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>"I already have Mom on my case, Luna," shrieked Usagi; "I don't
>need to hear it from you as well!"
>
Crow: [Usagi] Damn talking alien cats. Always on my case. She's
a jerk, right Mr. Clock?
Tom: [Mr. Clock] Right-o, Usagi!
- MSTing of "The Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle"
The premise of the Cuckoo Nest plot is that a character starts having hallucinations to the effect that they are in an insane asylum, where they are told that the events of the series are the actual hallucination.
The episode will switch from "reality" to reality, making one wonder what's really happening. Sometimes, even if the series canon reveals that someone was using phlebotinum to make them think they were crazy, there will be be an Or Is It scene in the "real world" of a psychologist giving up.
Often, if the character "accepts" the "insane asylum" reality by doing a certain thing (taking a pill, destroying the source of his "fantasy" power, et cetera), they might die, lose their power, or be submerged in the new non-fantasy reality forever. Occasionally the character is encouraged to kill themselves in order to wake up. The character is eventually persuaded to do said thing, and they're only stopped when incongruity reveals they're the subject of an elaborate ruse.
There's a variation on this, an ending to a movie/video game/book (they don't usually have the guts to do it to an entire series) where the final reveal is that the whole thing was just the delusion of an insane person -- a combination of this trope and All Just A Dream. Don't do this unless you really, really know what you're doing, and even then you probably shouldn't.
The Cuckoo Nest is the dark counterpart of the Lotus Eater Machine. A more benign form of the Cuckoo Nest is the Happy Place. A more sinister one is In The Mouth Of Madness. A version without the imaginary "reality" is going among mad people
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a perfect exemplar of this in "Normal Again". This episode ended leaving open the possibility that the entire series was in fact the hallucination of an insane Buffy Summers.
- Smallville, episode "Labyrinth". Possibly the worst scripted (and worst acted) instance of this trope.
- Star Trek The Next Generation, episode "Frame Of Mind".
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine, episode "Shadows and Symbols". Interestingly, the 1950s Sci-Fi writer that Sisko plays in the alternate reality was used earlier in the series ("Far Beyond the Stars"), only now he is completely insane, writing his dreams of Deep Space 9 on the walls of his cell.
- Combined with a holodeck malfunction in Star Trek Voyager's "Projections". It's given the twist that the character it happens to is a hologram.
- The final episodes of First Wave did this without the Or Is It.
- Stargate SG-1, episode "The Changeling".
- Stargate Atlantis, episode "The Real World", which ends with an off-handed comment by Sheppard that they might still not be in the "true" reality, which is quickly silenced by Weir.
- The Medium episode "Time Out of Mind" started off with this plot.
- The Lost episode "Dave" has elements of this.
- The Red Dwarf episode "Back to Reality" involves the crew waking up and finding out that all of their adventures aboard Red Dwarf have been a total immersion video game that they've been playing... very, very badly. As this was the fifth series finale, it was entirely plausible to viewers at the time that this was how the series was going to end. In somewhat of a twist, rather than being merely a more "normal" version of the reality, each character was basically the polar opposite of his normal character.
- The Red Dwarf comic ran a strip where the episode ended differently, and focussed on the Cat's supernerd alter ego Dwayne Dibbley. At the end, Dwayne decided that he was the real person and The Cat was just a hallucination.
- The Charmed episode "Brain Drain" has Piper being manipulated into believing that she's a mental patient instead of a witch, and she has to renounce her powers to regain her health.
- First season finale of Joan Of Arcadia: Joan is for a time convinced she was hallucinating the God avatars, and the second season premiere has God coaxing her back into accepting His presence.
- Used to rather creepy effect in Neverwhere and in the book of the same name it spawned. Richard, partway through his bizarre adventure in the sewers and other places, had his 'spirit tested', by essentially weaponizing this trope.
- Pretty much the entire premise of Life On Mars, particularly during the second season.
- One Twilight Zone episode had the main character oscillating between a reality where he is a happily married cop and another where he is a cop killer being violently interrogated. During all the episode we're guided to believe that he actually is a cop that dreams he's a criminal, and then comes the obligatory Twist Ending.
- On another Twilight Zone episode, based on an urban legend, a woman in a hospital has a recurring dream in which a certain series of events happens, and a nurse waits at the morgue door saying, "Room for one more, honey." Then, when she's released, those events happen at the airport, where the identical flight attendant says the line. She runs screaming, and the plane later crashes.
- An interesting variant is played out in Heroes in the second episode. The viewers follow Hiro through New York city for the duration of the episode until he discovers Isaac Mendez has been killed in a brutal fashion and that he is really five weeks in the future... then a nuclear bomb goes off and Hiro returns to the Japanese Subway he was riding in the last episode. All other stories during the episode take place during the regular date. Unusual also is that the rest of the season is spent trying to stop the events from happening and some actually do happen.
Anime
- Perfect Blue has this among the many tricks it plays with perception and reality. Unfortunately, these tricks are used so many times that the viewer is expected to keep several different alternate "realities" in their memory, up until the unsatisfying conclusion which explains absolutely nothing. Was it a good ending? A bad ending? An ironic ending? Nobody can tell. This is an example of Mind Screw.
- Episode 14 of The Big O was one of these, although another possible explanation is that the character involved was temporarily transported to an actual alternate world.
Film
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari used this as its Twist Ending, but this was back in 1919, before it was cool.
- Total Recall has a scene where someone tries (unsuccessfully) to convince the lead he is actually experiencing an extended hallucination. Throughout the movie we are given hints that this might be the truth. (We are, however, Left Hanging in the end.)
- Subverted in the original short story ("We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") when the main character has his memory altered to believe that only his existence is preventing the takeover of Earth by aliens, only for aliens to appear at the end and reveal that this is true.
- At the end of Brazil, when the protagonist is interrogated by the baddies, there is an action sequence in which he gets rescued by the resistance and gets to live happily ever after with his girlfriend in a house in the countryside. Then we get to see him sitting singing quietly to himself strapped into a chair in the room he was being tortured in before his rescue. The torturer present remarks to the chief interrogator that he seems to be lost to them, and they leave the room, the final shot being the protagonist, tied up in a chair, singing quietly to himself, lost in insanity. A studio-mandated alternate happy ending ditched the twist.
- Return To Oz had fun casting doubt on whether Dorothy's adventures in Oz were real or hallucinations.
- Gothika
- in Vanilla Sky, the main character is told that he's living in a virtual reality machine and he has to kill himself to get out. In a subversion, he jumps off a building, and it's true.
- Psycho Beach Party ends like this, with the lead character waking up in an insane asylum. The camera pulls back to show that the events have actually taken place in a drive-in movie. Character watching remark on how lame the twist ending is, until they are stabbed by the alternate personality of the protagonist.
Video Games
- American McGee's Alice does a similar thing with Alice In Wonderland; in this case the entire game is based on the presupposition that the original books were mental aberrations, with the different characters representing various personality fragments and psychoses.
- You wouldn't really know this if you hadn't read the game's manual, though, which provides the detailed journal of the psychiatrist who spent years treating Alice for her psychoses and makes frequent mentions of her ramblings and drawings, all of which somehow relate to the events of Wonderland.
- Max Payne 2 had a Show Within A Show, Address Unknown, where the protagonist was in an insane asylum and thought everyone else there was insane.
- No mention of Sanitarium? That's the entire premise of the whole game, if we discard the ass pulled resolution.
Comic Books
- Fallen Angel #14 directly references the Buffy episode. In this case, it seems like the character in question really is in a mental hospital, and is hallucinating the faces of the book's cast over the people there; at the end, it seems like she moves between dimensions, back to the series's universe.
- Grant Morrison's final issue on Doom Patrol centres on Crazy Jane in a mental hospital, where one of the supervising doctors, convinced all of her Doom Patrol adventures have been delusions, subjects her to electroshock and discharges her to live a humdrum "normal" existence. However, in the end, teammate Cliff Steele saves her from suicide by taking her "home" to the utopian Danny the World.
- A 2000ad story "Dead Signal" features a bounty hunter in a futuristic setting, who may be the delusion of an amputee back in the real world. The storyline has not finished yet, but this troper suspects there will be no definitive answer.
Western Animation
- Ed Edd N Eddy has the third (and originally last) season finale reveal that everything shown was just three old men reminiscing about their childhood. That would at least explain how nothing took place out of their cul-de-sac, the lack of a definite time-frame, and how nobody but the main cast are ever mentioned or shown even when they are at school.
Literature
- Keith Laumer's Knight of Delusions (also published, confusingly, as Night of Delusions) puts its hero through an insane number of alternate realities. Every time it becomes entirely unbelievable, he gets put into yet another one and is back at square one, trying to figure out if he's completely out or if he's stuck in yet another false reality. And they try everything, and I do mean everything, to find one that he'll stop mucking up; PI, crazy senator, psychic defender of mankind, a scientist with a Lotus Eater Machine, a homeless bum, God, and a good half dozen more at least. Finally we're told he's president and the whole deal was a test being given by aliens to see if Earth was mature enough to join the rest of the galaxy.
- A short story in the Let The Galaxy Burn collection set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe contained this. The story begins with a powerful Tzeentchian Chaos Lord inviting a fellow Chaos Lord to his stronghold, and expounding his conquests and victories throughout his ten millenia. The visiting Lord, however, sets a trap to kill him, and the Lord awakens in the body of a lowly human Cultist, being taunted and pelted with stones by others for his failings. They perform a ritual to mutate him into an animal-minded Chaos Spawn, and as his body is ripped apart the only thing he can think of is which life was his.
- At one point in Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is knocked out and wakes from an immersive simulation, or dreams that he's doing so. The person tending to him gets some of the details and names of his recent travails slightly wrong, and when Horza points this out, the technician realises they've woken the wrong person, so he puts Horza back in the machine. Horza wakes up, and it's never mentioned again.
- The Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw novel Fog Juice
 has the main character being shown by the Big Bad that he is lying in a hospital bed with a drip in his arm, and all the other characters are a drug-induced delusion. He dismisses this as the Big Bad trying to talk him into giving up... and tries not to think about the stabbing pain in his arm.
Webcomics
- A storyline in Fans! sees the F.I.B kidnap Shanna Cochran and - reasoning that, as the supposedly least imaginative and most 'mundane' member of the Science Fiction Club, her mind would crack under too much pressure - attempt to convince her that she is imprisoned in a mental hospital and merely hallucinating her adventures in order to get her to turn on her friends. Unfortunately for the F.I.B, however, this backfires quite spectacularly; convincing Shanna that she's crazy merely serves to break the self-imposed restraint on her imagination that she has adopted, meaning that the now 'crazy', yet fiercely imaginative and inventive, Shanna finds it remarkably easy to outwit her captors, escape, and play a not-insignificant role in thwarting their latest plan.
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