Happy Place



""I'm in my tree talking to the Dixie Chicks... and they're making me feel better!""

- Dawn, I Heart Huckabees

Sometimes the outside world can be a cold, cruel place, full of mean hurtful people and scads of author-induced pain. That's why the best solution to a world bent on making you suffer can be to just curl up into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and go to a Happy Place inside your head. The Happy Place is rarely uninhabited though; it may be populated by scantily clad harem girls/boys, Spirit Advisors, an inner child or three, or if one is particularly unlucky they'll be roommates (headmates?) with a Split Personality, Super-Powered Evil Side or Enemy Within, the troublesome roomies usually want to pick a fight.

A character interacting with others (or himself) in their Happy Place is a good way of giving them depth and explaining their motivation without having them act out of character in the show. The Stoic or The Quiet One who will never talk about the trauma that left them so may well relive it inside their mind, confronting a spectre of their guilt in the form of a dead loved one or other inner conflicts. In its extreme the dreamer may make a Journey to the Center of the Mind, sometimes accompanied by another.

Some characters are lucky and have their trip to the Happy Place happen outside of a show's real time, making their time and exposition there happen "instantly". A Cloudcuckoolander is seldom so lucky. They may enter a fugue state or literally go catatonic while visiting their Happy Place, though this may sometimes be for the best if it's induced by emotional or physical trauma. Usually this depends on the nature of the Happy Place. Then again, the reason the Cloudcuckoolander is so strange might be because they live there and visit real life.

There is one significant danger to the Happy Place, that being that if the resident has been sufficiently abused in the real world they might choose not to go back despite realizing it's fake.

Kinds of Happy Place:
 * Inner Monologue, a safe place for the character to get on a soapbox.
 * All Just a Dream (a la Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz film adaptation).
 * Personal getaway and spa, ideal for escaping torture and stressful situations.
 * Sitting on the Roof
 * Madness Place: The hyper-productive creative fugue state of the Mad Scientist.

For some reason, the Happy Place is often a beach of some sort.

See also All Just a Dream, Convenient Coma, Dream Sequence, Arcadian Interlude, Ghost in the Machine, Journey to the Center of the Mind, and Spirit Advisor. Compare with Cuckoo Nest, The Final Temptation, Happy Flashback and Lotus Eater Machine. This is often how Heaven is represented. Contrast Black Bug Room, which is just the opposite of a Happy Place.

This is in fact Truth in Television and is a short term way that many people with anxiety use to slowly function in the world.

Advertising

 * Sky TV ran a series of advertisements where a person is shown in a stressful situation, reciting lines from their favourite shows. Their tagline being "Sky - your Happy Place!"

Audio Book

 * The French audiobook ("saga mp3" in French) Trimoria. The main character builts a shelter in his own mind and enters into it by getting his head trapped in a microwaves. No comments about the fact that in reality, that would kill him. This inner kingdom has the name of Trimoria and makes the despair of the character's therapist.

Anime and Manga

 * In Chrono Crusade, Rosette takes a distraught Azmaria out to a beautiful lake surrounded by forest to cheer her up. Chrono notes that it looks very similar to the area where he first met Rosette, and it seems as though she comes out there often when she's upset.
 * In Shaman King Bokuto no Ryu is constantly on the hunt for his.
 * Lily's flashbacks in Magical Chronicles Lyrical Nanoha Force show that she created one for her to escape in during her time as a lab experiment. It was during this period, when she was trying to escape from her grusome reality, that she started to lose both her voice and her memories.
 * On one episode of Sailor Moon, Lita is making okonomiyaki while obviously in a very bad mood. When her friends try to get her to talk about it she says "I am not angry! I am in my happy place!"
 * In Full Metal Panic!, Sosuke has a real-life Happy Place, revealed at the end of the third novel (or the first anime): It's a secluded corner of Mithril's island base where he can just kick back and do some fishing. It may be the only place in the world where the perpetually battle-ready Sosuke actually unwinds and has fun, and he brings Kaname there because he wanted to share it with her.

Comic Books

 * In The Sandman, a confused superhero couple, Hector and Lyta Hall, live inside the Happy Place of an abused boy called Jed. Hector thinks he's a hero called the Sandman who fights monsters that invade the dreams of children, but somehow he doesn't notice that Jed is the only child he ever meets. This is all based on an older comic, also called The Sandman. In the new continuity, however, it turns out that the Halls' servants deliberately arranged for Jed to be mistreated so he would create this dream-place to escape to, where the servants could hide from the real Sandman.
 * The Maxx was based on this trope, with half of the action taking place in the Outback, a prehistoric dream world created by.
 * Later in the series it is revealed other people also have their Outbacks, including.
 * One issue of Nightmask involves a man whose wife and young daughter were murdered, and who has slipped into a catatonic Happy Place where they're still alive. The recently-orphaned protagonist is supposed to use his dream-walking abilities to bring the man out, but he's not sure he wants to, especially since it involves "killing" the dream family.
 * In Superman: Red Son, Hal Jordan was a Vietnam POW, eventually chosen by Lex Luthor to wear the Power Ring because of the elaborate version of this he constructed as a survival mechanism in prison. In his, he literally imagined himself building a prison for his captors in real time. The time it would take him to dig a hole or chop down a tree or take a break was imagined in his head until finally after years of real time imagination, he had "contructed" the prison and set about killing each of his captors in what he called the most glorious night of his life.

Film
""Slide.""
 * In Fight Club, The Narrator's happy place is a frozen cave occupied by his power animal--a talking penguin. He tries to enter it later to escape the pain of chemical burn, but Tyler Durden pulls him out. Now, how would Tyler know about that?


 * Narrator: "I'm going to my cave! I'm going to my cave and I'm going to find my power animal!"
 * In Happy Gilmore, Happy's mentor encourages him to find his Happy Place in order to curb his anger and improve his golf game; said Happy Place consists of his grandmother being wealthy and his girlfriend wearing slinky lingerie and holding a mug of beer in each hand. And a midget cowboy, who appears nowhere else.
 * Subverted when, at one point, the Jerkass rival has him so psyched out that the Happy Place doesn't work, and the rival invades it, making out with Happy's grandmother and his girlfriend.
 * Then double-subverted when Happy finally manages to relax, and the Happy Place is idyllic again - and his dead golf mentor is now a piano-playing angel.
 * The Nexus from Star Trek Generations.
 * Brazil. Perhaps the unhappiest invocation of the trope ever.
 * The plot of the Kids in the Hall feature film Brain Candy revolved around a new anti-depressant wonder drug which worked by constantly replaying the patient's happiest memory, thereby making impossible for them to be miserable.
 * Little Odessa: after the the morose protagonist sits alone in his car and imagines the three of them sitting quietly side by side in a bedroom in their home (from which he had been banished).
 * Played to the hilt in Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd encounters Sea Bass in the service station restroom.

Literature

 * In the Tamora Pierce Circle of Magic books, Briar creates a magical Happy Place for himself and his foster-sisters; the place in question is of the Sitting on the Roof category, and is the place where the four first solidified their friendship as children.
 * In the book version of The Princess Bride, Westley endures torture by imagining himself with Buttercup. However, this only works until Count Rugen brings in The Machine.
 * Hannibal Lecter built an entire Happy Palace, filled with his memories of culture and fine arts. He used it to endure his time in prison, and on long airline rides.
 * In the Stephen King-as-Richard-Bachman book The Regulators, autistic and telepathic Seth manages to create such a refuge for his aunt/guardian Audrey (using a vacation she took in her college days as source material) to give her a way to get away from Tak's various torments.
 * And in The Dark Tower, Sheemie Ruiz, a powerful but mentally-disabled psychic, can create a physical happy place with his mind, and sends the protagonists there to protect them.
 * In one of the Animorphs books, Taylor tortures Tobias by deliberately putting him in his happy place, then switching to unbearable pain, then back, and forth, and so on. This kept him from using his anti-emotion (including pain) mechanism.
 * In the Tale Of The Five series by Diane Duane, one character has a Hive Mind of dragon spirits in her head, and she's in a relationship with one of them.
 * Blue and pink feathers in Vurt.
 * Sleepy of The Black Company has a secret place to retreat into mentally when very frightened, or when confronted with sexual tension. It's strongly implied, though never really confirmed, that it stems from sexual abuse in childhood.
 * Taken rather literally in The Tripods. Human servants who can no longer serve The Masters go to The Place Of Happy Release (aka insteant death from some kind of vapor ray).
 * In Anne Fine's Taking the Devils Advice the protagonist had a pretty miserable childhood and would escape into flights of fancy, training his mind for great philosophical feats, allowing him a rewarding career, if not a happy home life.

Live Action TV
"Rygel: I'm dreaming, yes that's it! I'm asleep...and I'm dreaming all this. I'll wake up in my royal chamber surrounded by concubines and everything will be fine!"
 * Moss of The IT Crowd visits his Happy Place from time to time.
 * Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica often went back to his lake house on Caprica when under stressful or dangerous situations. Usually Six, his sometimes-abusive Spirit Advisor would lounge about with him or rub his back and other parts.
 * The Cylons on the same show were a Subversion, because they didn't go into the Happy Place so much as project it over their real environment.
 * John Crichton on Farscape would go into his subconscious when he wanted to talk to his Spirit Advisor and former Split Personality Harvey. And then there was the Looney Tunes episode.
 * Don't forget 'Out of Their Minds', where Rygel is stuck in John's body.

"Fiona: "Tricia, I want you to try something. It's a relaxation exercise I do in situations like this. I want you to close your eyes, and breathe deep...picture a peaceful mountain stream...picture yourself drowning the kidnapper in the stream. You're taking a rock from the stream, and raising it above your head, and with tremendous force you're bringing-""
 * Titus, of the eponymous comedy show, had a black and white room from where he'd have an Inner Monologue to tell the audience. In one particularly jarring Cliff Hanger,
 * One episode of The 4400 had Tom having a hallucination of a happy life that lasted eight years from his perspective, but occurred over a few seconds of real time.
 * It turns out that was the power of one of the affected. To generate the Happy Place for whomever she was in contact with.
 * It also nearly killed Diana when Diana chose to stay in the Happy Place rather than coming back to reality.
 * An odd variant appears in The Drew Carey Show, where Lewis has both a Happy Place (that he goes to) and a Happy Spot (the stroking or scratching of which can send him to his Happy Place).
 * In an episode of the fourth season of Coupling, one of the characters accompanies her friend to antenatal classes and disappears to her Happy Place (complete with wine and a string quartet) when the actual mechanics of childbirth get discussed. It is later subverted when the Happy Place itself is invaded by related imagery, such as a knife blade emerging between her legs from the red cushion of her chair.
 * Just Shoot Me: upon learning the Nina and his father are dating, Dennis retreats into his Happy Place, where he beats an Asian kid and a college professor at a Rubik's Cube competition.
 * In Black Books Bernard, and then Fran, both escape their dinner guests by hiding under the table. There's a bar under there.
 * In an episode of Scrubs, Dr. Cox goes to his happy place to escape Elliot's chatter, but while he's there, Elliot and Jordan cheerfully arrange a "couple date".
 * And while this is going on a storm breaks out in his happy place.
 * In one episode, JD's happy place is an Imagine Spot with him as the bandleader for Jay Leno.
 * In the Firefly episode "Objects in Space", River unintentionally experiences a Happy Place, where she retreats to shut out the thoughts of the rest of the crew.
 * The Supernatural Djinn in What Is And What Should Never Be sends it's victims here while he feeds on their blood. Highly disturbingly, Dean's happy place is where he can "rest", his father's still dead (yet still having the amazing ability of being able to bully him from beyond the grave) because a Happy!John would probably make his brain short-out, his perfect girlfriend looks the reaper from the premiere, everyone thinks he's a worthless waste of space (because he's the one who thinks that) and his family all have wonderful lives except him. And the worst thing? He's told that "It's still better than anything he's had."
 * Part of season 3 of My Name Is Earl has Earl in a coma dreaming of being a character in a pleasant family sitcom called "The Hickeys", complete with many typical sitcom tropes including Laugh Track.
 * Given a beautiful subversion in Burn Notice, with borderline Ax Crazy Action Girl Fiona:


 * In Corner Gas, Brent Leroy's happy place has two scantily clad women, pudding baths, chili cheese dogs and once, The Man from Glad.
 * Also, from the Theme Song: "It's a great big place/ Full of nothing but space/ And it's my happy place!"
 * In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon's Happy Place is Flatland.
 * Mocked in Stargate SG-1, when Daniel starts to complain that a number of artifacts have been moved (they were in the way), O'Neill cuts him off by telling him to go to his happy place.
 * In Community, there is a secret trampoline that can put people into a zen state.

Music

 * Evanescence's song "Imaginary" describes one of these places. The lyrics talk about a "field of paper flowers and candy clouds of lullaby" that the singer escapes to because her life is "the nightmare I built my own world to escape".

Theatre

 * Harper from Angels in America has a great many (Valium-induced) hallucinations that fill this purpose.
 * In Trouble in Tahiti, Diane sings of a garden "where love will lead us to a quiet place." The thought of it is the only happy escape she finds from her life in Stepford Suburbia.

Video Games

 * Xenogears' lead Fei not only has several Split Personalities, but several hang out in their own Happy Place apart from each other and Fei. Poor guy's head must feel like a condo.
 * Fei's MPD was a coping mechanism that young Fei's developed to deal with the painful experiments that his own mother (who was Not Herself, long story) put him through. Young Fei created a second personality (named Id, who calls the original "the coward") to bear the brunt of the trauma while the original personality retreated to a literal Happy place; a vault that contained all the happy memories that he had ever experienced. The inversion of this Trope also applies to Id, who's stuck in land containing nothing but the "unhappy" memories, due to the presence of a 3rd personality (the current Fei) that was created to contain the psychotic Id.
 * The entire plot of Kagetsu Tohya is based on how Shiki comes to realize that he's trapped in Len's version of a Lotus Eater Machine, which is really more of what he would consider this trope. All she really wants is a normal, happy every day life. While inside, he's always fairly happy while staying in the bounds of Len's script. He doesn't have to fight vampires, he can be with all his friends and love interests, it's always exciting and hey, maybe there's a festival going on! But that's Len's happy place, and she's a dream familiar that dragged him with her while thinking she was helping him after Arcueid knocked him out on accident.
 * In Project Origin, one of the recurring visions Becket keeps experiencing from Alma is of a hilltop amidst tall, waving grass with a single swingset hanging from the tree. The signifigance of this scene doesn't become apparent until the end of the game, when you reach Still Island.
 * In Rayman 2: The Great Escape, there is an odd alternate ending in the middle of the game. After beating a level called The Cave of Bad Dreams (actually the Black Bug Room of the god of that world), Rayman can choose whether or not to accept a huge pile of gold he does not need. If he does take it, the game ends on a shot of Rayman, very fat and happy, relaxing on a tiny tropical island, with the entire world around him in ruins. However, The Cave of Bad Dreams is a large Schrodinger's Butterfly, so it can't be known if the island is real or not.
 * Subverted. Wonderland used to be this, in American McGee's Alice.
 * Also subverted in the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. Wonderland initially looks like it will be a happy place for Alice, and that her therapy has paid off, but it gets much worse soon after she arrives.
 * Also subverted in the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. Wonderland initially looks like it will be a happy place for Alice, and that her therapy has paid off, but it gets much worse soon after she arrives.

Web Comics

 * In the Magic: The Gathering webcomic UG Madness, R&D director Mark Rosewater's happy place is inhabitted by talking consumer products, three post-mortem samurai, and a giant red hairball named Thomas.
 * This Something Positive strip recommends the use of a Happy Place to avoid giving unwanted raises.
 * A Megatokyo guest comic done by the guys at Mac Hall showed Piro at a convention attempting to commit seppuku. As they're trying to wrestle the blade out of his hands, someone yells out, "Go to your happy place, Piro! Sad girl in snow!"
 * When Fumbles is tortured in Goblins, he suffers a Heroic BSOD. However, it's shown that he's actually in his Happy Place, having Monty Haul adventures as Senor Vorpal Kickass'O.

Web Original
"It has been reported that some victims of violence, during the act, would retreat into a fantasy world from which they could not WAKE UP. In this catatonic state, the victim lived in a world just like their normal one, except they weren't being raped. The only way that they realized they needed to WAKE UP was a note they found in their fantasy world. It would tell them about their condition, and tell them to WAKE UP. Even then, it would often take months until they were ready to discard their fantasy world and PLEASE WAKE UP."
 * This infamous Creepypasta story turns this trope into high-octane Paranoia Fuel.


 * The World of Warcraft fan song "Happy Place" is about an undead rogue whose happy place is picking flowers. Just don't pick his flowers or he'll gank you 'til the cows come home.
 * Pretension Nirvana!
 * The Nostalgia Critic's happy place is being with Catherine Zeta Jones and she wearing only a hat, tie, glasses and a long sweater.

Western Animation
"Freakazoid:NOOO! GET OUTTA HERE WITH THAT WATCH!!! LAY OFF THE POOR BEAVERS, WILLYA?!!! SHEEEEEZ!!! YOU'RE A CREEP!!!! GO AWAY!!!! WE WERE HAVING A GOOD TIME UNTIL YOU SHOWED UP, JEEPERS!!! UNGGGGH! GO HAVE SOME COFFEE WITH CREAM OR SOMETHING, BECAUSE I'LL TELL YOU SOMETHING,THIS IS A HAPPY PLACE!"
 * In one episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Billy goes to his "happy place" to get away from Grim and Mandy, who are trying to force him to face his fear of clowns. There, he has a conversation with his "inner frat boy", who convinces him to face his fears... by beating the crap out of any clown he sees.
 * Freakazoid has the Freak-a-Zone, where the titular Superhero goes when Dexter Douglas is in control.
 * Also:

"Bigshot: I said PUT IT IN THE HAPPY BOX!!"
 * One of the pilots featured in Cartoon Network's "Big Pick" event starred a thickheaded space explorer who could retreat into his idyllic Happy Place at a moment's notice. At the episode's climax, with the villain torturing him (by punching him repeatedly with a giant robot hand), he desperately retreated into his Happy Place, only to somehow bring his nemesis along with him; he himself was promptly kicked out, leaving the villain in control of his Happy Place. "Whoa. That can't be good." As the pilot was never picked up, nothing ever really came of this.
 * It wasn't the villain, it was a physical manifestation of his inner rage which the villain created with a machine. Commander Cork was the name of the short.
 * In the second Robot Chicken Star Wars special, going into this was how Anakin was able to bring himself to kill the Jedi children -- retreating into his memory of Naboo, where he and Padme fell in love. Instead of children, he now sees sunflowers...
 * In Finding Nemo, Darla is tapping on the fishtank glass where Peach the starfish is, singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Peach cries "Find a happy place" three times as she falls off.
 * In the Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon short film on the 'How to Train Your Dragon'' DVD (2nd disc), Snotlout says this twice in a row.
 * "Calm Blue Ocean. Calm Blue Ocean," chants Miss Hoover, after Lisa Simpson steals every teacher's guide in the school.
 * Arguably, this is the reason why Homer envisions the disgusting fantasies while chanting "Think Unsexy Thoughts" during the episode "The Last Temptation of Homer Simpson".
 * In the Family Guy episode "Petergeist", Stewie's Happy Place is being on MTV's Jackass, kicking his father's ass.
 * Tweek has one in South Park
 * The Tick: Recovering Punisher-Expy Bigshot ends up adopting this to resolve conflicts in "The Tick vs. The Tick". He doesn't hold up very long...