Another frequently found possibility for explaining the fantastic intrusion is to ascribe to it the mode of the dream. Actually, this leads us back to the era of silent cinema, proving that the idea of metaleptic transgressions in comedy film is not a mere invention of postmodern cinema. In Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), a film projectionist who wants to become a detective one day falls asleep whhile he is at work, and in his dream he approaches the screen and then jumps into the film that is just being shown. Similarly, in Delirious (Tom Mankiewicz, 1991), soap opera writer Jack Gable (John Candy) finds himself in his own TV show after an accident, but as the story reaches its climax he suddenly awakens in the studio set, only to realise that all that he has experienced was but a dream during his blackout. All these examples make clear that usually some sort of explanation is required to make plausible the otherwise illogical and paradoxical transgressions of fictional metalepsis.
