Psychic Nosebleed - Television Tropes & Idioms

I, I must remind you that the, uh, scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea.

Some unfortunate man, Scanners

Purely mental battles are hard to show with special effects. Sure, you can have the characters sweat, strain, or show veins swelling on their forehead. But when a character with Psychic Powers pushes them to the limit, or when a character is under mental attack, nothing quite exemplifies the true state of affairs like a thin trickle of blood oozing from their nose.

Exactly how much damage this implies varies from place to place. Exaggerated versions of this include blood from the eyes and/or nose.

An early example of the trope was the film adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter, where it was used in place of the original book's far-less-visible "tiny cerebral hemorrhages". However the first actual depiction can be found in the film Scanners (1981), which came out a few years prior.

Polite Dissent, a comics blog written by a physician, regularly provides examples of Psychic Nosebleed Zen

Examples:

Depending on how Time Travel works his can also happen when someone with mostly Ripple Effect Proof Memory gets an 'update' on the new timeline and the mental stress from trying to contain memories from a large number of lifetimes in this way causes immense physical stress on the person's physical body. This might happen even if memories are the only thing that carry over from shift to shift and the time traveler is no longer in his or her original body.
Max Lord, of the Justice League Of America, had a small nosebleed whenever he used his metahuman "push" ability.
Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four, frequently does this. In recent times it happened in both the movie and the recent Civil War storyline.
- The Fantastic Four comic has quite a few examples cropping up from time to time. Any character that suffers psychic stress seems prone to the Psychic Nosebleed.
- Marvel Boy/Justice also got nosebleeds when overusing his psychic powers.
This happened to telepathic cop Matt Parkman in the first season of Heroes.
- Also happened to Angela Petrelli in the second season, when she (unsuccessfully) resisted Matt's mental assault.
- Plus Peter Petrelli in the second season finale.
The 80s movie version of Dune involved a scene in which several Bene Gesserit (psychic witches) cried blood. This was due to a test the main character was undergoing, not what they were undergoing. It's David Lynch, it doesn't have to make sense.
- In Eraserhead, Henry gets a nosebleed, but it's anyone's guess why.
Just about everyone who had been Touched By Vorlons in the miniseries Taken did this. In fact the series ended with the super psychic girl giving all her fellow abductees nosebleeds to push out the small transistors that the aliens had placed in their brains, to prevent future re-abductions.
Similarly, various psychic characters in The 4400 have had nosebleeds when using their powers.
Jean Grey and Rachel Summers from X-Men. Hardly surprising, since the second is the first's time-travelling daughter from an alternate future.
The villain Saturn Queen from the Supergirl comics.
In Akira, the new, weaker psychics developed and employed by the Big Bad Tetsuo tend to have this. Tetsuo, and the other more powerful psychics, won't get any such ill effects.
Sophie, one of the Stepford Cuckoos from New X-Men, suffered a psychic nosebleed before her death while using Cerebra (the upgraded version of Cerebro). This was a combination of several factors; she wasn't a strong enough psychic to control Cerebra, and was on the mutant-power-boosting drug "Kick" in order to do so. Combined with her inexperience with the machine, it's somewhat unsurprising that it led to her death.
Manga example, partial subversion: In Gantz, the psychics Sakata and Sakurai get a slight nosebleed when they USE psychic abilities, not their victims. This is explained as using these abilities pushes their bodies past limits that just shouldn't be pushed, resulted in wearing out their insides in a process that's exactly like aging: although they always appear to be the same age, their bodies are becoming that of old men by using these abilities. Of course, considering the Old Man character that's the Hero's Right Hand Man, this might not be a BAD thing, persay.
- Oh, but it gets better. Later on, when Sakata holds back an enormous alien at the risk of his life to give Sakurai and Reita a chance to escape, he bleeds from the nose, mouth, eyes and ears. Ouch.
Scanners not only invented this trope, it pushed it farther than anyone has since, where it shows that enough psychic energy not only causes noses to bleed, but veins to pop leaks, eyes to bulge and even pop out, and, in one famous scene, an entire head to explode.
And of course, we can't forget the ever-lovin' trope-hoggin' Star Trek: Voyager, where Kes had been known to give the crew PsychicNosebleeds (usually under Evil Influence).
Dominic Deegan is prone to Psychic Nosebleed when he's been fighting titanic battles on the mental plane. See example here.
- This could also be explained that Dominic Deegan merely slammed his face onto the desk while battling in the mental plane.
Cancelled sci-fi television show Threshold has Carla Gugino's character getting nosebleeds every time she even remotely hears the alien signal - EVEN when she's talking on a phone to a friend on a quiet private plane, and neither the friend nor the audience can hear the signal being played on the plane.
In the fifth season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Willow gets some of these after using a teleportation spell on Glory.
In Deep Space Nine, when Kira allows one of the Prophets to take her body to fight a Pah Wraith (in the body of Jake Sisko), the exertion gives her a Psychic Nosebleed.
In Global Frequency, the man causing the radiation outbursts is shown bleeding from his eye in his first scene.
- A later example from the same series had people whose minds were being taken over by an alien meme-virus bleeding from the eyes, and possibly from the nose as well (it's been a while since this troper has read the series).
In Naruto, after using his Amaterasu Sharingan technique, one of Itachi's eyes begins to bleed profusely and becomes extremely bloodshot.
A recent episode of Lost used this when a character was stuck mentally traveling between the past and the future without a reference point.
In X/1999 Subaru has blood coming from his ears after going within Kamui.
In Warhammer40000 nosebleeds are a 'secondary indicative symptom of proximal psychic activity'.
- Much of the fiction features serious psychic nosebleeds, taken to typically W H40k extremes (for example, the loser of a high-level psyker duel is turned inside out)
In the movie The Fifth Element, anyone in the presence of the great evil thing soon bleeds from the scalp, whether it's about to plow through your space ship or just calling you on the phone.
In The Bible, Jesus sweats blood while in the garden of Gethsemane. Josef Mengele proved that it is possible for a human to do this while under enough stress, but we'd rather not know exactly how he proved this.
- The condition is called Hematidrosis. Leonardo da Vinci reported it in soldiers about to go into battle, and it has been reported for those about to be executed or raped. It's caused by the blood vessels supplying sweat glands bursting due to extreme use. Sadly, there are no sweat glands in the nose.
Caused by evil overdose in a paladin in Goblins.
In Erfworld, after Charlescom forces are hit by a massive ball of magic, Charlie (who uses "Thinkmancy" with his troops) notes that it gave him a nosebleed.
- Actualy, you are just taking the idiom used -"you gave us a bloody nose there"- literally.