Acid Trip Dimension

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Would anyone else like to enter the Fly of Despair?

Breathe the Fire; Walk the Air; Drink the Earth; Warm your hands at the Water. —A greeting in Limbo

For the times when you enter a space-time rift and the next dimension reminds you of the last time you dropped LSD.

When characters go to Another Dimension, it'll never resemble anything from our reality, but instead it will be... weird. Some can look like the inside of a lava lamp, some have landscapes that look like those Salvador Dali paintings, and others are not so pleasant. What's for sure is that the dimension won't resemble anything like our own, and the rules of physics are different or nonexistent. This can be Played for Laughs.

Contrast with Cloudcuckooland. What makes Cloudcuckooland weird is that the cultural norms there are very different from what we're used to. Acid Trip Dimensions may not even have inhabitants, and the dimension's physical laws themselves are wonky. And that's if the Acid Trip Dimension is even fleshed out, sometimes it's just a brief sequence to show that the character is doing some interdimensional traveling.

For a more musical experience, see Disney Acid Sequence. See also Hyperspace Is a Scary Place, Eldritch Location, Ludicrous Speed and Reality Is Out to Lunch.

Examples of Acid Trip Dimension include:

Anime and Manga

• The Witch's Barriers in Puella Magi Madoka Magica have a tendency to be... weird.

Comic Books

• Dr. Strange - most other dimensions (especially Dormammu's).
• The Special Zone was portrayed this way in Sonic the Comic. Referenced when a character claimed the part where most of the action took place was the weird part.
  • There are, however, parts of the Special Zone which are "normal". It's a Cloudcuckooland to Sonic, but it's pretty average in comparison to the swirling mass of colours that make up the rest of the dimension.
• Superman: The Bizarro-world, the Phantom Zone, etc.
• Delirium's world is like this in The Sandman...at its most coherent.

Fan Works

• The Hypercube's interior in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series: lots of red, blue, and yellow, a bunch of stuff floating around...

Film

• The various seas The Beatles travel through in Yellow Submarine: Time, Monsters, Holes, tc.
• What Dreams May Come is this in spades, considering that their entire vision of heaven and hell is based upon paintings from over the centuries.
• The end of 2001: A Space Odyssey is possibly the most well-known example.
• Wherever the hell that boat in Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory goes might count. The whole factory counts. It's one really strange factory.

Literature

• The dimension outside "angled space" (the 3-dimensional universe) in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House fits this. It's a black space filled with portals, and living beings passing through it appear as strange shapes.
• The "Unseen world" (or "wraith-world") in The Lord of the Rings which the Nazgul inhabited, and which exists along with the Seen world; in it, things in the "Seen" world are typically perceived as dim and shadowy, but other things can seem plain which are hidden to the "Seen" world. For example, on Weathertop Frodo puts on the Ring, he vanishes from the Seen world, but can see into the Wraith world (being "half in the wraith-world" himself), and he sees the Nazgul as they appear in the Wraith-world, i.e. as their normal human forms (which is also how the Nazgul appear to each other, despite being invisible in the Seen world). Likewise, Frodo is drawn gradually further into the wraith-world after being stabbed by the morgul-knife. Glorfindel, meanwhile, lives in both the Seen and Unseen worlds at the same time, since he has dwelt in the Blessed Realm; but he appears as a "shining figure" in the Wraith-world. (In the movie, however, Frodo is apparently entirely in the wraith-world whenever he puts on the Ring, while the Nazgul seem as glowing distorted figures rather than plain men; meanwhile Arwen becomes the "shining figure" despite having never dwelt in the Blessed Realm).

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has one that's "a dimension of all shrimp". We never see it, but Anya mentions it.
  • So does Illyria. It's reportedly very boring.
• The Star Trek universe is constructed of a matter universe and an anti-matter universe, separated by a "neutral universe;" the anti-matter universe is identical to the matter-universe in every way, but the neutral-universe is quite bizarre.
  • The wormhole in Deep Space Nine appears to be actually a different dimension that touches normal space in two separate points. The inside looks like nothing even roughly similar, but thankfully space ships can travel through it without any trouble if equiped with the neccessary technology.
• The Twilight Zone TOS episode "Little Girl Lost".
• The time vortex from Doctor Who can range from being trippy to down-right scary!
• In the Disney Channel show Adventures in Wonderland, a modern-day Alice steps through her mirror into one Once Per Episode on her way to Wonderland.

Tabletop Games

• The plane of Limbo from Dungeons & Dragons cosmology. It's a roiling mass of chaos matter, which changes randomly or based on the will of people traveling on the plane.
  • There's also the Far Realm, which exists outside the bounds of the multiverse. Nothing there even resembles the real world, and the text which actually describes the appearance of the plane (Of which there is very little) carries the note that nothing on the Far Realm can possibly be comprehended by a human being, therefore you can't even imagine what it's like. Oh, and to top it all off: The Far Realm contains more than one dimension, and you can see all the other dimensions by looking down and, in some areas, can be in several dimensions at once.
• JAGS Wonderland, based on Alice in Wonderland. The lower a Chessboard is, the more different it is from the real world. The lowest level ones are very odd indeed.
• The Wyld in Exalted isn't a separate dimension, it's just the writhing Primal Chaos that exists past the borders of Creation, where The Fair Folk live. It otherwise fits this trope perfectly.

Video Games

• In Grim Fandango the world of the living is represented by a weird collage. Manny mentions that the living creep him out.
• In Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon there are two single-screen "dream" levels like this. Not that the rest of the game makes much sense, mind you—this series is a Weird Thing from France—but these two locations are deliberately bright and bizzare. Oh, and the way to get to them? Eating mushrooms. Both times. You can't get a more literal example of this.
• The Elder Scrolls Oblivion features at least two:
  • The quest A Brush With Death features you entering a painting to fight painted trolls who killed their painter
  • The daedra quest for Vaermina features you entering a dream dimension where up becomes down over time.
• The Ethereal Void in Ultima Underworld 2.
• Moonside from EarthBound, where you fight some of the more absurd enemies like Dali's Clock, gas pumps, fire hydrants, and paintings. The denizens aren't much saner.
• Touhou has whatever is inside Yukari's gaps...maybe. Those eyes are creepy regardless.
• Psychonauts, every single Mental World. The graphic style is already pretty stylistic, even in the more 'realistic' settings, but the psychic journeys dive right into trippy.
  • "The Milkman Conspiracy" is especially notable for its irregular physics and being a scarily accurate rendering of how a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist sees the world.
• American McGee's Alice. That is all.
• Heavy Metal FAKK2, the elemental planes, especially fire.
• RuneScape has a fairy ring transportation network which can send you to a few different versions of this trope.
• Yume Nikki, since it's essentially about exploring a Nightmare Sequence disguised as a Wide Open Sandbox, and the dreamer clearly has... issues.
• Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The entire game as a whole could count, but a good example would be the inside of the Moon's mouth. Yes, you read that right.
• Kingdom of Loathing has several areas that are only accessible while your character is under the influence of hallucinogens, where you fight things like Interesting Wallpaper, or The Feeling You're Being Watched. Drinking too much virtual booze has predictable effects.
• LSD Dream Emulator is exactly what you would expect.
• The plane of Xoriat you can visit doing the Dungeons and Dragons Online quests Delirium and Acute Delirium. Highlights include that for chasing a beholder, you need... An Airship! Made of 12 beds and 6 bookshelves.

Web Animation

• Strong Bad's Sweet Cuppin' Cakes
• Many YouTube Poops.

Web Comics

• The KAMics, Gertrude, Brunhilda & Nikki experienced one of these.
• Quite possibly the home of the Fae in DMFA.

Western Animation

• An obvious homage to Yellow Submarine, the 3rd Futurama movie has opening titles that fit this trope, complete with a yellow Planet Express Ship.
• A more blatant parody occurs in Robot Chicken where there's an entire skit with the yellow submarine. Complete with an Art Shift as it is noticeably different from the standard dolls they typically use.
• In an episode of He Man and The Masters of The Universe, Skeletor erases He-Man's memory and sends him to another dimension by way of a Narmy Disney Acid Sequence, to a world that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
• Wackyland from the Looney Tunes short Porky in Wackyland and its remake Dough for the Do-Do, as well as its appearance in Tiny Toon Adventures.
• The Merrie Melodie Tin Pan Alley Cats has this as its centerpiece.
• In the Ren and Stimpy episode "Black Hole", Captain Hoek and Cadet Stimpy travel to one of these through the titular black hole.
  • In another episode, Stimpy crawls into his own belly button and falls into an Acid Trip Dimension, accompanied by a sixties-sounding rock song.
• The Simpsons: Homer is sent to one of these in a hallucination after consuming a nasty chilli pepper in the episode "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)".
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Squidward has a lot of experience with these, one of the more memorable being a spaghetti hell.
• Teen Titans has two. While time-traveling, Starfire goes through a dimension made up of ticking clocks. In a later season, Raven meets the hero Herald in one of these.
  • Any episode involving Mad Mod.
• The inside of the Grinch's "paraphernalia wagon" from Halloween Is Grinch Night.
• The aptly-named Warp of Confusion in the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Trail of the Missing Tails".
• Perhaps one of the earliest appearances of an Acid Trip Dimension comes from the 1930 Fleischer short "Swing You Sinners". The short is a Mind Screw all the way through, but it completely stops making sense and loses control of itself for the last minute or so, resulting in this.