All through my teaching career, when I had to set imaginative writing tasks for my students I absolutely forbade them to end their stories “… and I woke up and it was all a dream…”
I thought that was the most feeble and pathetic ending… and if when I was doing exam marking I had an essay which ended in the way then I would dock a mark or two because I just thought it showed a lack of planning, imagination and originality. So you can guess what my feelings were when I came across something I had written when I was eleven, for the school magazine which ended with me waking up from a dream…
Lois Elsden 