Perchance To Dream (The Twilight Zone) - Plot

Plot

Edward Hall (Conte), a man with a severe heart condition, believes that if he falls asleep, he'll die. On the other hand, keeping himself awake will put too much of a strain on his heart. He believes this due to his constantly overactive imagination. He believes that his imagination is severely out of control, to the point where he'd be able to see and feel something that was not there. Due to this, his heart condition is especially dangerous. He seeks out the aid of psychiatrist Rathmann and explains that he has been dreaming in chapters, as if in a movie serial. In his dreams, Maya, a carnival dancer, lures him onto a roller coaster in a funhouse in an attempt to scare him to death. Realizing that Rathmann cannot help him, Hall starts to go, but stops when he realizes that Rathmann's receptionist looks exactly like Maya. Terrified, he runs back into Rathmann's office and jumps out of the window.

In reality, the doctor calls his receptionist into his office, where Hall lies on the couch, his eyes closed. Rathmann tells the receptionist that Hall had come in, lain down, immediately fell asleep, and then a few moments later let out a scream and died. "Well, I suppose there are worse ways to go", the doctor says philosophically. "At least he died peacefully..." Rod Serling's narration then reveals that in a split-second, a person can dream up a thirty-minute dream.

Read more about this topic:  Perchance To Dream (The Twilight Zone)

Famous quotes containing the word plot:

    Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
    why are they no help to me now
    I want to make
    something imagined, not recalled?
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.
    Jane Rule (b. 1931)

    We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.
    —E.M. (Edward Morgan)