The original post: /r/television by /u/James-Samuel17 on 2026-05-17 13:48:49+00:00.
I usually don’t care about dreams in TV shows or like I don’t really pay that much attention if they are the main focus of the episode. I think the only other TV show that really was capturing my attention with the dream sequences was The Sopranos, that really was amazing at using those dream sequences to let us into the characters’s psyche in a genius and realistic way (Especially the season 2 finale Funhouse, one of my favorite TV episodes). I was doing a rewatch of Buffy season 4 finale Restless for my paper on the character writing in the show Buffy (since it’s so well-crafted) and the episode just blew me away, it was legit art. It captured the weirdness and surrealism of all of our dreams perfectly. I once had a book, a Buffy Episode Guide, and in each episode chapter they had a section called “Restless” where they go into how that episode touched on the episode you’re reading about, either as a call forward or a callback. Almost every single episode of the series had a Restless entry. The writing for the characters is sharp and foreshadow so many things about them going forward in a way few shows do. Willow’s low self worth (with ideas of costumes in her dream), is something she brings up after her break up with Tara in Season 6: “Who am I Buffy? Just some girl… Tara didnt even know that girl”. Buffy’s rejection of the Slayer as an isolated entity that is not allowed to interact with humanity: “I walk, I talk, I shop, I sneeze.”- the mundane human acts combined with the poetic, “I don’t sleep on a bed of bones”, a reference to the graveyard. There is also foreshadowing, even with regard to source of the Slayer’s power in a throwaway line by Adam. (“You and me come by it another way”)
Xander’s dreams are rife with his issues of inadequate masculinity (with the hilarious “Spike is like a son to me” - implying that Giles would prefer to train someone he dislikes over Xander), being left behind, and always stuck in his parents basement. It also shows a definitive moving on from his early season feelings for Buffy - because he sees her playing in the sandbox, a childlike image, and she refers to him as a brother. The parts with Buffy in the desert are so beautiful and the engaging with the first slayer is so correct.
Amber Benson nails it too.Amazing storytelling and foreshadowing for the next chapter of the show. For me it stands as the midpoint of the series as a whole, as it explores in depth the characters’ identities up to that point and lays down a lot of foreshadowing for what they’ll go through and who they’ll become in the rest of the seasons.
It also clearly delineates the key periods of their lives in the show; adolescence, where life is (relatively) simple and going to plan; high school, college, fall in love and fight monsters with your friends, from the messy, unexpected reality of adulthood and how that often derails us from “the plan”; bereavement, saddling unexpected responsibilities, not getting that happily ever after you dream of and making what you got work. The show in all itself is actually quite good at dream sequences and in rewatch you can see new things pop up, it’s so good.
”You think you know, what you are, what’s to come. You haven’t even begun.”.