Lotus Eater Machine - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Angel Sanctuary, the protagonist, Setsuna, is put into a dream world where Sara is not his sister but his girlfriend, his best friend Kira is a happy intellectual big brother figure, the guys he had been framed for killing were still alive, and the overall Angels vs Angels thing was just a dream. He is awoken by the desperate crying for help of Kira, who actually is the spirit of his sword, who actually is Lucifer, while the dream Sara tries to convince him to stay in the dream.
- Another Angel Sanctuary example is when Setsuna and Kato try to break out of Uriels realm a part of Enma-o's body places an illusion on Katou where he sees his family and himself as a little child, his sister (played by Enma-o) asks him to put away the bat because he doesn't need it here, even his father who isn't his father at all, only the husband of his mother is nice and kind and tells him that he got that short temper from him. he stabs Enma-o with his staff and then breaks the seal on the cauldron.
In Bleach Episode 178, Ichigo is trapped within a special technique created by Saiga, a bakkoutou weapon used by the assassins of the Kasumi-Ooji Clan. He is trapped within a memory of his childhood where his mother dies, and he is alone, waiting by the river at the spot she was killed. Upon breaking out, Ichigo pulled out his Visored mask and promptly delivered an ass-whupping to his tormentor.
Inflicting one of these is the power of the kakugane "Alice in Wonderland" in Busou Renkin.
Code Geass gives this trope a twist by having the Lotus Eater Machine actually be a highly addictive drug, called Refrain. It's popular amongst the conquered Japanese (and may have been developed specifically as a weapon against them), since it causes the user to relive happy memories.
- Another possible lotus eater was the false memories implanted in Lelouch by The Emperor so he would live a relatively normal life, unable to interfere with his plans. He gets over it in the first episode of R2, though, when C.C kisses him and undoes his amnesia.
Keroro Gunsou episode 3: After trying various methods to disguise Keroro so he can go outside, Tamama tries the plant "Dreaming Alpha", which sticks its tentacles into Keroro's head and makes him hallucinate that he's in a wonderful field of flowers, but almost instantly drains his body away. (The plant itself is oddly similar to the one in the Alan Moore story.)
The Book of Darkness uses this against Fate Testarossa in the second season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, locking her into a dream world where her Mad Scientist mother Precia is alive and sane and Alicia, the dead girl she was cloned from, also lived as her older sister. After making peace with Alicia, Fate literally shatters the dimension with Bardiche's Zanber form.
This is the main ability of Yukariko's CHILD in Mai-HiME. An entire episode is devoted to this, as she uses its power of illusion in an attempt to break Mai's spirit. Mai escapes from the Happy Place, so Yukariko commits suicide rather than hurting her further, bringing her evil lover Ishigami down alongside her.
- She uses the same treatment on Yukino and Haruka in the fourth volume of the manga. Haruka's Happy Place puts her Twenty Minutes Into The Future where she's uber-successful at everything, has her own naked lesbian harem, and she's utterly defeated and humiliated her rival Shizuru, whom she now uses as a footstool for bathing. (It really happened; we swear!) Once she realizes the whole thing is fake, Haruka uses her Heroic Resolve to break her and Yukino free and kick Yukariko's ass.
Fushigi Yuugi has a character with a similar power: Tomo, Nakago's right hand. He tends to apply it in a simpler and more subtle way than most examples, but is capable of building an entire populated town around the simple desires of one girl.
In Mx0, one of magical aptitude test is to leave a Lotus Eater Machine room within 10 minutes. If you do that, you'll forget everything that happened in there, and if you don't, you'll keep your memories but fail the test.
Neon Genesis Evangelion's penultimate episode was devoted to this, the culmination of all the psychological/spiritual Techno Babble of the series. The twisted reality presented has become an actual Elseworld in official games and manga.
This happens a couple of times to Sailor Moon. And at least thrice in the R season: when Usagi is trapped in an illusion by a youma that saps her Life Energy away until Mamoru wakes her up with a True Loves Kiss, when Ami is brainwashed into believing everyone hates her by another and has to debrainwash herself and when Wiseman tries to brainwash her into serving the Black Moon by breaking her spirit, but Usagi breaks away.
Tenchi In Tokyo episode 25: The villain Yugi, after "destroying" her shadow (and Tenchi's love interest) Sakuya, sets up a "dream world" when Tenchi tries to come after her, in which Tenchi and Sakuya could be together forever. Interestingly enough, it's Sakuya (who has gained a will of her own) who breaks Tenchi out of the illusion, at the cost of her own life.
- This is pretty much the plot of 1999's Tenchi Forever!, the final movie set in the Tenchi Universe continuity. Haruna, Yosho's former lover, takes Tenchi into her own universe to live out the dreams she never experienced.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann had this as the "Alternate Space Labyrinth". Eventually, the spirit and/or memory of Kamina shows up and saves everyone while Rap-Opera plays in the background.
- Or does he?
- It should be noted that it could've been Simon's own force of will, taking Kamina's form. The same happened to Yoko, which could serve to prove this theory wrong, if Kamina wasn't the most important person for both of them.
In the Battle Angel manga, mad scientist Desty Nova traps Gally in a VR simulation in which she's a normal, innocent girl and he's the scientist who rescued her from the Scrapyard, setting himself up as her father-figure. (As a nod to the English translation, Nova also gives her a different name: 'Alita'. In the translation, of course, Alita is renamed 'Gally'.) Nova's intention is that Gally's personality will be altered by the experience, and she'll find herself unable to kill him after he releases her from the simulation. However, this backfires in two ways — Gally recognizes that it's only a dream from the start and plays along, relishing the chance to briefly live a normal life; meanwhile, having genuinely come to love Gally/Alita as a daughter during his time in the simulation, Nova can no longer bring himself to shoot her in the real world. (Later in the series he becomes more-or-less a good guy, but his motives were always so obscure anyway that it's impossible to tell if it's a direct result, and he actually claims to have no memory of this incident due to the way he resurrects. He just backs up his mind and downloads to another body, but only backs up at certain time periods.)
Subverted very well in Wolf's Rain, where Kiba is separated from his companions and wakes up in an idyllic paradise. Since the whole point of the series was to find paradise, and it had been hinted that Kiba was purer than the others, he might actually be there (and the viewers were kept in the dark as long as Kiba was).
Played straight in Paranoia Agent, where Chief Ikari, one of the series' protagonists, is led into one of these, a choppily animated world where everyone and everything is paper thin. He stays there until the last episode, when with some help from his dying wife he realizes that he shouldn't run away from his responsibilities, and so destroys the fake world with a bat.
In Sorcerer Hunters, the team unleashes a book that makes everybody's desires real, creating two extra Carrots to fulfill them all. Carrot saves the day, which is arguably what he most desired.
Occurs several times in Ergo Proxy, as the proxies mentally war for supremacy. The ones involving Vincent have him and his friends appearing to steadily go mad, however one less serious episode involves little girl-robot Pino playing inside another proxy's gaudy Disney-esque Theme Park.
Gatekeepers had one in episode ten where the team were taken away to a beach paradise, however, it's mildly subverted because Shun suspects that something is up with the place from the off.
An interesting case can be found in Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex where a Mad Artist created a virtual reality that consists only of movie theatre in which the perfect film is played for all eternity. Everyone connecting with the program gets trapped and the only thing he ever wants is to continue seeing the film. Of course it's never shown what is seen on the screen, but it's apparently more like The Ring tape than an actual movie.
Yu Yu Hakusho had the more or less invincible Elder Toguro, a villain who could shapeshift at will and seemingly couldn't be killed. The problem? He managed to piss Kurama off, and when Kurama regressed into his more-powerful Yoko form, he sealed Toguro with something called the Sinning Tree: a Lotus Eater Machine that would slowly suck the life out of him while trapping him in a nightmare. Too bad he's immortal. Have a nice eternity!
- Yu Yu Hakusho definitely subverted this, however, in that Elder Toguro's addiction to the fake reality was based on his mindless inability to think outside the box, and his boundless rage and hate of his enemies, not his desire to stay there.
  - The implication was that waking up by oneself was impossible and that belief or disbelief of the nightmare was immaterial. The key point is that, belief or disbelief, he can't wake up on his own and he can't die because he can't die.
The last two episodes of Digimon season 2 had a very sudden reveal of the Big Bad, who used an alternate world where dreams come true to trap the Digidestined in their own fantasies. The way they got broken out seemed so contrived to some people that Epileptic Trees have been planted theorizing that the entire ending is nothing more than a dream-within-a-dream, and the battle never ended.
- What battle?
Yu-Gi-Oh!: It was implied in the Anime-only Noa arc that Noa was put into one of these by his father after he died, and went mad as he realized this, and his father subsequently abandoned him because Noa wasn't playing along.
In the Pokémon episode "Malice in Wonderland", Ash and his party get trapped in a dream-world, where Ash is able to defeat the champion Cynthia and owns every single badge in the world, Dawn is a undefeatable Coordinator, who has no problems taking on her own Mom and owns more Ribbons than one can count, and finally, Brock is surrounded by an army of Joys and Jennys, who all want to marry him. The cause is a ghost-type Pokemon, who wants them to play with it.... forever. As soon as they realize, that everything around them is not real, the dream changes into a nightmare, but they find a way to use their own imaginations to fight back.
Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch had Alala, a Fairy-like villain, who had the ability to use her song to either perform mass hypnosis or trap someone in a sweet dream so that person wouldn't want to wake up.
When you're bitten by Vampire Princess Miyu as a part of your blood contract, your mind gets placed in a dream similar to this. She calls it "living in happiness", since it's a pre-requisite of said contract to be a physically attractive person who has gone through horrible trauma.
At the end of the Inu Yasha manga, Kagome, while trapped INSIDE the Shikon jewel, is initially made to believe that she is living a normal life, forgetting all about the Feudal Era and everything she did there. When she remembers her adventures and comes to in the darkness of the jewel, it tries to trick her into making a selfish wish by promising her that perfect normal life if she wishes for it. Only remembering and being with Inuyasha prevents her from wishing selfishly on the jewel and being trapped in it forever.
- In the anime, when the Shikon Pearl is contaminated by Tsubaki the evil Miko and Kagome is affected, she's temporarily trapped inside another one where the Inu-tachi doesn't exist and she can't remember them, despite seeing people that act and look like them (Sango and Miroku are a young married couple she passes by, Kaede and Shippo are an old lady and her grandson, etc. She only breaks out when she meets the equivalent of Kikyou, who poses as the captain of the archery club and starts questioning Kagome's motives to be there.
Interlude takes place almost entirely inside of one of these.
In Dragon Ball Episode 116, Korin sends Goku to an icy wasteland to find a magic potion that will help him beat Demon King Piccolo. This icy wasteland is inhabited by a monster called Darkness, who traps Goku in a dream world where his friends are able to live in peace, because Demon King Piccolo does not exist. Goku refuses to submit, so the dream becomes a nightmare where his friends become violent. Although Darkness was just testing Goku before giving him the potion, because it is fatal to the unworthy.
In Hunter X Hunter, one of the first tests is running around a dark alley surrounded by tree roots. Anyone caught between the roots experiences a dream related to their darkest memories and sapped ot of energy until they die. That's how we learn Leorio's backstory: he dreams about Pietro, his old friend who died of illness.
In Naruto, there is a spectral sword known as the Sakenagi Longsword which seals whoever is cut by it in a blissful illusion for all eternity. Itachi possessed it as a part of his Susanoo jutsu and used it to defeat Orochimaru, who had spent years searching for it.
- The leader of Akatsuki also recently revealed his endgame plan is to put the entire world into one of these.

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The story by Cary Bates in Action Comics #492 (Feb 1979) in which Superman is caught in an "odd-shaped swirl of crimson energy" and has illusions of a future life in which he marries Lana Lang and has children, which turn out to be implanted by Phantom Zone villains to distract him while the crimson energy kills him.
In Comicbook/X-Men the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, had a nervous breakdown and created the House of M Alter reality, where most superheros had no memory of having powers or being heroes at all, and most of them found this to be a much more enjoyable alternative to a reality of fighting and killing each other.
In a recent Batman story arc, evil scientists working for Darkseid put Batman in a Lotus Eater Machine so they can take advantage of his psyche for their own ends. He finds out though and actually is able to completely destroy all of their equipment and ruin their plans without even waking up.
Doctor Doom once trapped the Fantastic Four into such a device: They thought they were living idyllic normal lives in a place called Liddletown, when in fact their consciousness had been transferred to miniature clones of themselves, and the town was an intricate scale model.
In an issue of Green Lantern, Green Lantern and Green Arrow are ensnared by a single Black Mercy by Mongul's son, also named Mongul; Lantern's dominant personality made the ideal world they shared too ideal for the jaded Green Arrow, and they manage to escape.
- Turns out that Black Mercys are Well Intentioned Extremist who do this in order to end pain and fear and later joins the Green Lantern Corps
An early Sonic The Hedgehog comic has Robotnik trapping the Freedom Fighters in such a machine, where on top of the traditional ideal world, it actually changed to meet its inhabitants' wishes. After figuring it out, Sonic pushes the machine's "user-friendly" nature to its limit, takes control of Robotnik's war machines (currently on their way to raze Knothole), and forces Robotnik to let them go by threatening to turn them on Robotropolis.
- Sonic The Comic did something similar to this effect in an early issue in the "Ruled By Robotnik" arc. Sonic woke up to find out that he was a human and lacked his abilites.
Spider-man in Marvel's Earth X traps an aged Peter Parker in an illusory world in which, among other things, he is married to Gwen Stacy and has a son (rather than his real-world daughter).
Alan Moore's For The Man Who Has Everything, featuring Superman. The plant gives the victim hallucinations of his biggest dream — in Superman's case, that he's with his still-living parents on Krypton. Superman subconsciously frees himself from the fantasy by making that dream Krypton become a heartbreaking nightmare of the planet sliding into a self-destructing chaos, spurred by his embittered father. After it was removed from Superman, it fell on Batman, and he also experienced his greatest fantasy — that his parents were not murdered. After Superman is freed from the dream, he proceeds to unleash the mother of all Unstoppable Rages upon Mongul, who mentions that he used the flower specifically to create a prison that Superman could not escape without giving up his greatest desire.
- The story later appears in the animated series Justice League Unlimited. (Reportedly, this is the only adaptation of any his works that Moore has liked.) With a few differences. Notably, Krypton never decays to the degree it does in the comics, and Batman is freed so quickly that he gets to see his dad beat up Joe Chill -- only for the latter to get off a shot anyway just as the plant lets go.
- I always got the impression it was the Black Mercy itself that made Krypton a mess. This story, like much of Moore's work, seems to be a De Construction of the trope. The Black Mercy ensnares its victims by giving them what they think they want, but to keep them there it has to prevent them from realizing what's going on. In order to do that, it makes the illusion as realistic as possible by extrapolating what the logical outcome of their victim's fantasy would ultimately be, which, of course turns out nothing at all like they wanted.
- One of the lighter on heavy duty silly action and alien sun eating super power inducing undercover covert ops angel alien trope summoning subverting inverting creating bad guy zombie clone body double alien arcs of Grant Morrison's JLA run had the villain The Key (who'd had a comic book death) awoke after the Justice league fought a bunch of either a bunch of Hard light copies of the Justice League or some rogue angels who were going to drop a giant arc spaceship on San Francisco.
  - Oh wait, forgot to explain it with all the buildup! The Key puts all the of the League in the best happy place you can think of, the only intervention is Green Arrow, Connor Hawke! Who takes out all of the Key's robots, while Batman snaps out of it, who then you know, travels through all the psychic links and frees the lot, and Key, well, ... "dies" or something. He doesn't get better.
  - This story is actually a subversion. The Key was planning on the heroes breaking free of the machine: doing so would open a door that would make the Key all powerful.
- A similar story, perhaps written to echo the Batman: The Animated Series episode mentioned below, has the Mad Hatter trapping Batman in an idealized Silver Age world. Tellingly, Batman realizes that the illusion is not real, and breaks himself out of it, because he realizes that, in the world created by the Lotus Eater Machine, he is happy.
  - Actually, he realizes it's a dream because the portion of the brain responsible for reading is apparently inactive during sleep. Astute viewers can figure out something's going on by how versions of Mad Hatter's leitmotif plays throughout the episode.
Also by Alan Moore, Dark Age volume 2 of Marvelman (aka Miracleman) recasts the character's Silver Age adventures as Lotus Eater Machine dreams invented to keep him and his fellow post-humans in line while they were being studied and programmed.
Alan Moore must really like this trope. He used it again in his Jonni Future stories. One of Jonni's enemies is the Empress of the End, who trades people all their Earthly possessions to experience a (fatal) experience of their heart's greatest desire. A surprising number of people willingly make this trade, but when the Empress kidnaps Jonni's sidekick, Jermaal Van Pavane the Paraman and forcibly submits him to the machine, she has to rescue him.
- In another Jonni Future story, she has to be rescued from a planet which causes her to hallucinate her greatest desire. Which is apparently being swarmed by lots of naked versions of herself...
Ed Brubaker did a guest two-parter for Tom Strong, in which the title character got dropped in a really subversive one of these: first the hero is made to believe that he's mad, and then when he fights this, he discovers that he's the result of a government Super Soldier program, and when the project was scrapped he was dumped on the street. The resulting existential angst almost kills Tom Strong... but then he realises that it was All Just A Dream, smashes the Phlebotinum keeping him there, and goes back to his loving wife and four-color adventures. Except the wrap-up is handled very quickly, leading some of us (one at least) to wonder...
Zenith's Chimera is a living Lotus Eater Machine, an attempted Super Soldier that self-evolved into a pocket universe, containing any reality anyone can imagine. This turns out to be useful when there are a bunch of insane Reality Warper former-superheroes-gone-bad to dispose of. No, this was not by Alan Moore (it was Grant Morrison).
- As was the Batman story above. He obviously likes the trope as well.
In an attempt to take control of his body and manifest in the real world the Devil Hulk once trapped Bruce Banner in a perfect fantasy land that existed only in his head. Bruce was married to Betty, had kids and was best friends with his father and General Ross.

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The original ending of Brazil, self-imposed.
Labyrinth The Goblin King unsuccessfully attempts this with Sarah.
The Matrix: Agent Smith (and, later, the Architect) reveals that the original Matrix was a giant Lotus Eater Machine for the entire human race, but their minds rejected it because it was too good to be true.
- 'course, the current version of the Matrix is still a Lotus Eater Machine compared to the real world...
In Minority Report, the prisoners in containment are supposedly in virtual realities where all their wishes come true. Some speculate that after John is arrested, all the events after he enters the cell are his fantasies coming true. Note that it's a Philip K Dick story...
- Technically it's not a punishment, since the prisoners haven't committed the crimes for which they have been convicted. It's a storage facility meant to prevent them from ever committing those crimes. A subtle difference, and it's possible that the Lotus Eater Machine-aspect was a deliberate compensation for the fact that they haven't actually done anything.
Star Trek: Generations gives us the Nexus, where, in Guinan's words, it's as though joy were something tangible, that you can wrap around you like a blanket. "Once you're there, all you'll want is to stay in the Nexus." The villain decides it's worth the sacrifice of several solar systems to get back in. Picard nearly agrees until Guinan talks him out of it, and Kirk loves it until he finds out that nothing he does there ''matters''.
Total Recall revolves around this, giving an Or Is It ending with a My Own Worst Enemy revelation tied in. Or was he his own worst enemy?
Vanilla Sky ends with the revelation that the protagonist actually committed suicide early on and was cryogenically frozen and put into a state of lucid dreaming where he lives out his fantasy life, gets the girl and gets an operation which fixes his disfigurement...however, the dream turns into a nightmare which culminates in him accidentally killing his girlfriend. At the end he jumps off a building in order to wake himself up despite being given the choice to have everything fixed so that the dream would be happy again.
In X2: X-Men United, Jason Stryker is a mutant with this power, who uses it on Professor Xavier to break his will. At one point, he shows Xavier a vision where he is able to walk again.
In Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled in a last ditch effort to get his third wish the Djinn offers Lisa a perfect fantasy world where all her desires can come true. She manages to reject him.
Given an Outer Limits Twist in the early-'90s Fangoria Films release Mindwarp. In a post-apocalyptic Earth, the majority of the surface consists of large areas of radioactive wastelands, inhabited largely by violent mutant "Crawlers" . The remaining humans, a.k.a. "Dreamers", live in a single biosphere known as Inworld, and spend their time plugged into a computer living out virtual-reality fantasies; while retaining barely enough volition to take care of their basic physical needs. One Dreamer rebels and is exiled from Inworld, fights Crawlers, and searches for her father who was similarly exiled for rebelling. In the end she encounters multiple layers of Dream Within A Dream, as she repeatedly "wakes up" from virtual-reality fantasies; and is ultimately revealed as just another apathetic Dreamer.

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Used at least twice by Alfred Bester, usually not via virtual-reality machines (or the equivalent in sophistication) but with actors and (presumably) various more mundane aids:
- In The Stars My Destination, the failure Gully Foyle is put in a fantasy where he's rich, famous, and loved, and all his remembered past is part of a psychosis he's struggling to overcome; the goal is not to imprison him but to wring valuable information out of him. Fortunately, he's too stubborn to accept it.
- In the short story 5,217,009, Jeffrey Halsyon is dumped into successive science-fiction-themed juvenile fantasies: in the first, he's the last fertile man on Earth, with all that implies. This turns out to be an unorthodox method of psychiatric treatment.
Ray Bradbury's Mars is Heaven! starts out as a sort of Ontological Mystery in the beginning. A crew from Earth land on Mars, which looks like Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. However, when their long lost dead relatives start appearing, it becomes more of a Lotus Eater Machine story. It has a Downer Ending: the residents of the town are telepathic, shape-shifting Martians who put up the facade to throw the spacemen off guard. It works: that night, just as the Captain is beginning to realize this, his "brother" turns into an alien and stabs him to death. The same thing happens all over town. The next day, they have a funeral for the spacemen...and then take on their true forms and gleefully tear the ship apart.
In Arthur C Clarke's novella The Lion of Comarre, the protagonist discovers that "Comarre," a rumored place that is occasionally sought out by people who are never seen again, is a robotic Lotus Eater Machine facility. The government tries to keep the truth hidden, and to keep people away — but not very hard, as it's considered a good safety valve for those who would otherwise be disruptive.
Used more-or-less in William Gibson's Neuromancer. The hacker Case keeps getting pulled into hyper-realistic simulations by the AI he's supposed to free. The longest which was actually caused by the AI's rival/counterpart lasts several subjective days and reunites him with his murdered girlfriend; the Machine breaks down, though, since he's just as miserable and lonely with her as without.
In Robert Jordan's The Wheel Of Time, the test for becoming Accepted is to go through an artifact that does this three times. The dream world (Or Was It A Dream ?) takes many forms, sometimes horrifying, sometimes perfect, sometimes prophetic. To pass each round of the test, they must pass through an exit door that appears only once, at the time when they are least able or willing to use it.
The Pendragon Adventure by DJ MacHale: the territory of Veelox has Lifelight, a sort of virtual reality where people can live perfect lives. The world outside decays into a ghost town because of this. The titular Reality Bug is created to make the illusions less idealistic, but it has the unintended and VERY unwanted effect of actually killing people. Unfortunately, Saint Dane's plan all along was to have the bug deactivated. Bad ending.
Accelerando by Charles Stross: Some Sufficiently Advanced Aliens discover an Islamic scholar, and become interested in his beliefs. So they decide to throw him into a virtual reality version of Paradise, complete with 72 virgins. He responds by locking himself in the highest tower he can find and praying, as he knows immediately this isn't Fluffy Cloud Heaven; He's a scholar, his idea of paradise is infinite knowledge straight from the most omniscient source around. Interesting in that this is the sort of Lotus Eater Machine that you can't break out of, even if you know it's not real. He has to be rescued by someone outside.
The original novel version of Red Dwarf ends in the "Better Than Life" simulation where Lister must make the decision whether to stay in the simulation or return to the hardships of traveling back to an Earth six million years in the future where he may well be the last human as he understands it. Talk about a Downer Ending. The second novel reveals that the Lotus Eater Machine digs deep into their psyche, bringing to light their deepest desires. Which, unfortunately for Rimmer (or fortunately, since it is what breaks them out of the fake paradise), revolves around his self-loathing. Rimmer's self-hatred ends up destroying the dream world. Except that they wake up to find a functioning Red Dwarf, and several of the crew were also put into stasis. They proceed to test things by dropping buttered toast, which invariably land butter side up. The game designer appears, congratulates them, and offers a replay. The crew decline.
- The final episode of Series 5, titled Back to Reality, features an actual Lotus Eater Machine, claiming that the entire events the characters remember up to that point were a popular virtual reality video game called "Red Dwarf". But in a twist it turns out the machine itself is part of the hallucination. The characters did not wake from a dream machine video game, but they are stuck in a collective nightmare hallucination designed to drive them to suicide.
- More Red Dwarf: The three-part miniseries Back to Earth that aired in 2009. Act II and Act II get increasingly bizarre until they are revealed as a Lotus Eater Machine hallucination brought on by a hallucinogen that links all the affected characters in a pleasant dreamworld. After finding out, Lister is tempted to stay but ultimately he ops for the real thing.
In the novel The Last Temptation of Christ, this was Satan's last attempt. Satan gives him a vision of a peaceful life with Mary Magdelene. Jesus rejects it to die on the cross and redeem humanity. Christians who never actually read or watched it protest it anyway.
Part of a minor subplot in the novel House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. One character plays in a virtual reality game which malfunctions and replaces his personality with that of his game character. Eventually he has to be wired permanently into the machine as he can't function properly outside it any more.
In Connie Willis's short story "Feng Burger," the main characters inhabit a shared lotus eater machine universe, while in the outside world their bodies slowly dehydrate. It is left unclear whether they go on living in the fantasy forever even after their bodies die
In the Warhammer 40000 Novel Ghostmaker. The Tanith 1st, a regiment of light infantry are fighting a regular enemy when they are suddenly placed under a psychic illusion where they imagine they are on their homeworld. This is important, as said homeworld was destroyed when the Tanith were first formed into a unit and were forced to evacuate the planet against all their wishes. The illusion is intended to make them fight harder by touching on what was most dear to them. As a result, the illusion gave the Tanith the chance to defend their homeworld that was forever denied to them. It works spectacularly well, as they defeat a force that outnumbered them a 1000 to 1 with only one casualty.
Percy Jackson And The Olympians has the Lotus Hotel and Casino, named for the Greek Trope Namer.
Romance Of The Three Kingdoms has a non-literal version of this be "Plan B" when Sun Quan and Zhou Yu's plot capture Liu Bei under the guise of an arranged marriage to Sun Quan's sister goes sour when the marriage, thanks to the intervention of their father-in-law and Sun Quan's mother, and as advisor Zhang Zhao put it, "Liu Bei began life in a humble position and for years has been a wanderer. He has never tasted the delights of wealth." Unfortunately for them, Zhuge Liang saw the whole thing coming a year away, and thus the second of his three "schemes in a bag" (literally) was to have Zhao Yun snap Liu Bei out of it. Oddly enough, it appears that a year away was as long as it took for Zhao Yun to actually remember that scheme #2 existed... *facepalm*
There was this Captain Future villain - I believe his name was Ru Ghur.
The Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter And The Sorcerers Stone appears to have become an unintentional example of this. It only shows an image of someone's greatest desire, but "Men have wasted away in front of it, even gone mad" indulging in the fantasy. Dumbledore stops Harry from becoming one of them.

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On The 4400, Alana's promicin ability is to create worlds inside hers and another person's head. The future people use this to romantically set up her and Tom Baldwin by creating a world for them where they've been married for a few years and nobody but them even remembers the 4400. Eventually Tom figures this out and he and Alana have to choose to leave the fantasy world after spending most of a decade together happily married.
The main character of Angel has a curse where if he's ever truly happy, he loses his soul and becomes a vampire serial killer. For plot reasons, the good guys needed this to happen, so a spell was cast to accomplish this. After the spell is cast, it appears that nothing happens, and Angel and company decide they have to face the Big Bad regardless. Over the course of the episode, it plays out just like a normal episode, with gains and losses, things happening, until the Big Bad is actually defeated and everyone is happy. Then...everything starts getting freaky as too much happiness results, with far too many good things happening, culminating in a rewind back to the supposedly "failed" spell, which actually worked. The entire episode was a hallucination of Angel's while his soul was taken from his body, and we come face to face with Angelus.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in true Buffyverse fashion, pulled off a really bizarre, particularly twisted, and more than slightly subversive take on this by combining it with the horror standard Or Is It in the sixth season episode "Normal Again". The episode introduces what appears to be a demon giving Buffy a Lotus Eater-style fantasy world where she's really a patient in a mental hospital, her parents are not only both still alive, but still together, and her life as a Slayer is an elaborate fantasy that she can defeat (read: kill all her supposedly make-believe friends in) in order to return to a normal, happy life. Keeping in mind that this is not too long after she had lost her mother, found out her little sister was an elaborate construct to hide an extra-dimensional key, died to save said sister, and been pulled out of heaven itself because her friends were convinced her soul had been trapped in a hell-dimension only to make her wake up in her own coffin and dig her way out of her grave on accident... it is rather noble that she chooses the Slayer reality to be real, stops trying to kill her friends, and defeats the demon. At least, it seems noble until the last minute, when the episode jumps back to the "fantasy", where a now-zoned out Buffy is shown, with one of the doctors sadly saying that "We've lost her", implying that potentially the entire series is an elaborate, somewhat masochistic fantasy inside a deranged Buffy's head. Depending on your perspective, this is either arts-ily playing it straight, or subverting the hell out of it for a Downer Ending after which the series manages to go on as if nothing happened for more than a season (and a number of comic book continuations too).
- Smallville had an almost identical episode. And then the bad guy who made the fantasy world gets killed.
  - Inverted in another episode where Clark is trapped in a nightmare world instead - he finds himself in an asylum, and made to believe that everything he has been through, superpowers and all, was paranoid delusion. He is rescued by the Martian Manhunter.
- Possible LEM variation in Becoming Pt. 2 - Giles, weary from a marathon torture session, is mesmerized by Drusilla into thinking she's the late Jenny Calendar - in his bliss over having her back he spills the critical info.
Doctor Who has had a few of these:
- In "The Family Of Blood", the Doctor has rewritten his personality to be that of an ordinary human named John Smith. When the titular Family comes after him, he finds the item that will allow him to restore the Doctor personality... but receives a glimpse of a full, happy life with his love interest, who he'll never truly be able to connect with as the Doctor.
- "Forest Of The Dead": Donna ends up in one of these after a teleporter accident. She, like the thousands of others "saved" by the library, ends up in a recreation of 21st century Earth, and ends up marrying a man and having two children before she's rescued.
Given an interesting twist in an episode of Eureka: the entire populace of Eureka is slowly disappearing around Sheriff Carter, consumed by strange glowing portals, leaving him as the only one who even remembers them existing in the first place. Turns out he's hooked himself up to a prototype virtual reality psychoanalysis machine, which has trapped him in its illusion in a somewhat overzealous attempt to force him to come to terms with his fear of losing his daughter (at the time, the subject of a custody dispute between himself and his ex-wife). He breaks the spell by taking her to the edge of town and leading her into one of the portals, at which point the machine declares him cured and allows him to wake up.
- This seems to be a blatant ripoff of an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Dr. Crusher gets trapped in a pocket dimension shaped by her own thoughts, in which the crew members disappear one by one and are forgotten by the rest of the crew, while weird portals (leading back to the real world) open up everywhere- eventually she's the only one left and the universe starts collapsing.
Farscape: Crichton is twice made, by different factions, to hallucinate that he is back on Earth. The second time, he quickly realizes it's not real, but can't figure out how to wake up, and the dream steadily becomes more and more surreal. When he finally makes it back to Earth by sheer luck, he initially assumes it's another mind trick. Oddly, the question he asks as a test when he makes it back to his own world and time is one that could have been answered by either of the previous two.
- The first one involved him realizing something was wrong when everything was /exactly/ like when he left as if he had gone back in time. He becomes increasingly aggravated at how everything is the same once he realizes this and manages to break out once he enters somewhere he has never been (ladies room) and finds a glowing wall, he is then spoken to by the creators of the hallucination.
Subverted in "Tempests", an episode of the 1990s Outer Limits. The protagonist's spaceship gets trapped in a Pinnochio-ish giant space beastie; when he goes outside, he is bitten by a nasty little Body Horror that lives inside it and passes out just as he returns to the airlock. When he wakes up, he keeps passing out and reawakening between a reality in which he's lying on a hospital bed with his family at his bedside, having already been rescued, and a reality in which he and a remaining crewman are struggling to fix their spaceship and escape while one crewmember is lying on the floor slowly turning into a blobby Body Horror while babbling obsessively. He attempts to decide which is the "real" reality, eventually rejecting the hospital reality, successfully fixing the spaceship and escaping the inside of the giant space beastie. At his moment of success, however, our view fades out to reveal the Downer Ending of him and the other two crewmembers combined into one fleshy blob on the floor with all three faces replicating the obsessive babbling of the third crewmember from throughout the episode. Meaning that BOTH realities turned out to be Lotus Eater Machines.
Power Rangers Operation Overdrive has an episode where the Mercury Ranger is made to believe that his girlfriend is still alive, he was never mutated into a Lava Lizard, and the entire season never took place.
The Red Dwarf episode "Better Than Life" features a Virtual Reality Game that can make all your deepest fantasies come true. In the end, though, Rimmer's deep self-loathing results in the destruction of everybody's perfect worlds. In the books, the game is almost impossible to leave, because in order to leave, somebody has to want to leave, and nobody ever does (also, it's hard for people to realize that they're in the game in the first place, as the game sets itself up in such a way as to prevent people from realizing they're in the game). As a result, the person's real-life body will eventually waste away and die. Somewhat of a spoof in the novel, as the Cat is so self-absorbed that nothing will fulfill his desires short of living in a mountain kingdom and being waited on by giant, topless, singing, dancing Valkyries, putting even Rimmer's incredibly indulgent fantasy to shame, while the android can come and go freely as they have no hopes, dreams, or desires besides getting new squeezy-mops.
- It is later reversed in the same series by a hallucinogenic venom from a Despair Squid that causes the group to, together, hallucinate a reality that drives them to the brink of suicide. They are only stopped by the ship's computer forcing the android to release a mood stabilizer.
- It's also used in a form in "Legion". The crew are dragged into a space station by a tractor beam, but find the only occupant - the eponymous Legion - simply wants to accommodate their every need. This is because he's a gestalt entity and can only exist when there are other life-forms on the station. All the residents died millennia ago.
Sh15uya takes place entirely within a Lotus Eater Machine, and although the viewers know this from the very start, the story revolves around the main characters figuring this out. It might not seem perfect at first (there's a three-way gang war going on, and violence is common) but as one character puts it, "Shibuya has everything that you young people want: the latest styles, fashions, entertainment, you name it." It turns out that the Lotus Eater Machine is being used to rehabilitate the cast from teenage thugs to model citizens.
Stargate Atlantis used this in the episode "Home". The characters think they've found a way to return to Earth, though it doesn't become apparent until about midway through the episode that their Lotus Eater Machine is individual and doesn't include the others. Each of their worlds was designed with everything they wanted, to keep them from fighting back, but starts defying logic in ways that provoke their suspicion. Though, in Major Sheppard's case, he somehow figured this out early and, and to test it, included in his mental fantasy a sweet apartment he had never seen and two friends who were both dead in the real world.
- The idea was that he "wished they could be there", as one misses lost loved ones and such. The fact that they appeared was what tipped him off.
{{Stargate SG- 1}} had two instances, both using the same machine. In an early episode, the team is captured in chairs that put them in virtual worlds, and forced to replay traumatic events from their lives because the other denizens of the "game" were bored with their own memories. The team escapes by showing the others that their world, the pollution of which led them into the game in the first place, had healed, and was beautiful again.
- In the second episode, Teal'c is testing a virtual reality training simulation based on the same technology, and gets trapped because he keeps subconsciously making it more difficult for himself, and won't let himself quit.
- Another instance had the human-form replicator Fifth set up an idylic fantasy existence for Carter, where she's happily married to her boyfriend Pete.
- Yet another Teal'c example, he finds himself bouncing back and fourth between 3 realities, one where he's human and he and the rest of the team are firemen, another where he's back on the base living fairly "typically" and a third true reality where he's lying in the middle of a battlefield slowly dying.
Star Trek examples.
- This was the plot of the original pilot, "The Cage," though Pike sees through the ruse easily. However, another character trapped there doesn't want to leave the machine — and knows that it's all an illusion - as after having been horrifically mangled in a crash the aliens were able to restore the illusion of her original beautiful appearance. They give her a illusory Captain Pike to live with until the real Pike returns to the planet in a later episode made up of the original pilot.
- Star Trek The Next Generation
  - "Future Imperfect": Riker is trapped in a Lotus Eater Machine by a benevolent captor who just wants to be friends with him.
  - "Ship In A Bottle". During one of Data's Sherlock Holmes holodeck adventures, Moriarty gains actual sentience. He then theorizes that he must have come to life, and he should be able to leave the holodeck, which he does. The rest of the episode is Data and Geordi trying to figure out what's going on until they realizes everybody on the Enterprise suddenly is left handed, like Moriarty. They manage to escape the program, and create a small subroutine so that Moriarty, still living in his dream, can dream it for as long as he wants with the love he found in his Lotus Eater Machine.
- In one episode of Star Trek Voyager, a Negative Space Wedgie in the form of a gigantic psychic creature (referred to as a "telepathic pitcher plant") tricks the entire crew into believing that it is a wormhole that leads to Earth, then making them pass out and experience a supremely pleasant false reality in order to feast on them. Specifically inverted for the characters Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman, who are able to resist its effects because they have no particular desire to go to Earth.
- Another episode has telepathic aliens who exist primarily in a dreaming state invading the crew's dreams, forcing them to all join into a single group dream that seems totally real in order to attack them. Only Chakotay, the Magical Native American, knows it is a dream at first, and uses his lucid dreaming / vision quest Applied Phlebotinum machine to control the dream world. Eventually, the whole crew learns this skill to turn the tables on their captors and exit the dreamstate, or do they?.
- Can't remember specifics, but several DS 9 episodes hinge on this. In one, O'Brian is condemned to spend several years of his life as a prisoner for a crime he didn't commit. Even after proving his innocence he's still stuck with the memories.
Supernatural, "What Is And What Should Never Be": After fighting a Djinn, Dean wakes up in a world where his mother is still alive and he and Sam are living normal lives. This included a slight inversion; rather than creating a perfect world for Dean, it granted him a specific wish, that being that the demon had never killed his mother. As a result, their father never became a monster hunter, all the people the Winchesters saved are dead and Sam and Dean have absolutely nothing in common. Eventually Dean realizes that, rather than changing the past, the Djinn just messed with his head to make him think he was in an alternate reality. Unusual in that Dean chooses to try and leave before he realizes that it's an illusion. Just believing that all of the people him and Sam saved are 'actually' dead now is enough to make him go for the Heroic Sacrifice.
Subverted in The Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit," in which an unsavory protagonist is trapped permanently in a Lotus Eater Machine that turns out to be Hell itself.
The X Files episode "Field Trip": Mulder and Scully are caught in a... (wait for it)... Giant Underground Fungal Organism which used hallucinogens to keep them trapped while it tried to digest them.
Charmed featured a magical version, with the Source using it on Piper to retrieve a spell to remove the sister's powers, which had been removed from the Book of Shadows, and existed only in her head.

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Opeth, what with being lead by a savvy fellow, have "The Lotus Eater"

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Philosopher Robert Nozick conceived of one of these in a discussion about utilitarianism. To this day Lotus eater Machines are sometimes known as Nozick Engines.
Dreams (and to some extent, our minds) are organic subversions of this trope. Think about it....a world where your fantasies or nightmares run about freely? Where you can kiss your beloved or get sucked into a whirlpool? Where else but DREAMS?

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There's The Legend Of Zelda Link's Awakening. The entire game takes place in Link's/the Windfish's dreamworld. Link is sent to a perfect island paradise with plenty of adventure, friends, and fun, and he'll never have to work for anything again. Instead of staying, though, he's forced to fight the game's enemies, the Nightmares, to wake up the Windfish and return to reality. In doing that he essentially destroys the entire island and all of its inhabitants he's grown so fond of. Even though most people know it's coming, it's still a pretty powerful ending. The manga is even worse.
In the unfinished 80's video game series Alternate Reality, the character was abducted by aliens and placed into one of these for the entertainment of the aliens.
In Fable II, this happens to your hero after Lucien's attempt to kill him or her. Apparently on the brink of death, you awaken in "The Perfect World", a bucolic farm where your sister is alive, you have parents (who are conveniently offscreen on a trip, though), and everything is peaceful and beautiful. After a day of innocent fun, however, you awaken in the night to hear a music box playing, and if you follow the tune down a path away from the farm, your sister begs you not to leave, her pleas becoming more desperate before she eventually lets out an agonized "NOOO!" and vanishes, the trail becoming a war-torn battlefield full of fire, ruin, and dead bodies. Even more heart-wrenching is that you have to leave all this behind so you can confront the villain and save the world.
Fallout 3's main quest brings the player character to Vault 112, where the residents inhabit a virtual reality simulation orchestrated by Dr. Stainslav Braun, the vault's Overseer. The current simulation is for "Tranquility Lane" a 1950s-esque suburban cul-de-sac with the other residents of Vault 112 playing as the people of Tranquility Lane. However, the psychopath Braun merely torments them for his personal amusement, devising methods to traumatize and temporarily kill his vault charges. The player, stuck in the virtual body of a 10-year old child, can tell the residents that this is just a computer simulation, but they will respond in character thinking that it really is the 1950s (or more likely pre-war 2077, which was heavily influenced by the 1950s). The only way to escape is either play along with Braun's sadistic games (which causes major Karma loss) or activate the hidden "Failsafe" which kills all of the Vault's inhabitants (a preferable alternative to being eternally tormented by Braun) leaving Braun trapped alone in the simulation.
In EarthBound, Ness is knocked unconscious after visiting the last Your Sanctuary, leading the player to explore Magicant, a surreal, idealised version of the game's world, populated with figures from Ness' life.
Basically the whole plot of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
The adventure game Gateway featured a rare TRIPLE Lotus Eater Machine. First the protagonist is placed in a VR paradise and must escape. Next comes a VR Hell, which is also escapable. (Given the lack of real torments and the presence of challenges, this is really a puzzle-solving adventurer's Lotus Eater Machine in disguise.) Finally, after the villain's apparent defeat, it is revealed that no escape has been made, and the player must act within the illusion to defeat the villain.
Kingdom Hearts II has new character Roxas discovering he is in one of these towards the end of the prologue, though a portion of it, "The Seven Mysteries of Twilight Town", gave away hints that the town and its people weren't what they seemed. Roxas, a Nobody that theoretically couldn't feel emotions was generally happy when hanging out with his friends (though he was going through a literal identity crisis with Sora). When the illusion was revealed the was in a computer simulation and the reason he was placed there to keep him safe until Sora is ready to reabsorb him, he goes into a mini-Unstoppable Rage against a computer monitor and a holographic DiZ. When he finally sees Sora in his memory pod, he resigns to his fate and when Sora meets the real versions of Roxas' friends, Roxas cries through Sora for the friends that he never really had.
A non-happy example of this is Metal Gear Solid Mobile. It starts off looking like a typical infiltration, with Snake being guided by Otacon and eventually talking to a scientist over the Codec. Then you discover that the scientist is a computer program designed to lure you into disabling the security for the building so that terrorists can take over Metal Gear. Then you discover that the entire mission is a computer program, and the mysterious person who calls you multiple times throughout the game without Otacon noticing is in fact the real Otacon hacking into the simulation. Of course, the only way to get out is to finish the mission. It turns out that the program was made by the Patriots, who kidnapped and drugged Snake before putting him into it. They decide he didn't give them enough information so they wipe his memory, cleverly obscuring the game's canonicity in the overall series.
Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark had a scene where an Elder Brain, in a last ditch effort to keep you from killing it, used its powers to make you think you actually live a peaceful life with your significant other in a cabin in the woods. It's easy to break out of the illusion, but if you want...
Planescape Torment has two instances of this. The faction of the Sensates collect magical stones that contain memories and experiences. One of these is a trap that one of your previous incarnations set for his later self, i.e. you, but isn't too hard to break out of. The other is created by the main antagonist and found in the penultimate room, and even holds your brilliant Chess Master previous incarnation captive.
In Shin Megami Tensei 2, the workers in the Factory district are brainwashed by siren's song to make them happy, productive workers content to literally work themselves to death with endless shifts. Additionally... The entire Arcadia district is one big Lotus Eater Machine; everyone is really strapped into chairs and hooked up to computers while living in a virtual paradise.
- Actually Arcadia was a prototype, everyone would be hooked up to the machine once the plan was enacted.
In Final Fantasy VIII One of Selphie's Hidden Limit Breaks is "The End", which sends the enemy to a serene field of flowers where they are put to rest.

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In the first storyline of Fans!, Thackerabilitus Sieughiewiecz hooks the whole Billberg Sci Fi Club (less Rikk, who's been shot- pity, it would have been interesting to see his) up to one of these. Rumy is an award-winning graphic artist and writer, Katherine is a female Knight of the Round Table, Tim is surrounded by a harem of his female friends and sexual fantasies, and Will is a crewman on the Enterprise-D getting counseling from a Captain Ersatz of Counselor Troi. Three of them break out because they've changed since Thack psychoanalyzed them (Rumy values companionship more since she heard how devoting himself to his career ruined her idol's family life, Katherine doesn't feel worthy of her knighthood since she noticed her Napoleon complex, and Will uses Troi's psychoanalysis to figure out that it's All Just A Dream), but the author has acknowledged that Tim wouldn't have escaped on his own, and he has to be awakened by the others.
- Thack also plays around with this with Shanna, who he doesn't put into a simulation but instead tries to convince that she's been in one all along, trying to get her to "symbolically" put on his Mind Control glasses.
- Shanna would later be Mind Screwed again by the FIB into thinking that all of her adventures with the Fans have been All Just A Dream, but she got out by noticing the stress marks on her hands from squeezing the 23-Sider of Power when the alternate past says she was straightjacketed.
In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, during the "Spooky Stuff" storyline, Mitzi specifically warns Dark Smoke Puncher and Gordito (her youngest son and her oldest son's sidekick, respectively) that the opponent they have been tasked with taking down will try this on them. Gordito sees through Mitzi's trick right away; Dark Smoke Puncher...not so much.
- When it actually happens to Dark Smoke Puncher, all we see is a page of his father hugging him and saying that "computers are pretty cool".
George undergoes this when X tries to create a hive mind out of every living being on Earth. When he uses his electrical powers to defend himself he gets thrown back in time back to Mega Man 6. Which is more of a nightmare than an idealistic dream seeing as the last game he had to live trough he hung from a ceiling for nearly all of it. As soon as he recovers his electrical powers he rips a hole trough the illusion and ends up in a representation of X's mind.

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Daydream dragons from the adoptable dragon site Dragon Cave weave beautiful fantasies and daydreams, which they drop from their magical clouds to humans down below. People who live nearby are stated to have to be careful not to let their mind wander because they could end up spending days in a dreamstate, and it's implied that the dragons' powers can have these type of effects.

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American Dad episode "Vacation Goo": the CIA (of course) has a few old Lotus Eater Machines lying around, which Stan borrows whenever his family wants to go on a holiday. They have such wonderful holidays...
In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "perchance to dream", Batman wakes up in a world where his parents never died, he never became Batman, and instead he ended up with Selina Kyle. He eventually figures it out by realizing that he couldn't read anything (which is supposed to signal that you're in a dream).
In one Batman Beyond episode, a villain traded rides on his Lotus Eater Machine for stolen loot brought in by mostly unhappy teens. The machine also slowly killed them while letting them temporarily experience their greatest wishes.
- Taken as a metaphor, this isn't a bad Drugs Are Bad episode if it's not too Anvilicious.
The Ben 10 fourth season premiere "Perfect Day": Enoch uses a machine to force the titular character to have a perfect day in his mind while he is being robbed of his Imported Alien Phlebotinum. He is able to escape as he realizes that he is able to control what happens. The episode ends with Enoch trapped in the machine and The Reveal that he is not the true leader of the forever knights and that his boss decides to leave him in the machine as he has failed him for the last time.
In Danny Phantom, this is Nocturn—the Dream Ghost's—specialty, as he has devices that gives the dreamers their happy paradise. The beginning portions of the episode is designed with this in mind for Danny, though he quickly snaps out of it.
Dave The Barbarian: Dark Lord Chuckles The Silly Piggy tempts the good guys with literal rose-colored glasses — whoever wears them will see (and somehow, hear) a perfect world. He is quickly defeated by someone putting the glasses on him, causing him to go catatonic and laugh endlessly as he thinks he has finally attained ultimate power and wiped out his quirky enemies.
In the Fairly Odd Parents TV Movie Wishology, the Darkness puts Timmy in one of these until his friends come and save him. It is an interesting case because it is quite likely that the Darkness did this because it wanted to make Timmy happy - not because it wanted to trap him.
The Gargoyles episode "For it May Come True". Goliath wakes up to find that he's human, married to Elisa and has children. Naturally, his fantasy gets worse when he discovers that Xanatos is still a villain, the Quarrymen are still around, and Eliza has joined up with them to kill the rest of the gargoyles.
The "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom" episode of Invader Zim: Zim traps Dib in a Lotus Eater Machine just to find out if it was he who threw a muffin at him. After extracting the information, Zim releases his nemesis in a fit of Genre Blindness, instead of finishing him. But not before hitting him with a counter muffin. From a cannon.
Justice League Unlimited has its previously-mentioned adaptation of the comic For The Man Who Has Everything.
Kids Next Door: a villain makes Numbuh One think he's on an island inhabited only by kids.
- In the end, the machine is put on him and, in a rarity for this trope, this villain is left aware of this and miserable.
The Tick in "Evil Sits Down For a Moment": The villain traps the Tick in the "World's Comfiest Chair," which is so comfy that nobody ever wants to stand up again after sitting in it. No imaginary worlds or anything are involved; it's just that comfy. The episode ends (like most serious examples of this trope) with the villain getting trapped in her own Lotus Eater Machine.
Transformers Animated had an odd, not-happy, example set up by Soundwave. The virtual world placed the Autobots into a series of increasingly bizarre scenarios. Seeing as the whole thing was a distraction so Soundwave could reprogram the Autobots into his slaves, this makes sense. The Autobots were also able to manipulate the world around them to a certain extent, a la The Matrix.
The Venture Brothers has "Eeney, Meeney, Miney... Magic!" in which Dr. Venture builds, as he calls it, a "joy can." According to Orpheus it probes the user's mind to create hallucinations based on the user's deepest desires. Of course... with Rusty being Rusty, it's apparently powered by the ~~heart~~ soul of an orphan. Brock gets trapped inside and we get a frightening vision of his apparent deepest desires. Using tinfoil hats, teenage limerence, and a urine soaked t-shirt, the boys are the ones that get Brock out. It's interesting to note that while the device does make an attempt to fulfill one's desires through hallucination, these fantasies appear to be horribly distorted in some way and all together surreal. Of course we're dealing with some fairly screwed up users here, so I'm guessing that point is moot.
WITCH has a character trapped in a Lotus Eater Machine for nearly half the first season, which is a key plot point, since the victim's actions affected the world outside.
- Also Nerissa in the series finale.
Lilo and Stitch The Series had the experiment Remy, though this is subverted in rather then create good dreams. It turns them into nightmares. Lilo had the unforunate pleasure of experiencing its power forcing Stitch, Jumba and Pleakly to go into Lilo's dream and fish it out before she wakes up. Or she'll forever has nightmares.

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