes causes these nightmares, or at least has a hand in their existence, the whole episode has a dreamlike quality to it, from the dark and moody lighting, candles in the TARDIS, the editing and all-round atmosphere of THAT final scene – the episode is like nothing else ever done on Doctor Who. But the dreamy-weaminess doesn’t end there.

‘He’s not real Clara. None of this is real.’

Last Christmas is my favourite Christmas special since A Christmas Carol – funny, dark, and an excellent study and progression of the relationship between the Doctor and his best friend Clara. Two parts Inception, one part Tim Burton, with just a dash of pop-culture references and a faint whiff of Amy’s Choice all wrapped up in a glorious Doctor Who package, the episode explored the very nature of dreams in a way the show hadn’t done before, along with all their complexities and the dangers they could present, especially when used as an anaesthetic to distract one from an alien crab sucking the life out of one’s brain.

What I like about the quote above in particular, however, is how it mirrors the dialogue all the way back in Asylum of the Daleks, when the Doctor faced a Dalek-fied Oswin Oswald and had to break the news to her. ‘It wasn’t real. It was never real,’ a defiant Doctor announces, with the sense of disappointment in his voice when he discovered he’d failed to save one more person. This brings the whole dream theme full circle, drawing parallels between Jenna Coleman’s first and what would have been her last appearance, had she decided not to continue with the show. However, I believe the Moff isn’t done yet.

The Doctor: The TARDIS is sitting outside.
Clara: So?
The Doctor: So all of time and all of space is sitting out there in a big, blue box. Please, don’t even argue.

Cast your mind back, dear reader, to the final shot of 2014’s Christmas Special: the camera pans over the window sill, and through the window we witness the Doctor and Clara exchange some final words before darting off into the TARDIS, next stop, everywhere. And as the focus changes, we’re left with the image of a single tangerine sitting on the window sill, a way for Steven Moffat to finish off the episode with a light finger poking a wee bit of fun, a warm smile probably etched on his face as he typed the last words of the script. But what if that warm smile was actually a malicious grin, one that grows on his face whenever he’s concocting his latest schemes and plot twists (as I imagine he does whenever he’s writing Doctor Who or Sherlock)? What if – and it’s a big if – he was planting the seed for the biggest plot twist of Series 9, and one which he claims we won’t see coming?

We all know where tangerines come from. They come from Father Christmas. They’re his signature gift, and in the world of Doctor Who, at least in the case of Last Christmas, sweet Papa Crimbo is always popping up in dreams as a way of ensuring the dreamer knows they are, in fact, dreaming. So, how did that tangerine get there? The Doctor woke Clara up, didn’t he? They went off together once more to see the universe, the Kantrofarri defeated. But what if they didn’t wake up?

Let’s look at the facts. Clara awoke at last, young again, in the same building she’d been in throughout the episode. This building seemed, to me at least, to be a different one to her flat seen from The Time of the Doctor onwards, and at the beginning featured a stair lift which, for all we know, was still there at the end of the episode. So why was the building different to her old flat? Maybe she’d moved since her last meeting with the Doctor; it had been six months, and perhaps Danny had left her a bit of money, and perhaps she fancied a change of scene? But when she awakens she is still wearing that nightie, the same one she’d been wearing throughout the episode when she was technically an old lady dreaming of a younger self.

So perhaps the big twist of Series 9 will be when, just before the huge climactic showdown between the TARDIS duo and whatever/whoever is threatening to destroy the earth, Clara will just… wake up. Obviously I’m sure the Moff could sprinkle a bit more magic on it to avoid the completely clichéd ‘and they woke up and it was all a dream.’ Or maybe it links in all the way back to the Doctor’s dream of reaching Gallifrey… somehow? Perhaps I’m reading too much into a simply tangerine, but this is just my theory, a hypothetical brain fart if you will. If you have any theories or spot any glaring holes in mine you’d like to point out, say something nice in the comments below! Thank you for reading.