Your Mind Makes It Real: Difference between revisions

* Subverted (somewhat) in ''[[Inception]]'', where dying in a dream is the easiest way to wake up ({{spoiler|unless you're both heavily sedated and in someone else's dream, in which case you end up trapped in a potentially [[Fate Worse Than Death|endless]] [[And I Must Scream|dream]]}}).

** Furthermore, while the human brain does not make dream death a reality in ''[[Inception]]'', it does make ''pain'' real. Getting shot in the leg in a dream sends the same signal to the brain that getting shot in the leg in real life does, i.e. extreme pain.

** However, in ''[[The Matrix Online]]'', safeguards have apparently been put into place that when a redpill is killed in the Matrix, an emergency switch jacks them out of the Matrix, forcing them to re-enter at a hardline after some recovery time.

** In the original [[The Matrix|movie]], Neo subverts the trope. {{spoiler|After he ascends to full-fledged [[The Chosen One|One]] status, his control over the Matrix becomes so great that he apparently ''wills himself to life''.}}

* Russian cyberpunk literary classic ''Labyrinth of Reflections'' used a massive VR world... based on ''DOOM''. Considering the state of the nigh-post-Soviet information network in 1991, that makes some sense.... The trick was a hypnosis program of sorts known as Deep that put the user in a trance-like state; the relatively limited visuals they were given were filled in by the brain's natural ability to add extra data (akin to limited side effects of sensory deprivation) and an immersive world was created. The trick was a very small, professional group of "Divers" who could bring themselves out of the trance-state at will, and interface with the system as it actually existed. Also there has been made a certain virus in the Deep that actually kills the users. And one that traps divers.

* In the third ''Hellgate: London'' novel, a demon used a device which made the target relive his/her past in the dream, which will go horribly wrong and kill them, or make them go crazy.

* One of the [[Driving Question|central mysteries]] in the ''[[Otherland]]'' series, by [[Tad Williams]], is why this trope seems to be occurring. [[Brown Note]] effects are known to exist, but they require especially high-quality virtual reality interfaces, and yet the Otherland network somehow manages to deliver sensations that the users' equipment is incapable of generating, and keeping them trapped online even when they ought to be able to simply remove their VR gear. The answer is that the {{spoiler|operating system has [[Psychic Powers]]}}.

* In ''[[The Saint]]'' short story "The Darker Drink", Simon Templar encounters in the High Sierras a man named "Big Bill" Holbrook who claims to represent the dream avatar of Andrew Faulks of Glendale, California. Holbrook notes that Faulks had started to have an increasingly vivid recurring dream, such that smell and tactile sensation emerged. It appears that the personages in Faulk's dream (such as a woman named Dawn Winter) had started to manifest in the waking world. Templar notices curious phenomenon which seem to support Holbrook's claim: Simon sees his own reflection fine in a small mirror, but Dawn's features are "blurred, run together, an amorphous mass"; when every single character repeats the same cluster of honorific catch phrases when they first meet the Saint; and the phenomenon of time compression that Holbrook identifies as an aspect of dream (a group of thugs searching for Holbrook and Winter say they will travel a long distance to fetch their boss from the town return in less than thirty minutes). Though one of the thugs opens fire on Templar, he has no wounds in the morning. However, when he visits Glendale, California to look up Andrew Faulks, Faulks has died after slipping into a coma.

* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s [[Conan the Barbarian]] story "Shadows in Zamboula", Zabibi is trapped in a circle of cobras, that prove illusionary in the end, but the [[Evil Sorcerer]] assures her that forcing women to dance to escape until they collapse was a common form of [[Human Sacrifice]].

* ''Magicnet'' falls somewhere between this and [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]], depending on whether you view magic as a shared hallucination, or the product of an alternate reality that coexists with this one. Characters who truly believe that magic exists can and do get hurt by it, but a large amount of what occurs is shown to be just smoke and mirrors once characters deny it (e.g. a supposedly exploding plane engine turns out to be undamaged.)

* In a case of "Someone Else's Mind Makes It Real", in [[Anne Mc Caffery]]'s ''[[Tower and The Hive|The Rowan]]'', it was first thought that Prime level talents suffered from debilitating vertigo (known as Travel Sickness) if they attempted interplanetary travel. Then along comes Jeff Raven, an untrained Prime from a frontier colony who could bounce around with no ill effects. It was later discovered that the only one of the six known Primes that did have that condition was Siglen, who had an inner ear condition that really did cause her to fall ill. Siglen's giant ego subscribed this to "the burden Primes must bear for their power," rather than have herself checked out. Since Siglen trained or trained with all the rest of the primes, she mentally pushed her condition on the rest. The Rowan was the only one of the original five young enough to train herself past her conditioning. And then, preferred staying on her home base of Io, Jupiter's moon, unless she had to travel.

 

** Another episode had a [[Master of Illusion|master hypnotist]] (the second master hypnotist, not the first one) whose hypnotic illusions were so real that Jimmy bumped his head on an imaginary desk and got a real life bruise. The hypnotist used this power to cause people to die from illusions.

* Subverted in ''[[Eureka]]''. During an episode of shared dreams, one [[Red Shirt]] died in reality and in the shared dream at the same time... but it turned out to be coincidental.

* ''[[Lexx]]'': "Patches in the Sky". We're told, offhand, that "If you die in a dream, you die for real," as if it's obvious.

* ''[[War of the Worlds (TV series)|War of the Worlds]]'': "Totally Real", the loser of the VR game lost his life—though this turned out to be the entire point of the simulator's design.

== Tabletop Games ==

* The RPG ''[[Shadowrun]]'' uses the "lethal biofeedback" version in its cyberspace; however, a hacker can avoid the feedback by using what's referred to as a Cold ASIST interface (as opposed to the Hot ASIST interface that most deckers use). However, not only does Cold ASIST [[Nerf|forgo all the massive bonuses to your die rolls]] that Hot ASIST grants, (which is why hackers use Hot ASIST, despite Cold ASIST being the default user mode for all legitimate users of neural interface technology), but all the other deckers will [[Easy Mode Mockery|mock you viciously]] before they [[Curb Stomp Battle|Curb Stomp]] your [[Nerf]]ed tuchas. One of the major events of the metaplot had the Matrix crashing, which resulted in people either dying or suffering irreparable brain damage when their cyberpersonas were cut off from their bodies. Considering the fact that deckers directly connect their brains to the Matrix, this is at least somewhat more acceptable than other reasons.

** Though it's unclear why as Shadow spells use material from the Plane of Shadow to create quasi-real duplicates of regular spells.

** Some Phantasm spells, such as ''Phantasmal Killer'' and ''Weird'', make you save or die upon failing the roll to disbelieve, doing nasty damage even on success. Annoyingly, ''Death Ward'', which protects against other spells that make you save or die, won't protect you against this because it's an illusion based on fear.

* Subverted by two small-press RPGs, ''Shattered Dreams'' and ''Dreamwalker'': while dreaming in either game can kill you—and probably will, in the former—the danger comes from actual predatory creatures infesting the dreamworld, not from your own mind.

* The "stigmata" enhacement to the Illusion advantage from ''[[GURPS]]: Powers'' can cause small amounts of damage to the target, but only to the point that he falls unconcious from the wounds.

** The deceiver can do this in a weird way. He can make the fearless run. Being fearless in 40k means something on the order of having the fear bit removed from your brain. So his ability to scare those without that component of the mind through some kind of mental vision would have to convince the subject they can feel fear.

 

 

== Western Animation ==

* The Simpsons episode "How I Wet Your Mother" has a device that lets homers family go in his dreams. They die in the dream, they die for real.

* ''[[Kim Possible]]'' has an ep involving a VR system, where its malfunction resulted in extreme aggression if the players were removed without winning the game.