Doctor Who: 12 Unanswered Questions From Last Christmas

10. How Much Of It Was A Dream?

Basically... most of it. The dream probably started, for the Doctor at least, at the end of Death in Heaven when he woke up to the sound of Santa Claus knocking on the TARDIS door. For Clara it all began when his sleigh crash landed on her rooftop which means that everything that followed was part of the dream, and subsequently a dream within a dream, and so on so forth. Pretty confusing stuff, especially for Christmas Day, but it does make absolute sense when you start to break it down. Honest. As such, all of the characters - that's Shona, Professor Albert, Fiona Bellows and Ashley Carter - were absolutely real, they just weren't really at the Arctic Base, if that makes sense. In the real world they were all sleeping soundly in their beds - well, Ashley was, Shona who was napping on the sofa and Fiona who had drifted off in her wheelchair. Their respective dreams had been networked by the Dream Crabs to bring them together on an Arctic expedition in which they were aided by everybody's Christmas hero, Santa Claus, on the North Pole. But more on that later. The only real parts of the episode, therefore, were the scenes in which the characters were waking up, including the final moments in which Clara rose from her slumber and decided to rejoin the Doctor on his travels. The fact it was all a dream doesn't distinguish its important, though. It all did really happen, it just didn't really really happen. You're asleep now, aren't you?