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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"...but you start with parallel lines that ''intersect'' and you go from there."''
|'''Black Mage''', ''[[8-Bit Theater]]'', [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2008/06/12/episode-1004-fun-house/ #1004]}}
A staple of [[Cosmic Horror Story]] and of [[Mind Screw]] artworks. [[Eldritch Abomination|Elder Gods, Old Ones, and other horrors]] tend to bend the laws of physics to suit them. Why make a triangle where the angles add up to 180 degrees, when you can make one where they add up to 200 degrees in a flat space and get some extra room? Even the very ''body'' of a particularly squamous thing may exhibit this, though more often it shows up in architecture as physically-impossible buildings—[[Genius Loci|occasionally sentient themselves]].
Alien Geometries are often depicted as being dangerous to the sanity of normal humans; where you have to ''read'' the [[Tome of Eldritch Lore]] for it to drive you crazy, just ''looking'' at this stuff can have an [[Motif of Harmful Sensation|unpleasant effect]] on your mental stability. Or at least really hurt your eyes.
More innocuous forms may appear normal. Then you realize that it is physically impossible for [[Bigger on the Inside|something this size to fit in that]], or you travel a short distance and find yourself kilometers away, or you turn left and end up to your right. Doubly fun if found in the [[Mobile Maze]].
[[Eldritch Location
Compare with [[Bizarrchitecture]] and [[Sinister Geometry]].
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''Casshern'' shows what appears to be a metal bolt of
* The Angel Ramiel in ''[[Rebuild of Evangelion]]'' manages to pull this off with some aplomb; the very first time we see it shift shapes from its fairly mundane octahedron to... other things, we see that it is somehow ''impossibly deep'' and one piece all at the same time... and then it starts changing shape when firing beams of pure killing. The effect is enhanced by the fact that what it does is almost ''painfully'' easy to render in CGI, but to see a physical object actually ''do'' it would be skull-crackingly horrifying.
** Leliel in the original ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' appears out of nowhere over the city as a giant, floating sphere with black and white stripped patterns on it. But when the Evas fire at the Angel, the sphere fades out to dodge the shots, then casts a shadow which absorbs everything into it. It's then discovered that the sphere isn't its body: the angel is a 600-meter wide and 3 nanometer thick disc that is connected to a [[wikipedia:Dirac sea|Dirac Sea]]. The floating object is actually a 3D shadow that appears when the Sea is opened. It gets even more mind numbing when you realize that the "shadow" is NOT intangible: it [[Mind Screw|casts its own shadow]] and can physically interact with other objects ([[Gorn|Unit 01 tearing its way out]], in particular). It can even ''bleed''.
* The third season of ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' does this when one of that season's miniboss squad accidentally breaks reality, resulting in the entire house becoming a zone of warped space.
* The [[Another Dimension|Reverse World]] in ''[[Pokémon: Giratina and The Sky Warrior]]'' is an [[M. C. Escher|Escher]]-like place where 'up' varies, but [[Fridge Logic|apparently only for landbound creatures]] (see the ''Pokémon Platinum'' note in Video Games below).
== Comic Books ==
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* ''[[Alpha Flight]]'' - Shaman's medicine pouch has its own laws of physics, able to hold far more than its volume, as well as responding to its owner's wishes as to what he wants. Anyone inexperienced in Shaman's magic style who looks into the pouch risks going catatonic.
* ''[[Swamp Thing]]'' - The Demon Etrigan employed Alien Geometries in an incantation to create a path from Hell back to Earth during [[Alan Moore]]'s run, when Swamp Thing rescued his beloved Abigail from Hell:
{{quote|
Is substance formed to shape the fields we know
Your perfect waltz that conjures form from chance
Must pause to free us from these wastes below.
By root of minus nine and circle squared
Set right and true against dimensions three
Let our ill-angled passage be prepared
Between the folds of rare geometry." }}
* During the Troll War sequence in ''[[Elf Quest]]'' Wendy Pini drew one panel with deliberately Escheresque geometry, showing a spiral staircase from the side with the characters at the top appearing much bigger than those at the bottom.
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* [[Donald Trump]]'s hair, as portrayed in ''[[Doonesbury]]''.
== Fan Works ==
* ''[[Harry Potter and
* ''[[
* In ''[[
* In the Pokémon fanfic ''[[Ash's
==
* An indie black-and-white short film of ''The Call of Cthulhu'' by [https://web.archive.org/web/20071101063857/http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society] does a particularly good job of getting this idea across, in a scene (faithfully adapted from [[H.P. Lovecraft|HP Lovecraft]]'s story) wherein a victim falls into a crevice which an optical illusion has led the audience to believe is a convex crag of rock.▼
▲* ''[[Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality (Fanfic)|Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality]]'', in line with the original ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' series, has this: Hogwarts' corridors which can change when you aren't looking. The number of stairs you climb has only a passing correlation to your actual elevation when you look out the window. At least one corridor is tiled in pentagons.
▲* ''[[Aeon Natum Engel (Fanfic)|Aeon Natum Engel]]'' and its rewrite ''[[Aeon Entelechy Evangelion]]'' are the crossover fanfics consisting of ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'', ''[[Cthulhu Tech]]'' and ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon]]'', with the latter adding elements of ''[[Eclipse Phase]] and ''[[Alastair Reynolds|RevelationSpace]]'' to the mix, so they have this in form of Heralds/Harbingers who replace the Angels. Mot, the equivalent of Ramiel, cranks this up to eleven.
▲* In ''[[Fuck the Jesus Beam (Fanfic)|Fuck the Jesus Beam]]'', there is a city that literally ''does not exist'', as it is only a lie. Despite this, it is also a physical location. Given the name Αδιβ, when someone who can see in only three dimension looks at it, it appears normal, but in progressively higher dimensions, the architecture becomes more and more bizarre.
▲* In the Pokémon fanfic ''[[Ash's Return|Ashs Return]]'', the doors in Glitch City manifest this way to anyone trapped inside.
== Films -- Live-Action ==▼
▲* An indie black-and-white short film of ''The Call of Cthulhu'' by [http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society] does a particularly good job of getting this idea across, in a scene (faithfully adapted from [[H.P. Lovecraft|HP Lovecraft]]'s story) wherein a victim falls into a crevice which an optical illusion has led the audience to believe is a convex crag of rock.
* ''[[Cube|Cube 2: Hypercube]]'' is a rare example of this trope being employed in a visual medium. The actual warped geometry shows up only a few times, due to the special effects required being rather expensive; the rest of the time it's showcased indirectly (e.g. duplicates of characters showing up).
* The climactic scene of ''[[Labyrinth]]'' takes place in an [[M. C. Escher|Escher]]-esque landscape where 'up' varies. The scenery was based on a drawing by M.C. Escher.
* The [[Phlebotinum|Red Matter]]-generated black holes in the new ''[[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]]'' movie. From the front, they look like your average [[Swirly Energy Thingy|swirling]], [[
* ''[[Grave Encounters]]'' plays with this quite a bit a short distance into the movie. {{spoiler|the doors that should lead outside now lead to more hallways, corridors are either entirely blocked off or in wrong locations, and time seems to pass at its own rate inside the demonic hospital which makes it impossible to tell what time it is without a watch or cellphone.}}
* The tesseract-thingies during the "beyond the infinite" sequence from ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]: A Space Odessey''. Just look at them, and the way they move.
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** In the film, the proportions are a sexier 1:9:25 (1^2:3^2:5^2), or maybe 1:8:27 (1^3:2^3:3^3). In comparison, 1:4:9 looked like a brick.
* The House of the Maker from ''[[The First Law]]'' trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. The protagonists enter about halfway up, walk around a bit inside but never ascend or descend, then exit on the roof. Most of the characters can't wait to get out of the place, even if it does involve crossing the narrow, rail-less, hundred-foot-high bridge. And there's always the possibility of leaving the place ''before'' entering it.
* This happens a lot in ''[[Warhammer
** In [[Graham McNeill]]'s ''Warhammer 40000'' ''[[Ultramarines (novel)|Ultramarines]]'' novel ''Dead Sky Black Sun'', the city in the [[Mordor|Eye of Chaos]] features this — producing a [[Mobile Maze]] with it.
** In [[Dan Abnett]]'s ''[[Eisenhorn]]'' novel ''Xenos'', the saruthi "tetrascapes" include regular octagons that nevertheless tessalate. Eisenhorn rescues some [[New Meat|green soldiers]] from such a tetrascape, and later chooses them over experienced soldiers to go into one. Wise of him: the green soldiers had actually seen a tetrascape before, and the experienced ones hadn't. As a result, the "greens" manage to shoot and kill dozens of enemies, but the elite Deathwatch Space Marine attached to Eisenhower's squad can't hit ''anything'' thanks to the effect the twisted geometries have on ballistics.
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* ''[[House of Leaves]]'' starts with a {{color|blue|house}} that is 3/8ths inch [[Bigger on the Inside]] than on the outside. They are only able to measure all the way across because {{spoiler|a closet mysteriously appeared in the {{color|blue|house}} when they left for a week}}. This discrepancy disappearing is, believe it or not, the cue for things to [[It Got Worse|get worse]].
* ''[[Thursday Next]]'''s Uncle Mycroft, among his other [[Mad Science]] projects, developed "Nextian Geometry" with his wife, said to be based on how a cylinder looks like a rectangle from the side, which allows one to use a circular cutter on dough without any left over: it makes circles tesselate.
* [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s short story ''[[
:A math-nerd resident of ''[[Second Life]]'' actually went and reproduced the Crooked House in 3d, and if it's still rezed somewhere public you can actually walk through it. Not a real hypercube of course but some excellent special effects. [http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/06/_and_he_rezzed_.html Here's the story with video.]
* Heinlein's ''[[Glory Road]]'' had the hero and companions invading a tower "where the architect used a pretzel for a straight-edge."
** It's so convoluted that it took hundreds of spies decades to figure out a route to the [[MacGuffin]].
* The premise of ''[[The Number of the Beast]]'', as well: we're only seeing dimensions x, y, z; but there are at least three others which can be rotated around or extended along, and which apparently can be used to travel between universes. This is a conceit to let him run through every literary universe ever, and have a massive [[Crossover]] event. The novel culminates in a party, in what is effectively the Crooked House, with every single character he created attending (plus several guests). Special mention goes to the [[Acceptable Targets|literary]] [[Take That|critics]] lounge, which was shaped like a Klein bottle... once you were inside.
* ''[[The Magids|Deep Secret]]'' - the [[Place of Power|Hotel Babylon]] has halls where you can go around more than four right angles before coming back where you started thanks to the building being on top of a bunch of [[Ley Line|ley lines]].
* ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'' - The Aelfinn and Eelfinn ("the Finn") inhabit one or more separate dimensions described by the author as having radically different natural laws. Successive windows do not show what one might expect. That the magic system in the series is heavily geometric likely has a great deal to do with why its use is explicitly forbidden there. The doorways into their realm also resemble this in the "real world", and are described as "twisted"
:Though it's less apparent, the same is true of the Ways, an artificially-constructed dimension meant for quick travel. Except in one dream sequence (which, for complicated reasons, probably reflects the reality of the Ways), the realm is extremely dark, but travelers there have noted that by the arc of the bridges they're walking on, the platform they've just arrived at should be directly beneath the last. During the dream sequence, it becomes apparent that the platform-islands extend infinitely downward—and unless you follow the bridges with your eyes, appear to be on the same plane. The doorways seem to be a description of a three-dimensional Möbius strip.
* A rare ''[[Star Wars]]'' example can be found in [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] novel ''Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu''. In it the titular character finds the titular artifact - which seems to exist in several dimensions simultaneously and as such it really hurts just to look at it. Lando then uses it to unlock the passage into the Great Pyramid of Sharu - where he is expanded in size several dozen times, while his droid companion is shrunk to the size of a louse. There are even more examples of
* ''[[Night Shift]]'' - Inverted in Stephen King's short story ''I Am the Doorway''. An alien lifeform [[Humans Through Alien Eyes|sees]] a boy walking with a sieve under his arm: "an abominated creature that moved and respired and carried a device of wood and wire under its arm, a device constructed of geometrically impossible right angles."
* In Stephen King's short story ''[[1408]]'', the titular room's door is crooked to both the left and the right. Or not at all. Maybe it can move? And it gets worse from there.
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* ''[[The Way Series|Eon]]'', by Greg Bear, features an asteroid hollowed out by people from ..elsewhere, with seven chambers running along its internal axis. The first six contain cities, parks, a spaceport and loading area, and power generators. The seventh chamber {{spoiler|goes on forever, contains objects made from redistributing probability over space, and a mathematical singularity running along its centre.}} And ''then'' things start to get weird.
* ''[[Discworld]]''
** Bloody Stupid Johnson, architect, [[Bungling Inventor]], and general anti-genius regularly does this kind of stuff ''entirely by accident''.
:He once designed a letter-sorting machine whose central component was a wheel that had pi equal to ''exactly'' three. This causes it to sort out letters it hasn't had put in yet, among other oddities.
** ''[[Discworld/The Colour of Magic|The Colour of Magic]]'' featured a parody of Alien Geometries: the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth (itself a spoof on [[Cosmic Horror Stories]]). The most striking feature of the Temple is that its walls, ceilings and floors are composed entirely of interlocking regular 8-sided tiles. Whilst is it possible to create octagonal tiles that be fitted in a regular, interlocking way, they must be concave polygons: there is a mathematical proof that no convex polygon of seven or more faces can tessellate on a Euclidean plane.▼
:Empirical Crescent, a row of terraced houses where every door and window leads somewhere other than where you'd expect it to lead. At least it makes it easier to get rid of rubbish—just toss it into the garden. After all, it might not be your garden.
:The reason for this corruption of dimensions occurs because the row of houses is crescent shaped on the outside only. Inside, it's supposedly laid out like a straight row. Presumably the two configurations conflict. Occupants had a tendency to leave in the middle of the night, often without stopping to pack...
▲** ''[[
*** The first chapter mentions one of the gods using a 7-sided (but still cube-shaped) die to cheat.
** The buildings of the Unseen University, which have been rather strongly influenced by the vast amount of magic that has flowed through its halls over the centuries, have floors and rooms where logic says they simply could not exist. Magic is as much a part of the architecture as cement.
** The Library of the Unseen University is a particularly strong example—the presence of so many ancient magical texts distorts space-time like an elephant on a trampoline, dimensions and gravity being twisted into the kind of topographical spaghetti that would cause even [[M. C. Escher]] to go for a good lie down (or sideways). That's quite apart from the fact that it serves as a gateway into L-Space, and is therefore linked to all libraries everywhere in all points of space, time and reality. Technically, it contains every book that has ever been written, every book that is ever going to be written, and every book that ever ''could'' have been written (whether it actually was written or not)
:Once, the Librarian took a trip deep into the shelves, passed tribes of lost students, and ended up in the same library in the past.
:In addition, Pratchett explains that any sufficiently large collection of books (magical or otherwise) can exert the same effect as the Unseen University Library; the equation goes "Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass". And since mass warps space around it, so does a high quantity of knowledge.
*** In reality, however, power is equal to dW/dt, or energy acting as work divided by time, and energy is equal to m*c^2, or mass multiplied by the speed of light in a vacuum squared. However, the lack of correct physical defintions is overlooked due to the [[Rule of Funny]].
** Death's house is bigger on the inside than on the outside, being the size of a cottage on the outside, but the size of a small castle on the inside. This is not so much intentional, but is rather the result of a slight blindness to ordinary architecture on Death's part. Many of the rooms have the peculiar effect of being enormous at the same time as being regularly sized. Death's room in particular is stated to be about a mile wide, but most can be crossed in only a few steps.
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* In Ambrose Bierce's ''The Damned Thing,'' a creature, judged by ignorant folk to be a mountain lion, is a color that the human eye cannot see and makes noises that the human ear cannot hear. This inverts this already inverted trope because the color is natural and it is humanity that has become too alien (or at least insensitive) to comprehend it.
* In the ''[[Deathstalker]]'' series the AIs of Shub constructed a world of their own to live on. Unfortunately for humans who might visit, it exists in more dimensions than they can perceive and so is unhealthy to look at for extended periods of time. The Madness Maze, despite a relatively innocuous appearance, had convoluted, nigh-sentient path designs that would either evolve you into a higher being or tear you apart.
* In ''[[Flatland]]'', the two-dimensional protagonist A. Square struggles to fathom the third dimension when he is introduced to it by a travelling sphere, and it [[Go Mad
** Many sequels have been written. ''Flatterland'' has even ''more'' bizarre geometry, including a hyperbolic world, a fractal world, a grid world, and so on.
* ''Threshold'' by Caitlin Kieran contains a fossil in a shape that cannot exist, causing the heroine to [[Go Mad
* In the ''[[Star Trek:
* A feature of the bizarre planet in ''[[The Inverted World]]''. Within about a dozen miles of the "optimum", everything is pretty much Earth-like. Go any farther than that, however, and things start to distort unpleasantly. Because the optimum is constantly moving, [[Base on Wheels|the entire City has to move after it]] to avoid destruction.
** Even weirder, {{spoiler|In the novel version, it turns out that the Inverted World is actually EARTH - the inhabitants of the City only perceive it the way they do because their perceptions (and possibly their physical reality) have been altered.}}
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* ''[[The Last Battle]]'', the final volune of ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia]]'', ends in a world that's essentially the opposite of reality, in that the closer you get to the center, the more there is.
* In ''[[An Elegy for the Still-living]]'', the main character spends a few minutes walking down a forest path before realising he is seeing the same scenerey looping over and over again. Also, this passage:
{{quote|
* In George R. R. Martin's ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire|A Clash of Kings]],'' Danaerys enters the House of the Undying Ones in Qarth. Once in the antechamber, she makes four consecutive right-hand turns without returning to her starting point.
* In [[Larry Niven]]'s ''Protector'' the Brennan Monster amuses himself by creating full scale replicas of some of Escher's art, using things like artificial gravity to make them work.
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] speculates that this is the default setting for the interior of a TARDIS, and that the Doctor's TARDIS projects a more easily comprehended interior so as not to [[Brown Note|freak out]] the Doctor's human companions. [[Genius Loci|She is just a sweet old thing.]]
* The spacecraft used by the [[Stargate SG-1|Goa'uld]] are relatively normal... until you notice the pyramid on top. Naturally, the entire spaceships can fold up so that their central pyramid can land on a planet-bound pyramid.
** Not to mention how a triangular-pyramid shaped spacecraft can land on a square-pyramid.
* The plot of the (admirably silly) ''[[Star Trek:
* ''[[Neverwhere]]'' does a very nice demonstration of this in passing. The protagonist is led down into the London Underground, then through a door, and down a stair case. This continues, always going down, until they reach a small door and step out on to the roof of a building.
* The ''[[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy]]'' series has a few examples:
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== Paintings ==
* Paintings by H. R. Giger, famous for his design of the Xenomorph in ''[[Alien (franchise)|Alien]]'', though his work tends more to towards the horror aspect than the impossible. He also likes to paint landscapes having sex with themselves. Think about that for "scenery porn."
* [[M. C. Escher]] could be could be considered to make "lite" versions of
== Tabletop
* In [[Mortasheen]], this is where the [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/xenogog.htm Xenogog] lives naturally, only coming into ours with a screw up in a time travel experiment.
* The near-universal hallmark of things made in the name of Chaos in ''[[Warhammer
* ''[[Dungeons
** The Classic ''Dungeons & Dragons'' system delved deep into this trope with its boxed set for PC Immortals, redefining game-reality in terms of five spatial dimensions. Mortal creatures exist in three, Immortals in four, and Old Ones in five. ''Which'' three a mortal creature occupies can vary: Nightmare-reality creatures share only one spatial dimension with Normal-reality beings such as humans, and "nippers" from the Astral Plane overlap with dimensions of both Nightmare and Normal reality. As for how all this applies to the geometry of the planes themselves, thinking about it could make [[Your Head Asplode]].
** The Planes in D&D 3rd edition got like this at times, such as an infinite plane having an edge. Seasoned Planeswalkers tended to give the advice "Try not to think about it."
*** In the ''Queen of the Demonweb Pits'' module, the players ventured into The Abyss to confront Lolth, the demon queen of the spiders. Lolth's domain consisted mainly of long, open passageways hanging in space. Even though these passages pass over and below each other, they never ascend or descend in any way.
*** Less heady are the Githzerai monasteries on Limbo, which take advantage of the fact that "down" is whichever direction you want it to be, giving us some extremely Escher-esque architecture.
** Possible example: In ''[[Dungeons
:For those of you asking, "How does a world where spheres are cubes make life easier?": the world in question appears to be made largely out of 5' squares, so having a setup where you don't need to wave around ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' templates every time someone casts ''Scorching burst'' speeds things up quite a bit (of course, hexagons would have been a closer approximation). Height is implicitly the same as the other two dimensions at some points, and implicitly non-existent in other parts of the rulebook.
* ''[[GURPS|GURPS: Illuminati University]]'' describes a campus which teaches human students and everything else capable of paying the exorbitant university fees how to function as [[Mad Scientist|Mad Scientists]], World-Conquering Dictators, Marketing Specialists, and other strange jobs.<br /><br />The campus is a stereotypical university: the campus has an open area or "Quad" in which students and staff may pause for reflection, study, impromptu lectures and other activities from which [[Hilarity Ensues|adventures may spring]]. Illuminated University has ''The Pent'', which has five sides for [[Rule of Cool|no particular reason]]; students who happen to have a protractor handy will discover that all five of the corners have 90-degree angles. One of the dorms is stated as having rather similar angles.▼
* ''[[GURPS|GURPS Illuminati University]]'' describes a campus which teaches human students and everything else capable of paying the exorbitant university fees how to function as [[Mad Scientist]]s, World-Conquering Dictators, Marketing Specialists, and other strange jobs.
* ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' has the [[The Maze|Twisting Maze Zone]], a localised distortion of reality caused by [[Eldritch Abomination|Abyssal forces]]. While it ''looks'' chaotic, constantly shifting jumble, this is actually because its directions extend into [[Time Travel Tropes|the fourth one]] as well. Unlike many examples, mages can use this to their advantage, using their will to walk through hidden parts of it to teleport around-in fact, they must, as the way to banish it is to walk through the areas of the Zone as they normally are-i.e., sans Twisting Maze-thus ''forcing'' them to apply to Earth laws.<br /><br />Once that is done, the Zone literally [[Logic Bomb|Logic Bombs]] itself out of existence, causing anybody nearby to gain a brief glimpse into the space-time continuum. Should someone have the force of will to process it, they have an epiphany about how the world works, resulting in an [[Experience Point]] gain. If no one does anything about it though, the Zone grows so bad that it ends up [[Ret-Gone|rewriting history]] so that it-and the area it effects-ceases to exist.▼
▲
* And, as you'd expect, ''[[Call of Cthulhu]]'' and ''[[Cthulhu Tech]]'' occasionally include this for...[[H.P. Lovecraft|well, we all know why]].▼
* In one of the adventures in ''[[GURPS|GURPS Super Adventures]]'', the PCs will come across a submerged circular ruin which, if measured, will turn out to have a value of pi equal to 3.
▲* ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' has the [[The Maze|Twisting Maze Zone]], a localised distortion of reality caused by [[Eldritch Abomination|Abyssal forces]]. While it ''looks'' chaotic, constantly shifting jumble, this is actually because its directions extend into [[Time Travel Tropes|the fourth one]] as well. Unlike many examples, mages can use this to their advantage, using their will to walk through hidden parts of it to teleport around-in fact, they must, as the way to banish it is to walk through the areas of the Zone as they normally are-i.e., sans Twisting Maze-thus ''forcing'' them to apply to Earth laws
:Once that is done, the Zone literally [[Logic Bomb]]s itself out of existence, causing anybody nearby to gain a brief glimpse into the space-time continuum. Should someone have the force of will to process it, they have an epiphany about how the world works, resulting in an [[Experience Point]] gain. If no one does anything about it though, the Zone grows so bad that it ends up [[Ret-Gone|rewriting history]] so that it-and the area it effects-ceases to exist.
▲* And, as you'd expect, ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]'' and ''[[Cthulhu Tech]]'' occasionally include this for...[[H.P. Lovecraft|well, we all know why]].
* The Terminal in ''[[Over the Edge]]''. It's Al Amarja's massive airport, nine-storeys high and built like a maze. Navigating it is so difficult, people need to hire guides. Of course, the best part is when you leave the airport and see that it's built like a step-pyramid. An ''upside-down'' step-pyramid.
* The dimensions of [[Exalted|Primordial world bodies]] are often based on their moods and personalities. For the more focused and stable ones, the worlds are typically consistent and predictable. For others, you get things like spatial relationships that are constantly rearranged, being able to pass from one side of a layer to another with no obvious transition, and having a sun that is inexplicably always right above you while also being at the center of a spherical arrangement.
** As you might imagine, this makes travel around Malfeas... interesting. Once you enter the dimension proper, you must cross Cecelyne, the Endless Desert, for five days to actually get to the Demon City. No, it doesn't matter if you're walking on foot, riding on horseback, and piloting a First Age airship. The trip ''always'' takes five days. Then you get to the Demon City, which is layers upon layers stacked on top of one another - but each layer has Ligier, the Green Sun, shining above it, no matter how deep down it is.
* ''[[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]'' has the Black Spiral Umbral Realm. Being a [[Spirit World]] the Umbra is pretty odd at the best of times, but normally follows at least the guidelines of the laws of physics, [[A Form You Are Comfortable With|if only because vistors expect it to.]] But the Black Spiral... From the outside [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|it looks like just a spiral pattern on the floor in black.]] Once you start walking it it seems longer, twistier and with entirely too many dimensions. In fact it's a path into the mind of [[Eldritch Abomination|the Wyrm.]] No-one's ever come out the other side sane.
== Toys ==
* The ''[[Transformers]]'' already skirt the trope, what with size and mass-changing and the oddness of the scales...but then we come to the Autobot Micromaster Countdown's playset. He's a deep space explorer. He has an interstellar rocket and a command base. The base is used to launch the rocket. But also fits inside the rocket: [[Your Head Asplode|mgnaaaaa!]]
== Video Games ==
* In ''[[Video Games/Temple Run|Temple Run]]'', the temple was surely designed by an [[Eldritch Abomination]]. Or by [[M. C. Escher]]. Or by a terrain randomizer that doesn't keep track of where you have been, so that it may happily let you take seven quick 90 degree turns to the right in a row and come to a new location each time.
* Unlike binary space partitioning-based 3D engines, portal-based 3D engines organize spaces by where they join together rather than where they are located in space. This means that games like ''[[Marathon Trilogy|Marathon]]'' allow multiple entities to occupy the same location without touching under certain conditions, such as a Klein Bottle-shaped level. While the ''Marathon'' series unfortunately doesn't employ it in the actual campaign outside a few Easter eggs, the multiplayer level ''5-D Space'' provides an example of the possibilities.
** Several third party [[Game Mod
** ''[[Duke Nukem 3D]]'' has a similar engine, and its quirks are used to full effect in some of the secret levels.
*** The level "Lunatic Fringe" is a 720-degree circular hallway around a central hub, so you have to walk around the hub twice before actually returning to where you started.
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** The Unreal engine is also capable of things like torus-shaped levels and endless corridors with creative application of warpzones, right from the earliest version of the engine. It's far from perfect, though: non-projectile or "hitscan" weapons can't shoot through, stacking more than four warpzones results in the engine glitching and drawing the portal surface's texture, warpzones must have the exact same dimensions at both ends or the game will crash, etc.. The level DM-Fractal even has a relatively simple "anyone falling into the floor trap falls out of a hole in the ceiling" trick.
* A little-known 2.5D sci-fi (considering it was made in Russia, nostalgical sci-fi) first person shooter ''[[Madspace]]'' embodies this trope, complete with this feature actually being [[All There in the Manual|mentioned in the manual]]. If you decided to dig the game out, there's one thing you should consider... never ''ever'' use the ghost cheatcode.
* Games like ''[[Asteroids]]'', 'and the like, use an unwrapped toroidal universe—the environments have the same geometry as the surface of a donut. [[Super Mario War]] does the same thing by default, but because all the levels are custom-designed, you can modify it to take place in an enclosed space, or add kill zones at the sides of the game window [[Super Smash Bros.]]-style.
* ''[[VVVVVV]]'' takes place in a [[Wrap Around]] universe. However, the Tower level is taller than the rest of the universe, but is hard to notice since said level is on auto-scroll.
* ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' is based all around this idea. If you shoot a portal into a wall, and then turn around and shoot another connected one into the other wall behind you, you can ''see your own back''. And then, if you wish, run in a straight line forever without ever leaving the space you're in. That's just for starters - try, if you place a portal well, being able to see an ''infinite series of your own back''. It's also fun to place a pair of portals in the ceiling and floor and then fall through endlessly (and there's even an achievement related to that in the first game).
** Which is at least easy to wrap one's head around, it seems. For the truly mind-bending type, see the above example about the Source engine.
* ''[[Pac-Man]]'' is a cylinder, since you can only go between left and right.
* The eponymous [[Temple of Doom]] in ''[[La-Mulana]]'' is [[wikipedia:Simply connected space|non-simply connected]], almost certainly deliberately. If you try to make a map that shows where all the areas are in relation to each other, taking every connection into account, you'll quickly discover that it can't be done. In particular, it's not at all clear what the lowest point inside the ruins is
:It makes more sense if you ignore the backside areas, and view the temple as being more of a cylinder than a flat map. Still holds with the temple as a whole, though, as the backside areas explicitly don't make sense if mapped on a single plane. The most obvious example would be how the Shrine of the Mother is both above and below the Endless Corridor, depending on where you enter it.
* The Polyhedron in the Russian art-house game ''[[Pathologic]]''. Hooooo boy. From the outside, the building simply appears to be impossible. {{spoiler|The inside is implied to more or less be another ''dimension'', inhabited by hundreds of children suspended in some kind of weird dream world.}} Yes, the game is a total [[Mind Screw]].
* In ''[[Diablo II]]'', the Arcane Sanctuary area contains some quite Escher-esque geometry: platforms are supported by pillars that stand on other platforms which ought to be at the same height. The game gives the option of displaying in perspective (parallel lines converge at the horizon) or isometric (parallel lines remain parallel). In Arcane Sanctuary, the perspective option is disabled, due to it being impossible to draw.
** The Canyon of the Magi doesn't let you use perspective either for no obvious reason. Maybe an anomaly left behind from the magical battle that happened here? Or maybe I'm overthinking this and it's just a bug.
* Giygas' final form in ''[[
* ''Echochrome'' is a puzzle game based on the works of M. C. Escher. The geometries are as weird as you might expect.
** To elaborate, in the game, you are allowed to "cheat" the laws of perspective because only the camera angle's perspective counts as "real". If there is a beam covering up a hole, the hole [[Logic Bomb|then ceases to exist.]] This is a necessary skill to guide the main character<ref>You control the camera, not the player character</ref> to safety.
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* According to the characters, the Primeval Thaig in [[Dragon Age II]], although we have to [[Take Our Word for It|take their word for it]], cuz that's kind of hard to program.
* Certain areas in the ''[[Silent Hill]]'' series, usually paired with [[Chaos Architecture]]; examples include but are not limited to: the girls' bathroom in [[Silent Hill 1|the alternate school]] which leads you to the second floor when you exit it, the door between the first and second floors in Nowhere, and the convoluted space-time of the alternate Lakeview Hotel in ''[[Silent Hill 2]]'', where the doors now teleport you around the building, and you have to find the correct one that will warp you to the otherwise inaccessible east wing. And going back in the same door leads to a different door than the one you entered. Not to mention the Historical Society, where you jump down several extremely deep holes, then take an elevator even further down, but when you come out of it on the lakefront, you're only about 20 feet below where you started. It also has Escher-esque architecture at points, e.g. the room with the hole leading to the prison (doors on the floor and walls), and the rotating room in the Labyrinth.
* The Daedric ruins in ''[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind|Morrowind]]'' fit this trope. They certainly weren't built by man or mer...
* It's possible to ''make'' these in ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' if you're careless, insane or second-hand enough. Case in point: [[Let's Play|Headshoots]] had rooms that ''the players couldn't find'' without zooming on a dwarf that happened to be in them. {{spoiler|The last survivor is holed up in one of them.}}
** Of course, rather disappointingly, there's nothing physically impossible about it—it's just a web of extremely convoluted tunnels.
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** The Fairies' Woods in ''[[Oracle of Ages]]'', in which moving from one screen to the next and back again winds up placing you in a completely different spot than before.
** In the Forest Temple in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time|Ocarina of Time]]'' there is a corridor which twists 90 degrees to the side, meaning you end up walking on what was originally a wall. One puzzle in the temple involves activating a switch that twists and untwists the corridor, so you can access different sides of the room. And you're still somehow oriented the same way relative to the rest of the dungeon.
** ''[[Majoras Mask]]'' - The Stone Tower in involves reversing gravity so you can run around in the ceilings of rooms. This is made even more [[Mind Screw|mind-twisting]] by the fact that the horizontal orientation of the temple is preserved after it is flipped
* ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' - Warp Pipes ignore any physics beyond [[Rule of Fun]], but the ones in ''[[Mario
** Well, remember: the reason they lead in and out of them is because they are "warp" pipes. They basically teleport the user to another pipe. There's always the possiblity that [[Super Mario Bros.|World 1-2]] could be in another universe entirely...
* ''[[Super Mario RPG]]'' seemed to parody video game wraparound: the overworld actually ''is'' donut-shaped, despite there being no real reason for it.
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* ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'' has a unique twist. Mario exists in a 2-D world (with [[Shout-Out|Shout Outs]] galore to the first ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' games), but the first ability Mario learns is to "flip" between dimensions. In other words, he ''gains access to the third dimension''. Now, this isn't any problem for the player, but what's this like ''[[Fridge Brilliance|for Mario]]''? ...let's just say he needs a [[Sanity Meter]] to stay in 3-D. However, the game is a sequel to the first two Paper Marios, which were in 3D. Mario also seems to handle switching between 2D and 3D just fine between games anyway.
* There's a game in development, called ''Miegakure'', in which the puzzle aspect involves a 4th spatial dimension. Just trying to visualize a textual description of the game mechanics is enough to cause a headache. A three-dimensional environment can be represented by multiple two-dimensional images. Imagine taking an object, and tracing its outline on a flat surface from each side. You can get a good idea of the actual shape of the object in three dimensions by putting those images together in your head. What Miegakure does is present a four-dimensional environment in a similar fashion, in a series of three-dimensional models. You can switch the "angle" from which you view the four-dimensional environment by hiding one dimension and causing another one to become visible, similar to how a flat picture of a three-dimensional object "hides" the depth dimension.
* The Bizarre Room in the Wonderland level of ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]''. Entering from different points of the
* Two areas in ''[[Sub Machine|SubMachine: Subnet Exploration Project]]'' have rooms that connect in ways they should not. Appropriately, one of them houses a fan theory that the [[Sub Machine]] is looped through the fourth dimension, and the other is a series of padded cells. Another area is, for no apparent reason, sideways.
* In ''[[The Dig]]'', the architecture of the Cocytans shows a lot of reverence to the 5 Platonic solids, including shapes with strange symmetries; and there also the in-universe example of space-time
* The Mobius Ring track in ''[[F-Zero]] GX'' exhibits these; the sky is always up, as the mobius has only one side. Let's not talk about the architecture.
* An interesting loading error in ''[[Indiana Jones and The Infernal Machine]]'' once caused a corridor to loop back around itself into the same room that the player had just left without any perceivable distortion. The player who encountered the bug thought he might be going crazy at first.
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* ''[[Fez]]''. Gomez is a 2D man suddenly gifted with the ability to shift the 2D world on the third dimension.
== Web Comics ==
* In ''[[8-Bit Theater]]'', Black Mage's face is apparently so hideous as to be non-Euclidean—the hat keeping his features in shadow prevents people from [[Go Mad from the Revelation|being driven insane just by looking at it]], as seen [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/06/18/episode-044-what-the-hell-just-happened-in-survivor-8-bit-style-part-9/ here]. A more recent strip implied that revealing himself would ''[http://www.nuklearpower.com/2008/01/05/episode-939-total-protonic-reversal/ destroy the universe]'', but this was just an idle daydream.
* ''[[Gunnerkrigg Court]]'', In Chapter 19: ''Power Station'', the buildings at {{spoiler|Zimmingham}} look pretty normal from nearby, but [http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=461 long-distance shots] reveal that they are at crazy angles relative to each other.
* ''[[Problem Sleuth]]'': You cannot descend into the sky because the universe is not upside-down!
* According to ''[[Questionable Content]]'', [http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1380 dildos] can have alien geometries too.
* The polygons in ''[[Triangle and Robert]]'' tend to have their own style of geometry, leading to strips like [http://tr.froup.com/tr.pl?412 this]{{Dead link}} or [http://tr.froup.com/tr.pl?2327 this]{{Dead link}}.
* The Toymania store that serves as the main setting for ''[[TRU-Life Adventures]]'' is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Subverted, though, in that it's a fluke of how the measurements were taken.
* In ''[[Adventurers!]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20100701193541/http://www.adventurers-comic.com/d/20020614.html when Imposis is just about to leave], Ardam points out that nothing he does seems particularly impossible. Imposis gives him a Penrose triangle and continues on his way, leaving Ardam to hold it in his hands and stare at it until he gets a headache.
* From ''[[Tales of the Questor]]'', we have the ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20121018200038/http://www.rhjunior.com/totq/00513.html Unseleigh castle...]''
** Yet another homage to [[M. C. Escher]]'s "Relativity".
* The author of ''[[Xkcd]]'' drew a comic about [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonlounge/2008/10/cartoonoff-xkcd.html hyperbondage] (see slide 5) for a cartoon-off against Farley Katz.
* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', the evil planet of Derse (and presumably, its good counterpart, Prospit) has inner depths and corridors that twist upon themselves in ways that challenge the rational mind. There is also [https://web.archive.org/web/20130922010523/http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003568 this sequence].
** [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004942 The final form that Skaia takes as well.]
* ''[[Chainsawsuit]]'': [http://chainsawsuit.com/2010/05/12/cthulhu-cheats/ Cthulhu gets caught using non-Euclidian dice during a game of] [[Dungeons
* A few arcs in ''[[Fans]]'' (notably the whole of Book 5) centered around a power-object called the 23-Sider, an RPG die with 23 identical sides. When the 23-Sider was formed in Book 5 it warped reality.
* Pip in ''[[Sequential Art (webcomic)|Sequential Art]]'' chose to prove his superiority in [[Bland-Name Product|Cubeminer]] by building "[http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=684 Escher's Staircase]". The next page shows that with a few tweaks you sometimes can build ''this'' in a 3D game. {{spoiler|But there's no guarantee that the physics engine will survive an attempt to process it.}}
== Web Original ==
* Doctor Ka's mansion in the ''[[Global Guardians PBEM Universe]]'' is effectively a [[wikipedia:Tesseract|tesseract]], and is definitely [[Bag of Holding|bigger on the inside]] than on the out. If its layout was drawn on a set of blueprints it would feature rooms that overlapped spatially, rooms that seemed to have no exits or entrances, spherical rooms that nonetheless had corners, and rooms where the plane of gravity depending on which way you were looking.
* ''[[SCP Foundation]]:''' [http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-033 SCP 033] is a missing integer. Any surface it's written on will begin to break down.
{{quote|
* ''[[Fine Structure]]'' describes universes with more dimensions than our this way.
* The [[PPC|PPC Headquarters]]: It is unclear whether it is just a confusing maze of a building or whether it can actually move around, but thanks to the Laws of Comedy, one of the only ways to find the place you are trying to go is to distract yourself and not think about it. However, it "was" built by alien plants, and they seem to be able to navigate it just fine. Also, poorly-constructed descriptions in the Word Worlds cause some rather eye-breaking visuals for the agents when the worlds try to put them into practice.
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* Carmilla's room in the ''[[Whateley Universe]]''. It keeps changing size and shape. Its door moves from building to building. It's possible to walk in and out of it without using any known entrance. There's a reason the staff at Whateley Academy calls it the [[H.P. Lovecraft|H. P. Lovecraft Room]].
* There is no geometry but [[Time Cube]]. You are educated stupid. Time Cube is so obviously true that knowing anything except Time Cube will drive you crazy when compared to Time Cube.
* [[The Fear Mythos|The Empty City]], also known as the City of Empty Shadows or [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|DEVOURER]]. It's a [[Genius Loci|living city]] which intentionally makes itself into
* Fredrik K.T. Andersson managed to [https://web.archive.org/web/20160329142210/http://
* ''[[Bravemule]]'', the saga of a ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'', gave the dwarves an utterly bizarre culture with [[Blue and Orange Morality]]. Among other things, any shape that is not rectangular is "unscrupulous". An accidentally-created ''octagonal'' room was thus treated as horrible and incomprehensible, giving dwarves [[Catapult Nightmare
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[Batman: The Brave
* ''[[Looney Tunes]]'':
** Played for laughs in the [[Foghorn Leghorn]] cartoon "Little Boy Boo". While playing hide-and-seek with Junior, Foghorn Leghorn hides in a hay bin, [[Tempting Fate|claiming the kid would need a slide rule to find him]]. Junior writes out some equations, using a slide rule no less, then marks a spot in the grass before somehow digging Foghorn up from it. This leaves Foghorn irate, at which point the child shows him the equations; forced to admit that "figures don't lie", Foghorn is nevertheless curious and makes to open the lid, but stops himself midway through.
* The titular ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends]]'' sometimes exhibits a non-malevolent version of this combined with [[Bigger on the Inside]]. In one episode, Mac is attempting to leave for dinner but he and Bloo become hopelessly lost (and begin to go crazy from hunger), when, at one point, they exit on the roof, even though they clearly went downwards.▼
{{quote|'''Foghorn:''' ...No, I'd better not look - [[Logic Bomb|I just ''might'' be in there]]!}}
▲* The titular ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends]]'' sometimes exhibits a non-malevolent version of this combined with [[Bigger on the Inside]]. In one episode, Mac is attempting to leave for dinner, but he and Bloo become hopelessly lost
* Presumably alien geometries are how [[Scooby Doo]] and his gang perform their [[Scooby-Dooby Doors|strange chase routines]]. Perhaps something much more sinister than anyone suspected was going on the whole time.
== Real Life ==
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120225002759/http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/23009 Studies] of the cosmic microwave background radiation suggest that it better fits a Poincaré dodecahedron than a sphere.
:To make the Poincaré dodecahedron more clear: you are floating inside a giant dodecahedron. When you get to an outer face you [[Wrap Around]] to the opposite face. Except the faces don't exactly line up, so you also rotate one tenth of a rotation.
:More aptly, it is to be observed that Euclidean geometry, mathematically speaking, is a ''special case'': it only applies to forms in a space with zero curvature (for the two-dimensional case, a perfectly flat plane); something that is, strictly speaking, an abstract concept (in light of the fact that time and space are demonstrably ''curved'' by gravity.) Consider that you cannot, in Euclidean geometry, draw a triangle with three right angles, ''but it is perfectly possible on the surface of a sphere.''
:Sometimes made worse by the fact that a non-Euclidean two-dimensional geometry is often ''visualized'' as embedded within a three-dimensional Euclidean space (the surface of a sphere, or a saddle), which leads some people to mistakenly believe that an n-dimensional non-Euclidean space ''requires'' an unseen n+ 1 dimensional space. (It's not too difficult to imagine a two-dimensional space with positive curvature as the surface of a sphere. Now try to wrap your mind around the idea of a space where the geometry works out the same as it would on the surface of that sphere, but without any third dimension at all.)
:There are five axioms used to make geometry. Change one, and you get non-euclidean geometry. Change all five, and you could very well get arithmetic. Calling it a special case is an oversimplification.
:Speculations on the Topology of the Universe aside, it's clear, and even somewhat well known, as stated above, that the effects of gravity are described by the curvature of spacetime, which means that in truth, geometry is not Euclidean at all. As a famous test of this, we can see stars which should be hidden behind the Sun during a solar eclipse, due to the light following the shortest path in curved space towards us. Time is also curved, in a sense, as clocks will run slower in places where classically the gravitational potential is lower relative to clocks at greater potential. This effect too, was measured using high precision atomic clocks.
:Some astronomers who like thinking outside the box suggested that one might put a satellite 550 AU away from the sun. At this point, the aforementioned curvature of the spacetime bends light just right, making it possible to use the sun itself as, essentially, ''the primary lens of a huge gravitational telescope''. This idea is called a solar foci telescope.
* Spherical geometry isn't just something for universe-scale models. The ''surface of the earth'' is represented as a two-dimensional non-Euclidean space every time you look at a map. As mentioned previously, a sphere can have a triangle with three right angles on it, and the earth is (sort of) a sphere.
** An example: Start at the equator. Go to the north pole. Turn right 90 degrees. Proceed to equator. Turn right 90 degrees. You will reach your starting point. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Triangles_%28spherical_geometry%29.jpg Nifty, huh?]
* Many implementations of [[
:Some starfield simulators do this, too. Stars that vanish off one edge of the volume of space appear at the opposite one, resulting in the stars being positioned on the 3D surface of a 4D torus.
:These wraparound connections are used in the communications paths for processes or threads in some concurrent programs.
* There are multiple projections used on pictures, most commonly the gnomonic projection. The fisheye projection is also well-known. The reason these are necessary is that people see in elliptic geometry. As a simple example, imagine that you are standing on a railroad track, facing along the track. If you look straight down, the rails will look parallel, but if you look straight forward, they will intersect. If you look halfway between, you should be able to see where they're parallel and where they intersect, despite being perfectly straight.
* Relativistic physics border that territory at times. e.g length contraction says when moving at a high enough speed there is a visible decrease in lengths (the length decrease is always there, just you can not see the difference caused by sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)). That is still believable if you have some fantasy. The trouble is, from the other point of view the not moving system is the one shortened. Better not try it yourself
:To clear the confusion (as much as possible, anyway), if things are moving, they are shortened in the direction of their motion by a numerical factor dependent on their velocity. If you measure the length of an object at rest you will always find it is greater than the length of the same object moving at a finite speed with respect to you. Of course, in said object's reference frame, it is by definition at rest, and it is ''you'' who is moving, and therefore, shortened.
:The distance that the distance one through spacetime, the spaectime interval, is of a constant length, and is determined by the formula s = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (c*t)^2). That is to say, although space contracts by a factor of sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)), time expands by an equal factor, so the spacetime interval that you cross remains constant. This means that the velocity of the thing that travels along the interval is already determined for any given observer. For the layman, this means that objects do not really shrink when you travel at velocity; they are actually just rotating in four dimensions, and just appear to shrink because we can only see in three dimenions.
** And that's just special relativity. General relativity predicts that objects in a gravitational field shrink relative to those outside of the field. Essentially, when looking from the outside in, massive objects like stars or planets are actually [[Bigger on the Inside]]. This is due to the fact that what we experience as gravity is actually the mass of planets causing space to shrink in its presence. This means that straight lines, like those of laser light, become bent in the presence of mass. This is why planets orbit other planets, and light gets bent in a graitational field: they are following the curved lines of space around the planet. The best analogy of this is placing a mass on a rubber sheet, and waching it deform the rubber around it. Letting a ball spin around the mass is rather similar to planets orbiting one another, as the balls just follow the curved paths of the rubber sheet.
* The Bermuda Triangle, according to many theories and reports. In addition to vehicles vanishing without trace (no wreckage left), reappearing after disappearing from radar, etc. some people have reported experiencing "time warping" or "missing time" while traveling through here
:In reality, while several accidents have taken place there, they're not statistically more common than in any other area of sea with the same density of traffic. Which, in spite of the stories, is considerable.
* The Mandelbrot Set is a two-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional object that represents the eventual fate of iterating the assignment z <- z* z + c, where z and c are complex numbers (two dimensions each). Start with z=0 and try different values of c, and you get the usual two-dimensional view of the Mandelbrot set (which is, properly, only the ''boundary'' of the usually-black region representing points that do not escape to infinity). Fix a value for c and try different starting points for z, and you get a Julia set. The complete four-dimensional object stacks all the two-dimensional Julia sets along a complex dimension for a total of four real-valued dimensions.
* A [[wikipedia:Tessaract|tesseract]] is a "four dimensional cube". Just as a square is only one face of a cube, a cube is only one "face" of a
:Scarier still, people have built computer models Rubix Hypercubes which people have successfully solved. [http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm For your headache-inducing pleasure]. [http://www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d/ A 5D version has also been made.]
:If you want a quick view of just how confusing tesseracts can be, see [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xrSvVEpOog&NR=1 here]. Lovecraft would be proud. (Or actually he'd probably be nihilistically horrified at the alien, inhuman cosmos revealed by science, but whatever.)
:Tesseracts are really just the start of a really long and dark journey. Even a [[wikipedia:Hilbert cube|Hilber cube]] is a really simple example when compared to some of the ''other'' stuff. It is also a cuboid of countably infinite dimension. Studying maths at an uni sort gets you used to this stuff...
* [http://www.urticator.net/maze/ Try solving a 4D maze.] Just 3*3*3*3 takes about half an hour, and that's if you've gotten used to moving around in 4D.
* Try wrapping your head around the Moebius Loop. It's a loop with a half-twist with only one side and one edge. Similarly, the Klein bottle, which is a closed surface and only has one side, rather than having an inside and an outside. It has to go through itself at one point to make that work, though.
** Not really, that is just an artifact of embedding it in 3d space, in proper 4d space there is no such intersection.
* In 3d animation programs, when you make a polygon it's usually supposed to have 4 sides at the most and flat. In Maya, if you have something with more than four sides, edges that don't connect to a vertex or a vertex that's not connected to an edge, things get...weird. You end up with a shape that the program can't draw properly that will usually look like a different surface depending on where you happen to be viewing it from
:Programmers tend to do things like this a lot when they first step into the world of OpenGL and DirectX. Get the position of a vertex wrong when you're just messing around with increasingly more complex shapes, and you can easily find yourself with a headache just from looking at the shape you've made. This effect is how the Alien Geometry corridor in ''Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time'' was implemented. Some corridors in the ''[[Descent]]'' series are also twisted like this.
* Higher doses of LSD can produce visions of impossible shapes.
* [[Pittsburgh]], Pennsylvania's downtown area is called the "Golden Triangle" and is indeed triangular. To the uninitiated, though some of the turns ''feel'' like 90 degrees as you're trying to navigate. Making three "turns" and ending up back where you started has flummoxed more than one out-of-town driver (and more than its share of locals, too).
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** Also, the article correctly notes that once inside the event horizon, all points outside lie in the past. However, it then proceeds to draw incorrect conclusions from it. You would not be blind inside the horizon, because far from not being able to see into the past, you can ONLY see into the past. When you see something, you see it not as it is at that moment, but rather what it was when the light reaching your eye was emitted from it. Furthermore, a Faster-Than-Light drive would not be prevented from escaping from a black hole, because such a drive is perfectly capable of traveling into the past as measured by certain frames of reference.
* "Mystery spot" attractions use tricks of architecture to simulate this trope. Gravity hills do the same thing, but with natural tricks of topography.
* Optical illusions can convey an impression of
{{reflist}}
[[Category:
[[Category:Architecture Tropes]]
[[Category:Hyperspace Index]]
[[Category:Cosmic Horror
[[Category:Geometry Tropes]]
[[Category:Horror Tropes]]
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