Also, I always find it bizarre that the mentally ill part came out of Denny O'Neil's run. Before that, you could dismiss the problems as the only solution to the worst possible crime, but once Arkham appears and becomes a plot device, it's horrific.

Oh, and also, in that dream, commissioner Gordon was friends with Bruce Wayne, as a young boy, had also been traumatized by witnessing a crime. Bruce Wayne responded by donating to the police and to, like, midnight basketball and youth community centers and stuff like that.

I had a dream once that Batman wasn't real. What happened is that commissioner Gordon witnessed the murder of his family, and he ended up with a bunch of trauma that he did not deal with effectively. So he would go out to do cop stuff, sometimes he would witness a crime and dissociate super hard, and he would beat the criminal to a bloody pulp and believe that he was standing far away watching a guy dressed as a bat do that.

But that's what all billionaires do, one way or another. (Harm the poor and the mentally ill.)

Also, part of the disconnect is that when he started, Bruce Wayne had trust-fund kid money, not industrial tycoon money, which is why back in the day he fought crime in a costume: money for fancy cars isn't the same level as money to renovate a whole city. Modern iterations don't make nearly as much sense

which is why his story is a lot more relatable