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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|
[[The Multiverse|Multiple worlds that exist side-by-side]] are fairly common in fantasy and speculative fiction, but sometimes things get more complicated than one [[All Just a Dream|dream world]], [[Another Dimension]], a simple [[Alternate Universe]], or just one [[Show Within a Show]].
If the characters discover more layers within or without (or the layers are implied within the story), then you have a
[[Recursion]] is a phenomenon in mathematics and computer science where an equation refers to itself, allowing a finite function to represent an infinite set of objects. In physical terms, it is similar in structure to Russian [[Matryoshka Object|Matryoshka dolls]], which are designed to nest one inside the other.
The basic types:
* The "Russian Doll World" - the worlds are physically inside one another. The most common way to travel between them is [[Incredible Shrinking Man|changing size]]. This dates back to the sci-fi pulps of the 1930s, even though the atomic model that likely inspired this trope (where electrons orbited the nucleus like planets around a sun) had [[Science Marches On|been superseded]] as early as 1925.
* The [[Nested Story]] - One of the [[Older Than Print|oldest examples]] is ''The [[
* The [[
▲* The [[Nested Story]] - One of the [[Older Than Print|oldest examples]] is ''[[Arabian Nights|The Arabian Nights]]''. Scheherazade [[Framing Device|tells stories]] of people who tell stories about people who tell stories, and so on. This is basically a [[Story Within a Story]] or [[Framing Device]], taken [[Up to Eleven]]. (Layers deep, that is.)
* The [[Dream Within a Dream]] - A character dreams of another world, is put into a [[Lotus Eater Machine]] or starts hallucinating another life, and to emphasize the drama of the situation, the character's confusion and/or the depths of their madness, the character is pushed into a layer within or [[Up the Real Rabbit Hole|thinks they have escaped into the real world]], only to find [[
* [[Recursive Reality|Transfictionality]] - Suppose [[Recursive Canon]] (a copy of the work itself, or a related work by the same author) shows up within the work. Then it turns out to be ''real'', because the author of the [[Story Within a Story]] (who may or may not be [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|the author of the actual work]]) is, in fact, [[A God Am I|God]] of his own [[Mythopoeia|sub-created universe]]. May result in [[Fridge Horror]] (or regular horror if it's addressed by the plot) if the in-story author has a [[Creator Breakdown]]. See also [[Rage Against the Author]].▼
▲* The [[Matrix Hypothesis|Recursive Simulacrum]] - Building a ship in a bottle, on a ship in a bottle, basically. Someone creates an artificial world, be it a computer simulation, [[Cyberspace|virtual reality]], pocket universe or a miniature planet. Then someone in ''that'' world creates another simulacrum. Bonus points if an inhabitant of the last simulacrum builds another one, or the original creator's world turns out to be a model itself. [[Game Within a Game]] is a subtrope.
▲* The [[Dream Within a Dream]] - A character dreams of another world, is put into a [[Lotus Eater Machine]] or starts hallucinating another life, and to emphasize the drama of the situation, the character's confusion and/or the depths of their madness, the character is pushed into a layer within or [[Up the Real Rabbit Hole|thinks they have escaped into the real world]], only to find [[Schrodinger's Butterfly|they are simply in an outer layer of the dream.]]
▲* [[Transfictionality]] - Suppose [[Recursive Canon]] (a copy of the work itself, or a related work by the same author) shows up within the work. Then it turns out to be ''real'', because the author of the [[Story Within a Story]] (who may or may not be [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|the author of the actual work]]) is, in fact, [[A God Am I|God]] of his own [[Mythopoeia|sub-created universe]]. May result in [[Fridge Horror]] (or regular horror if it's addressed by the plot) if the in-story author has a [[Creator Breakdown]]. See also [[Rage Against the Author]].
For extra [[Mind Screw|headache-inducing]] potential, [[Mythopoeia|a creator]] might mix and match:
* [[Mutually Fictional|Stable Fictional Loop]] - Similar to a [[Stable Time Loop]] but with narration instead of time travel, this can take any of the above forms and turn it into a paradox, such as a pair of [[Alternate Universe
* [[Turtles All
▲* [[Mutually Fictional|Stable Fictional Loop]] - Similar to a [[Stable Time Loop]] but with narration instead of time travel, this can take any of the above forms and turn it into a paradox, such as a pair of [[Alternate Universe|Alternate Universes]] that reference each other through [[Recursive Canon|recursive fiction]], usually with paradoxical [[Event Flag|event flags]] that prevent you from determining which version of the story is the "outer" story, or which is [[All the Myriad Ways|the "real" story]]. Compare [[Trapped in TV Land]].
▲* Turtles All The Way Down - It's an infinite regress; [[Post Modernism|there is no "reality"]] except in the mind of one character / [[God]] / the author. No matter how far [[Up the Real Rabbit Hole|up or down you go]], [[Closed Circle|you can't get out]]. Perhaps they [[Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence]] or they're in a [[Dying Dream]]. Perhaps [[Through the Eyes of Madness|they're simply insane]]. If lucky, it's a [[Interactive Fiction|Multi User Shared Hallucination]], not a [[And I Must Scream|Solipsistic Nightmare]]. (The name comes from a famous "argument" for the [[Turtle Island]] cosmology as an explanation for [[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress|gravity]].)
* Single reality - There is only ''one'' world, that is somehow enclosed inside itself. Possibly in several instances.
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Compare with most [[Otherworld Tropes]], particularly [[All the Myriad Ways]], where the importance of all these alternates is downplayed by the assertion of a "real world", [[Matrix Hypothesis]] (also known as [[Shaped Like Itself|Recursive Reality]]), and [[Up the Real Rabbit Hole]], where the "prime" level of existence is called into question. The latter is often paired with [[Department of Redundancy Department|Recursive Reality]] for its [[Mind Screw|headache-inducing]] potential. See also [[Daydream Believer]], [[Welcome to The Real World]].
Note that there has to be more than two layers shown or implied, or a path inward must paradoxically lead to the outer world (which is closer to an actual recursive equation.) Otherwise it likely falls under one of the simpler [[Otherworld Tropes]]. Shrinking into a subatomic world, for instance, does not count as a
Also, try to keep in mind the [[MST3K Mantra]] while reading any of the examples. Believe us, it's just not worth it to lose your sanity to these.
'''[[Spoiler
{{examples}}
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* Hasse's ''He Who Shrank'' inspired a number of similar comic book stories: ''Lost In The Microcosm'' (originally printed in the EC series Weird Science #12, 1950), ''The World Beyond'' (Strange Tales #32, 1954) and ''I Shrunk Away to Nothing!'' (Journey Into Mystery #56, 1960), the latter two published by Atlas, the predecessor to [[Marvel Comics]].
* A short ''[[Darkwing Duck]]'' comic published in an issue of [[Disney Adventures]] (titled "Cogito Ergo Something") has Launchpad holding up a dandelion and positing the existence of countless Recursive Realities to Darkwing. Sure enough, the perspective changes, and we see another world inside the dandelion seed where an alien Launchpad is presumably saying the same thing to an alien Darkwing about an alien flower. Then the perspective changes to inside the alien flower, and we see the "normal" world again ([[Mind Screw|inside the inside]]), where Darkwing promptly blows the whole idea off as nonsense and blows the dandelion seeds to the wind.
* [[Marvel Comics|Marvel]]'s Microverse is actually a ''subversion'' of the [[Russian Doll World]] - originally it was treated as one of many microscopic universes, but it was [[
** In one tale, the cosmic entity Kubik was educating the younger cosmic entity Kosmos on the structure of the universe by ''growing'' from the mortal level through the galactic, eventually becoming larger than the universe, than larger than the trans-cosmic realm where universes exist ... only to pop ''up'' to the level of quarks, and growing up past the atomic level back to the mortal realm. As Kubik said it; "The center of the universe is wherever you happen to be at the moment."
* [[Grant Morrison]]'s ''[[The Filth]]'' shows several microcosm-style environments (including a city contained by an enormous ship and a miniature world populated by "[[Nanomachines|I-Life]]"). The Hand's base, The Crack, is implied to be {{spoiler|a microscopic base}} created to harvest the {{spoiler|ink leaking out of the pen Greg uses to write the note for his (probably failed) suicide.}} The Crack, in turn, is home to the Paperverse, the fictional reality that The Hand mines for exotic technology.
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* ''All-Star Superman'' shows Superman, wondering how the world will function without him, creating a miniature Earth in a miniature universe. It grows relatively quickly, and the last panel of the issue shows someone drawing a comic-book character, declaring "This time, I'll change everything..." The character is [[Superman]] - it's our world, the man doing the drawing is Joe Shuster, and we have a loop.
* The ending to ''[[Irredeemable]]'' is basically this: {{spoiler|Plutonian having to absorb deadly radiation surrounding Earth or be killed with a weapon so powerful it can kill him completely. After he does so his body begins to be slowly ravaged. As chance to finally redeem Plutonian, Qubit uses inter-dimensional technology to send Plutonian's original essence before his [[Heel Face Turn]] to a parallel universe where he can end up right. As a result Plutonian's essence inspires Joel Shuster and Jerry Siegel to create Superman which in turn gets [[Mark Waid]] into comics and eventually writing Irredeemable}}.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070704164349/http://www.irancartoon.com/quino/water.gif This strip] from cartoonist ''[[Quino]]''.
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* ''[[The Fountain]]'' is a film about a man hunting for the [[Fountain of Youth]] [[Who Wants to Live Forever?]]. It features the same two characters in three time periods. [[Trailers Always Lie|Given that, you assume]] they succeed, and [[Finagle's Law|Complications Ensue]] when the girl gets sick and threatens to die on him due to Phlebotinum Failure. [[Mind Screw|But no]]: the past timeframe is the plot of a book about Tom as a [[Badass Spaniard|conquistador]], told by the dying present day wife, and Tom's character [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence|Ascends To A Higher Plane Of Existence]] in the future timeframe, where he bodily intervenes in the plot of the uncompleted book. Meanwhile, the present Tom ''does'' find the [[World Tree|Tree of Life]], {{spoiler|but it's too late to save his wife}}, and the Tree in question is dying, so he plants another one {{spoiler|over her grave}} where she predicts it will resurrect her as a tree...at the end of the story, the conquistador succeeds in living forever when he stabs the bark of the tree and {{spoiler|[[Literal Genie|the immortal tree consumes him]]}}. He drops his ring, a [[It Was a Gift|a gift from the Spanish Queen]], which the future Tom picks up. It turns out to be the wedding ring that the present Tom had lost.
* In the movie ''[[Last Action Hero]]'', in Jack Slater's universe there are movies where Sylvester Stallone takes up Arnold Schwarzeneggar's roles. This is a movie within a movie within a movie. [[The Nostalgia Critic]] (a fictional character) reviews the whole thing, adding another layer.
* ''[[Horton Hears a Who!]]'' is about an elephant who hears voices from a tiny town called Who-ville, built on a dust mite. In the animated version, there's a [[Stinger]] where the mayor of Who-ville hears voices coming from a Who-scaled dust mite...
== [[Fine Art]] ==
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130424193455/http://www.claymath.org/gallery/escher.jpg This lithograph] by [[M. C. Escher]] depicts a man in an art gallery looking at a picture of a harbour. As the eye follows the scene clockwise the harbour expands into a city, which expands into a detail of a building containing a gallery full of Escher's drawings, which turns out to be the gallery in which the man is standing.
** There was a documentary about an attempt to figure out what would be in the white spot in the middle of the picture. The answer turned out to be the picture itself, shrunk and rotated. Of course that image would still have a white spot...
== Literature ==
* ''Indra's Net'' (Sanskrit: ''Indrajāla''):<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra's_net Indra's_net] ''wikipedia.org''</ref> Perhaps the oldest extant example of this concept is to be found in the Mahayana Buddhist text "Avatamsaka_Sutra"<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatamsaka_Sutra Avatamsaka Sutra] ''wikipedia.org''</ref>, circa 3rd century:
{{Quote|If untold buddha-lands are reduced to atoms,
In one atom are untold lands,
And as in one,
So in each.
The atoms to which these buddha-lands are reduced in an instant are unspeakable,
And so are the atoms of continuous reduction moment to moment
Going on for untold eons;
These atoms contain lands unspeakably many,
And the atoms in these lands are even harder to tell of.}}
* ''[[The Phantom Tollbooth]]'' has the location of the number Infinity.
{{quote|
''Then he sat down, fanned himself with a handkerchief, and continued. "Then, of course, we keep the whole thing in another box that's so small you can't see it -
* [[Older Than Print]]: ''[[Arabian Nights|The Arabian Nights]]'' is the [[Trope Maker]] for the metafictional version
** Spoofed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy who takes it to ridiculous levels.
** The 19th century novel ''The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'' has a similar structure
* One of the simpler examples, the Total Perspective Vortex that Zaphod confronts in [[Douglas Adams]]' ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy|The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe]]'' is a {{spoiler|model within a pocket universe}} within "the real thing".
* Brian Aldiss' ''Report on Probability A'' presents a circular sequence of worlds. Mrs Mary is being watched by her three servants, G, S and C, who are being watched by some aliens from a parallel universe, who are being watched by scientists observing a rift in reality on the top of a hill, who are being watched by... until we come to the observers in the "outermost" reality, who turn out to be the figures in a painting in the cafe that G, S and C frequent.
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* [[Philip K. Dick]]'s novel ''[[Ubik]]'': [[The Stinger]] indicates that {{spoiler|Runciter is in a deep-freeze afterlife just like the main cast was, and there's another version of Joe Chip feeding things down to him just like he fed things down to the "dead" Joe Chip.}} And [[Here We Go Again]]...
* Toyed with in Diane Duane's ''[[The Book of Night with Moon]]''. There's a Prime Reality, but it certainly isn't our Earth, and there's nothing better or worse about a given layer. Those layers closer to the prime reality have rippling effects on the surrounding realities, especially those further down the line, though. Taking a chunk of the biggest Russian doll is bad. Smudging the paint on the smallest might be universe-destroying for the bigger dolls.
* [[Greg Egan]]'s ''Diaspora'' is a
* In [[Jasper Fforde]]'s ''[[Thursday Next]]'' novels, all the worlds of literature exist in a parallel multiverse called the Bookworld. ''First Among Sequels'' features two fictional versions of Thursday herself. [[Fridge Logic|If you think about it]] the books they come from must contain ''another version of the Bookworld itself''.
** At the end, Thursday observes the remaking of the first ''Thursday Next'' book. The "on-stage" part is cut-and-pasted from ''The Eyre Affair''.
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** One of the ''[[Choose Your Own Adventure]]'' books did that too, but with ''quarks'' as ''universes''.
* ''[http://qntm.org/?responsibility I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility]''.
* [[Stephen King]]'s first ''[[Dark Tower]]'' book implies that Roland's universe is a
** In later books, you find out it also counts as [[Transfictionality]] and [[Recursive Canon]]. So the universe is in a blade of grass in another universe, ''written by the author''.
** More specifically, the Dark Tower setting is more like a mobius strip of recursion, wherein our world simultaneously contains and is contained within Roland's universe, each being both lesser and greater than the other. The Dark Tower tends to be somewhat insanely metaphysical.
*** The atom-in-a-blade-of-grass thing was never established to be definitely true; more the the Man in Black was just asking Roland to ponder all the infinite possibilities of creation. The whole thing was just a diversion to fuck with Roland's head and get him good and confused while the Man in Black slipped away unnoticed.
*** But the Dark Tower canonically manifests in our world (or a similar parallel universe) as a single, perfect rose on an empty lot in Manhattan.
* ''[[The Cyberiad]]: Fables for a Cybernetic Age'' (1967) by Stanislaw Lem has a robotic prince trapped in recursive virtual dreams by his [[Evil Chancellor]]. Once the prince realises what happened, he panics, and desperately tries to wake up "for real"
** This happens in a [[Show Within a Show|story within a story]].
** In one of the Lem's ''[[The Star Diaries]]'' story, Ijon Tichy visits the scientist, professor Corcoran, who build numbers of electron brains. Those electron braines closed in the chests have '''consciousness''' and they are thinking that they are real people. Chests are wired to the device which sends electric signals to those brains senses imitating perception of real world. Those brains have no clue about their real situation. Except one, who is called by Corcoran 'his world lunatic'. Because of some world imperfections (such as Deja vu or theory of Seriality), this brain suspected that it is not real and everything is just illusion which is ''served'' to him by someone or something. At the end of conversation, professor Corcoran admits, that he is also suspecting that he is not real and surrounded by phantoms, products of false signals sended to his senses and that it is probable that even creator of this world is also a chest in someone laboratory, and so on and on...
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* There is a story called "Fessenden's Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton, where a scientist creates a miniature galaxy to experiment upon. After he's killed (along with the galaxy), a friend of his, who saw it all, keeps thinking "is there a Fessenden out there"?
* A Soviet story "Engineer Alexeev's Mistake" is about a scientist who created a tiny galaxy orbiting Earth. When some time later he decides to shut it down, it turns out that due to time passing differently there, the galaxy has already developed an advanced civilization (with a communistic government, naturally), and managed to retaliate by putting the scientist in stasis.
*
* ''[[Cloud Atlas]]'' is a series of nested stories, told in different stories, through different mediums (a log book, a screenplay, a spoken story, etc) which abruptly end part way through as the next story begins. Each of the main characters will at some point actually find the previous story, get to the point where it was cut off, and for one reason or another be unable to finish it either. Only the "center" story is unbroken, and as it finishes the others are picked up again and one by one finished.
* [[Roald Dahl]] uses this trope a few times, most notably in ''The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar''.
* Lawrence Miles's ''[[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]]'' novels contain frequent references to the "bottle universes". The intent appears to be that the [[Virgin New Adventures]] universe exists in a bottle in the [[Eighth Doctor Adventures]] universe ... and vice versa. [[Mind Screw
*
{{quote|
* In ''[[The Enduring Flame Trilogy]]'', Tiercel proposes that the worlds are each nested inside the other like a puzzle box. When "lined up" properly, something can move from one world to the other.
* ''[[The Dresden Files]]'': At one point, Harry made a scale replica of Chicago, with a powerful spell on it. When he uses it, he "enters" the model, and is able to move around it. And through it, he can observe things happening in the real Chicago. One unnerving aspect of the spell is that if he looks up at the sky, he sees the interior of his own basement, and a giant size version of himself concentrating intently on the spell.
* The plot of the [[Bernice Summerfield]] novel ''Dead Romance'' uses this trope for some hardcore [[Mind Screw
* A very wide variety of examples can be found in Douglas Hofstadter's book ''Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'', in which recursion and self-reference, particularly applied to mathematical proof about the nature of mathematical proof, are major themes.
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* In ''[[Mork and Mindy]]'', Mork once shrank down to microscopic size and ended up in an alternate world.
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial "Castrovalva" features a variation on this, where the entire town (a town called Castrovalva) had been warped in on itself. One of the cliff-hangers had a hilarious line from the Fifth Doctor.
{{quote|
:: The deliberately over-the-top delivery of that line was lampshaded in the "Castrovalva" commentary where Davison described it as "end of episode acting".
** The entire premise of the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Amy's Choice" is a choice between two possible
** Then there was [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51JtuEa_OPc the time the TARDIS] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmiefoRcfU ended up inside the TARDIS.]
* In the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' episode "Normal Again" Buffy is poisoned by a demon that makes her hallucinate that she's in a mental institution, and has been [[Cuckoo Nest|hallucinating her life as a Slayer in Sunnydale]].
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* Despite multiple concrete examples of crossovers that put ''[[Victorious]]'', ''[[Drake and Josh]]'', ''[[iCarly]]'' and ''[[Zoey 101]]'' in the same [[Nick Verse]], Victorious as part of one episode refers to [[Drake and Josh]] as a TV show.
* Abed tries to do this via a film project in ''[[Community]]''. It doesn't work.
{{quote|
* In ''[[Cosmos]]'', [[Carl Sagan]] speculates that our universe could be the equivalent of a subatomic particle inside a "superuniverse".
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* In a reversal of the ''He Who Shrank'' scenario, [[Calvin and Hobbes|Calvin]] once grew to the size of a galaxy and finds a door that leads back to his own room.
* A ''[[Pearls Before Swine]]'' comic strip featured Pig meeting [[Critical Research Failure|Atlas who held the Earth on his shoulders]]. Pig then points to the part of the Earth where he is, and his giant hand comes down and pokes his eye.
* ''[[Dilbert]]'' had to deal with a guy so cocky, he thought [http://www.dilbert.com/2011-02-07/ he was the one holding up the infinite turtles].
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* The 1st Edition ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' modules ''I6: Ravenloft'' and ''I10: The House on Gryphon Hill'', could be played either as stand-alone adventures, as an adventure and its sequal, or as interlocked adventures in which PCs who retired for the night in one module would wake up in the other, and vice versa. This last option could be played as a recurring [[
* One campaign for ''[[The Dark Eye]]'' featured a pocket dimension containing an archipelago on whose islands certain legends were true. One suggested subplot depended on one character dying there; their soul would be transported to, and be able to have encounters in, another dimension while the rest of the group was supposed to find a way to bring them back. (This is ''not'' the norm in this game system; mostly, dead means dead.) It was mentioned that if the soul was swallowed by a certain kind of monster, it would be thrown into a realm even further removed, from which they could not be brought back.
* The farming board game ''[[Agricola]]'' features several different "Room" tiles, in of which a game of Agricola is being played (a few posts down [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/352362/humor-on-the-agricola-card-artwork-includes-compar here]).
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==
* At the amazingly fast rate we're adding tropes to this
** Of course in actual fact it's a bit more of a moebius strip than universe-contained-universe: You just get through the entire site and the last page link you back to the first. It only really counts if pages start referencing the different layers of meta-reality that would be in play, otherwise Occam's Razor suggests that since we can only see one universe, there is no logic in assuming there's a second one.
* If you click on [[Transfictionality]], Recursive Simulacrum, [[Matrix Hypothesis]], [[Russian Doll World]], or [[Turtles All the Way Down]], (all of which are found on this page), they lead you back to this same page.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* During the board game battle between the two Bonapartes in ''[[Psychonauts]]'', you can shrink down and travel on an enlarged version of the board game. This allows you to look inside the windows of the prop houses on the board where, in one house, you can find the two Bonapartes playing the board game!
* In ''[[Fallout]] 3'', this is the basis of the Church of Atom, a cult that worships the "creative" power of nuclear bombs -
** Nobody ever explain fusion bombs to these people. It might spark a holy war.
* At various points throughout the ''[[Pokémon]]'' games, the player will encounter [[NPC
* In the Sierra point-and-click game ''Torin's Passage'', the worlds are all physically nested within each other, and accessible through warp gates called Phenocrysts. The worlds all have their own atmosphere and sun except The Null Void, so it's not clear if the worlds exist within the same dimension.
* In ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'', you can shrink down and fight scabies (skin mites) ''on your own leg.''
** The Crimbo 2010 event lets you work in an office that gradually increases your Boredom. Get it too high and you might face the [[TV Tropes|Tome of Tropes]], get it to 100% and your character starts playing [[Kingdom of Loathing|the Best Game Ever]].
* External Gazer, one of the "Snake Tales" included as a bonus in [[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]: Substance, revolves around the use of the virtual reality system that is the in-universe explanation of the "VR Missions". It turns out that not only does it work by {{spoiler|locating a parallel universe matching the training scenario and projecting the user's consciousness into the appropriate inhabitant of that universe}}, it's also possible for the "simulations" to be nested. Plus, they're nested such that {{spoiler|the player must exit the nested simulation as though exiting that component of the game itself}}. It pretty much bends the fourth wall into the shape of a Klein bottle.
* In Sim City 2000, one of the articles in the in-game newspaper is about schoolchildren learning about city management by playing a Sim City-like game. One of the students interviewed for the article wonders if they're actually just characters in a game like the one they played...
* [[The Stinger]] of ''[[Super Mario Galaxy 2]]'' (which is shown after defeating [[Big Bad|Bowser]] in the final level for the second time), actually reveals that the game's events are all part of a storybook Rosalina was reading to the Lumas. While Mario and Yoshi are both flying through space rescuing Peach and the Power Stars from Bowser.
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* The page pic is from a ''[[The Perry Bible Fellowship]]'' strip in which an astronaut [http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF094-Freaking_Vortex.gif somehow lands on his own helmet]; when he takes it off he can see a miniature figure of himself standing on it holding a miniature helmet with an even smaller figure of himself standing on it holding...and to make his day even worse, his bald spot is spreading.
* ''[[Darths and Droids]]'' has no film version of ''[[Star Wars]]'' in its world, with the plots of the movies used for a [[Tabletop Game]] instead. In that world, however, there is a webcomic about a world that has no ''[[Harry Potter]]'' movies, with the plots of ''those'' used for a [[Tabletop Game]]. The layering goes down and down and down, with another movie added every 50 strips.
** Getting very meta with [http://www.darthsanddroids.net/heists/0050.html this one] based on ''[[Inception]]''.
* [http://
** xkcd has actually played with this a few times.
* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', the Battlefield, Skaia, is contained in the King's scepter. Said king is fighting on the Battlefield. And there are two kings.
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*** {{spoiler|Snowman's heart contains the troll universe, she is currently inside the troll universe.}}
*** {{spoiler|Not to mention that [[Big Bulky Bomb|The Tumor]] is a bomb using the death of two universes as a catalyst. The two universes are the Troll universe and the Human universe, both of which are contained within it.}}
* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' in "[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/09/27/ad-infinitum Ad Infinitum]" (which of course is also metahumour).
== Web Original ==
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[Johnny Test]]'' has an episode similar to "He Who Shrank" - Johnny shrinks to smaller than a quark, and it turns out that each quark is an entire universe.▼
*
* ''[[Futurama]]'': In "The Farnsworth Parabox" our heroes end up owning a box that contains the universe that contains them.
** In another episode, Amy plays a game of virtual virtual skeeball
** In yet another episode, Leela experiences the Dream Within A Dream type. She slowly realizes she's in a dream (or going insane) and keeps trying to escape only to end up in more bizarre situations. She meets Fry each time who tells her she needs to "wake up". Turns out {{spoiler|she was in a coma, and she was hearing the real Fry (at her bedside) pleading with her to "wake up".}}
*
▲* ''[[Johnny Test]]'' has an episode similar to "He Who Shrank" - Johnny shrinks to smaller than a quark, and it turns out that each quark is an entire universe.
* ''[[Rick and Morty]]'': a 3-deep [[Recursive Reality|Recursive Simulacrum]] forms the plot in the episode "The Rick's Must Be Crazy". Rick's space craft's battery utilises a "microverse" to power it. In this universe, the inhabitants perform a repetitive action to generate energy in a ruse to provide power to Rick's battery (which they do not know about). A scientist within Rick's "microverse" develops ''his own'' miniature cosmos, which he calls the "miniverse", employing similar slave labour to generate energy for him ([[Hypocritical Humor|which Morty berates Rick for rationalising]]). Finally, there is a scientist within ''this'' cosmos working on his own "teenyverse".
** This trope is initially [[Played Straight|played straight]] and then [[Played for Laughs|for laughs]], as Rick thinks his "microverse" is superior and mocks the silly sounding names "miniverse"/"teenyverse" (which are unwitting parodies of his ''own'' "microverse").
** Rick ends up in a stand off in an amusing [[Inception]] [[X Meets Y|meets]] [[Matrix]] scenario.
* ''[[South Park]]'' uses the fourth type for 1 Episode. In the end, it turns out that Stan has emotional problems, so he, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny (who didn't technically die this time) go for ice cream. The End.
*
*
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*
** One [[Kids WB]] ad for the show has Robin and Starfire sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Starfire asks Robin what he's watching; he says he's watching ''Teen Titans''. Zoom out to show a recursive image and Starfire asking Robin the same question. They do this enough times to put it ''barely'' short of an [[Overly Long Gag]], then Starfire [[Breaks the Fourth Wall]], asking the audience what ''they're'' watching.
▲* The ''[[Adventure Time]]'' episode "The Real You."
▲* The song "Yakko's Universe" from ''[[Animaniacs]]'' had the entire universe turn out to be inside Yakko Warner's snowglobe ''twice''.
▲* An episode of [[I Am Weasel]] revolves around Weasel, Baboon and Red Guy trying to find out where everybody in the world has gone to, leaving every public place empty. It turns out everybody is home, watching [[I Am Weasel]]. And yes, it DID in fact include a shot of Weasel in front of a TV showing him in front of a TV showing him in front of a TV showing him... To be honest though, this wasn't [[Widget Series|even one of the]] [[Mind Screw|weirdest episodes]].
== Real Life / Other ==
* Infinite [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAJE35wX1nQ Fractal Zooms], such as [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRdLD6vh3g&feature=related Mandelbrot Sets] "Bigger than the known universe!" Turn on the [[Mushroom Samba|Mood music]] when watching these... ''Schpongle'' perhaps.
* There are any number of magazine covers with a [[Droste Image]]
** Hell, ''Games'' Magazine made a '''puzzle''' out of it.
** Numerous commercials have used a similar effect, where a photograph in one scene expands and animates, becoming the ad's next scene. Usually, this also has a photo or other image in it, which also expands and animates...
* [[wikipedia:Raelism|Raëlians]] believe that our universe is a tiny particle within the body of a living creature in a much larger universe, and that all atoms in our universe also contain smaller universes similar to the one we live in.
** Archimedes Plutonium believes (or pretends to, [[Poe's Law|depending on whether you think]] he's an actual nut or a troll who doesn't know when to stop) that the Universe is an atom of Plutonium (and changed his name accordingly).
* The [[Turtle Island]] cosmology is the basis for the famous often-cited [[Straw Man|"argument"]] / joke / thought experiment in cosmology and metaphysics known as [[wikipedia:Turtles all the way down|"Turtles All The Way Down"]], see that other wiki for details:
{{quote|
'''Man #2:''' Don't be a fool. It's [[Turtles All the Way Down]]! }}
* Have two mirrors face each other and look at what you see in them.
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*** Gravity '''does''' apply on a quantum level, but it doesn't apply significantly, and the other forces typically overwhelm any influence it has.
* Philosopher Nick Bostrom [http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html has proven] that if there's ever going to be a recursive simulation of reality, then we're probably in it already.
** This is related to the notion of [[Transhuman
* There was this [[Distracted By the Shiny|animated ad years ago for something or other...]] anyway, there's this piano melody. And we see the pianist. Pull out, he's in a bubble, pull out, gets eaten by a fish, which is in a little boy's bathtub, which is in a house, in an apartment block, in a city, on a magazine cover, being read by an Arab on a camel, which is actually on a stamp on an envelope, being delivered by... and on and on until it's all in a little girl's toy city and ''that damn piano melody stops.''
* The Internet, perhaps. If nothing else, it can, and possibly should, be seen as a world within a world.
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* in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtHO4AtVSwc this] video someone uses the imbedded web browser in Second Life (textured to an in game laptop no less) to access a remote desktop viewer, which they use to.....log in to Second Life
** So would that be ''Third'' Life?
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130623040433/http://www.tofslie.com/hey/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/recursive.jpg This photo] is a partcularly clever example. Look ''closely''.
* Google recursion.
* The [http://www.themodelvillage.com/ Model Village] at [[w:Bourton-on-the-Water|Bourton-on-the-Water]] in the United Kingdom is a one-ninth scale model of the Cotswold-stone village of Bourton-on-the-Water as it existed in the 1930s; part of the model is a model of the model, which itself contains [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/4d/e6/374de6a52a52bf064a8356fea6b25801.jpg yet another, smaller model of the model of the model]. And ''that'' one has [https://theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/the-model-model-model-village-bourton-on-the-water-karen-roeflickr.jpg a playing-card-sized area marked out with the roads and river of an even smaller model, but no buildings].<ref>It's in the middle of the upper left edge of the model^3 in the linked photo.</ref> Counting the real, full-size village and the playing-card-sized one, that's ''five levels deep''.
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