Mind Screw - Television Tropes & Idioms

NEON. GENESIS. EVANGELION. . Don't even start on how much controversy this provoked.
- While the actual series is majorly mind-screwy, it's End of Evangelion that truly takes trope and flings it out the window into unexplored Beyond The Impossible territory. Hell, This Troper almost had a Creator Breakdown because he watched it and didn't know what to make of it all. If that isn't saying it, well...
  - Everyone's mind breaks the first time they watch the movie.
Space Runaway Ideon, to whom NGE is a Spiritual Successor, gets a special mention for being the earliest anime of this kind.
Melody Of Oblivion, also by Gainax, is a good example of this.
Serial Experiments Lain. 'nuff said.
FLCL. It may take you two or three viewings to understand just the plot.
- The manga is even worse about it. Good luck!
On those two notes, pretty much anything by Studio Gainax will have at least some traces of Mind Screw...even Petite Princess Yucie.
Angels Egg, an animated "tone poem" that was seminal for this sort of work in anime.
The Big O, though it wasn't entirely intentional: the planned third season was apparently supposed to explain things in a more straightforward manner, it's just that they didn't get to.
Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena's director Ikuhara has expressed particular, almost sadistic, delight in the despair fans have shown over figuring things out. Some of his more famous replies to fans have been "Miki keeps timing things because his watch contains the secret of the universe" and "The reason Utena turns into a car in the movie is because I really wanted to turn a cute girl into a car."
Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon.
Paranoia Agent: In the end, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies because that Desihner chick lied about how her dog died... when she was in sixth grade In between, a smiling lad on golden rollerskates who may or may not be real, magic or just a metaphor goes around bashing people's heads in, except when he doesn't. This was also directed by Satoshi Kon.
Dead Leaves takes this to Beyond The Impossible levels. It begins with a guy who looks like Canti from FLCL and a girl with a weird eye marking waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, and ends with a super-intelligent (?) baby coming out of the girl's panties with Guns Akimbo, putting enough dakka in the air to kill a bull elephant, and flying off into space to kill a giant worm. Retro, the Canti Expy, frequently comments along the lines of "This is so screwed up."
Boogiepop Phantom. Compared to this, the last two episodes of Evangelion are about as confusing as See Spot Run.
The hentai/horror anime Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend), the Naughty Tentacles Trope Maker, does this to the point of incoherence.
- What, its fans care for the plot?
Texhnolyze is another big recent example, with a lot of symbolism that will require several viewings in order to fully understand everything.
- As a matter of fact, this is rather expected, since Texhnolyze has a lot of the original staff from Serial Experiments Lain.
The "Land of Books" episode of Kino's Journey.
The ending of Akira is considered by many to be an example of this.
Paprika by Satoshi Kon, notice a trend?
- Relatedly, the director Satoshi Kon has been much kinder than most and explained the movie as "following dream logic" and that we should just go with it.
Ghost In The Shell: The first season of Stand Alone Complex ended the Laughing Man case with the knowledge that, we caught the Laughing Man, but we're not sure we caught the right guy. But he really is the right guy. We just don't know. We even offered him a job with Section 9, but he decided to stay in the Library of Congress.
- 2nd GiG ends on a very similar note. Did Kuze really die, or did he just upload his mind into the web before he got sniped? What did "I'll go on ahead" really mean? It goes on in circles.
- And then there's the original manga by Shirow Masamune himself. The major ends up fusing with the puppeteer. Is the end result a cross between the two? Predominantly Major? Mostly Puppeteer? Male? Female? Something completely different? The only answer we get is "The Net is vast."
- Don't even start on the second manga series. 1.5 is surprisingly reasonable. Even answers what happened to the Major a lot more clearly.
Ergo Proxy: Lain with shotguns. Full of mind-screw situations - especially when Proxy One starts playing mind-games with Vincent Law, his host and when the identity of Real herself comes into doubt later on. The group also has other weird experiences, like an episode focusing on the characters taking part in a game-show, and an episode where Pino explores a disney-like theater complete with anthropomorphic animals. When compared to the rest of the tone of the series, it's no wonder most of the cast are near-crazed by the end.
Brain Powerd. Okay, so there's a monster that employs people to help it absorb all life energy on earth so it can fly into space, and it produces robots with cockpits in their crotches, except that there are other crotch-piloted robots fighting against them, and all the robots are built from giant killer Lego disks. The robots may or may not be metaphors for children, and somehow every episode is about incredibly screwed-up family issues, except the ones where they toss around the word "organic" way too much. Um... Yeah, no idea. And that's just the premise. The last several episodes are a downward spiral of nonstop epic WTF-just-happened-itude.
- If you think that's something, you should see what happens when Mamoru Nagano, BP's mecha designer, writes his own manga...
Ghost Hound. = Psychological conditions + I can’t tell what’s real and what’s a dream + awesome, creepy ambient music + the supernatural + I can see your butt.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. So ambiguous and convoluted at times that official translators admit in the notes that they're basically making a guess and winging it. Unofficial translators do not say such in the notes only because that takes up space better filled by actively and profusely cursing at CLAMP.
- While not quite as bad, its sister series xxxHolic definitely has its moments.
  - This troper beleives that the writers are making it mindscrewy on purpose just to make reader's heads explode.
- Making a timeline for this series is practically impossible. And don't even think about trying to create a character chart.
Geno Cyber, though it's hard to comprehend the plot when you're too busy vomiting every five seconds and crapping your pants in terror.
- The main reason why it's a mindscrew is because there's a totally unexplained Time Skip between the first and second arcs, compounded by the fact that the first arc has No Ending.
Suzumiya Haruhi. The Anachronic Order will mess you up, since you cannot relate half of the stuff being said. Furthermore, it gets hard to follow in the 4th novel Disappearance and it's continuance in another novel, where time travelling is combined with alternate universes. It may take you 2 times to read just to understand how they actually managed to solve it. The 9th (current) novel features two realities, for no apparent reason, in which different stuff happens. and ends with a Cliff Hanger, so we still don't know what's going on.
- To be fair, the more surreal of the two phone calls in the 9th novel is obviously made by someone who knows more than they really should, and as it's the first point of difference, it's likely the cause of the split. Who they are and what they want is, of course, unclear.
Earth Maiden Arjuna. On one hand, the general theme of letting the earth be and saving the environment from unnatural influences is pretty clear. On the other hand, the details of the plot are rather surreal, to say nothing of the presentation...
Chaos;Head is one right from the beginning. The viewer is forced to pay attention to everything that goes on, not knowing if it's simply a delusion or possibly real. Even when things get cleared up, there's still another layer of mystery beneath that.
Soul Taker is what happens when you take Devilman and mix it with Neon Genesis Evangelion. The seventh episode's screwy enough that it will make you realize how easy it is to understand Evangelion.
- Make that Devilman meets Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akiyuki Shinbo, and as we all know most of the stuff he directs is pretty much mind screw, even Pani Poni Dash to an extent
Alien Nine. Even if you read the entire manga and watch the anime more than three times, all keeping the coming-of-age metaphors in mind, you are still most likely to be left scratching your head at something.
Tekkon Kinkreet starts out pretty straightforwardly. The ending, on the other hand...
Haibane Renmei is a much gentler version of this; while the plot itself isn't all that ridiculous, the backstory and setting is never explained.
Mononoke, particularly the "Noppera-bou" story.
You have a slice-of-life anime. The concept seems normal. Then they bring in a giant, floating cat that hates the color red and is voiced by Norio freakin' Wakamoto!
One of the newest examples in the Anime folder, Clannad. The Gainax Ending Grand Finale takes the cake...and eats it! It's enough to give Evangelion a run for its money.

Close Anime

Anything, anything Grant Morrison writes. Except for All-Star Superman.
The point in which The Maxx jumps from trippy to actual Mind Screw may vary from person to person. Some may say it's when the villain turns out to be a giant psychopatic self-help fueled banana slug; other may say it's just right before the revelation of why Julie's Outback was created(that part with the Hooly); or maybe when Sarah comes back from Disney Death as an Is...
The Sandman - Imagine how weird a story would be where the main character is the Anthropomorphic Personification of dreams. Now imagine something weirder than that.

Close Comic Books

The 1960s version of Lord Of The Flies. It's not even in a funny way. It's kind of scary.
- Most of the film's quite normal but then they film the pig close up and then they film the sea for two minutes. It doesn't help that it's in black and white. You could also call thisNightmare Fuel.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible
2001: A Space Odyssey. The book, on the other hand, is considerably more comprehensible.
- A popular urban legend (later confirmed by Arthur C. Clarke himself) goes that, after the premiere, Rock Hudson stormed out of the theater yelling, "What the hell was that all about?"
- The movie was such a mind screw that the film adaptation of 2010: The Year We Made Contact was largely devoted to trying to explain what the hell had happened in the last movie. You may not have heard of this sequel. There's an excellent reason for that.
- The prologue and ending of the original book of 2001 are significantly longer than their movie equivalents for the same reason. There was a lot of 'splaining to do.
The 2004 film Casshern had no explanation for the ending or for the various Deus Ex Machina moments that appeared throughout the film. For example, giant metal bolts of lightning that: Started the plot, transported the hero right to the point he needed to be with no question from anyone, and conveniently provided the final chamber with a giant hole in the wall.
The beginning of The City of Lost Children. Most, not all of it, make sense by the end.
Cube intentionally offers no real explanations to what the titular Cube is and why the characters were placed in it.
- The sequels, however, make things worse with their attempts to actually explain things somewhat, as none of the three films are made by the same people and can't seem to agree on essential points - Hypercube being the worst offender in this area.
The Matrix. The sequels have a mild case of it, anyway; in the first movie, Morpheus took the time to explain what was going on.
- The "Animatrix", a collection of short anime films based off the trilogy, easily qualify as Mind Screw material.
  - When they're not being Nightmare Fuel, anyway...
David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Or, to an even greater degree, Eraserhead.
- Mr. Lynch is so well known for his Mind Screws, that he had to title his one non-maddening movie The Straight Story. And it's still kind of weird.
  - Anything by David Lynch. ANYTHING
  - Well, this troper understood Lynch's Dune.
Waking Life
Primer, due to Time Travel rather than symbolism.
The Fountain.
Donnie Darko, to the extent that members of the cast can't agree on whether there is a legitimate Time Travel story, or just a handful of psychedelic delusions.
- Director Richard Kelly's second film, Southland Tales, somehow manages to be even more violently insane than his first. It was supposed to be part of a massive multimedia experience (that never really panned out), but it would take a damn lot of graphic novels to explain what on God's green Earth was happening at any point during that movie.
  - Read all about it here.
The Butterfly Effect is a sort-of mindscrew. Is he traveling through time? Moving across alternate universes and adapting to the memories of the version of himself in the new universe? Is he just totally nuts and then one day finally gets the help he needs? Is the end really just another delusion? These last two possibilities are subverted in the DVD release alternate ending in which he goes back to when he was in his mother's womb and commits suicide with his own umbilical chord before even being born.
After a certain point in the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the opening shot is redone, starting off a long medley featuring the three central characters merging into one and walking naked down an alleyway.
David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is a lot less disgusting than the book it's named after (it actually borrows from a large part of the works of William S. Burroughs), but only slightly less confusing.
- Pretty much all of Luis Bunuel's movies are like this.
- Speaking of Cronenberg films, eXistenZ is Philip K Dick-like in the mind screw department. It features a VR game within a VR game within a VR game within a VR game (... yah), the characters openly question whether they're still in the game at every level (and for bonus points, compare real-life to VR), switch sides multiple times, and reference things that happened at other levels.
The movie π (Pi) has a paranoid mathemathical genius, Hebrew numerology, conspiracies, neurological headaches, the secret name of God, and the protagonist taking A Drill to his head to escape all this crap. To top it off, it's in black and white. And is scored to techno music.
What the <BLEEP> do we know is a major, major offender of this one. If you can make some sense out of the cryptic, convoluted Technobabble about Quantum Mechanics, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything, you'll see how this movie easily beats Serial Experiments Lain in terms of head-trippiness, even though even The Other Wiki agrees it's all just quantum mysticism mixed with the ideas of some new age school. According to Intuitor, it also completely messed up Quantum Physics, horrible research, biases and scientific inaccuracies destroyed any hope of correct science.
- Here's the key: there is a middle-aged woman doing her best attempt at a deep male voice partway through the film. The name given on screen is "Ramtha". Her cult funded the entire movie.
  - The woman is JZ Knight, who claims to be channeling a 40,000 year old Indian spirit. Who speaks suspiciously good English. And doesn't understand squat about quantum mechanics.
Jean-Luc Godard's film Weekend.
Guy Ritchie's Revolver. It involves a formula that supposedly allows the main character to win any game, a blood disease that disappears for no apparent reason, a crime lord apparently being the same person as the voices in everybody's heads... Yeah.
Zardoz, quite possibly the only film to begin with a giant stone head coming out of the sky, declaring the penis to be evil, and throwing a bunch of guns out of its mouth. The movie just gets weirder from there.
- Including a bunch of women attempting to give an erection to SeanConnery, who is wearing a bright red nappy.
- The commentary on the DVD has the director admit he was on drugs throughout filming.
Jim Henson (yes, THAT Jim Henson) made a overly symbolic (and Oscar-nominated) short film called Time Piece. Scenes include a caveman in an office, Jim Henson's head on a serving tray, and the only dialogue in the movie is Jim himself saying "help" about 3 or 4 times.
- He also made a humorous but bewildering teleplay called The Cube (no relation to the Canadian film and its sequels). It's about a man trapped in a cube shaped room. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. Other people can enter and leave freely, but he cannot. People change into other people, objects appear and disappear, bizarre philosophical interpretations of his situation are suggested and dismissed, and when he gets cut he bleeds strawberry jam. Is he dead? Insane? Part of some twisted psychological experiment? Or is he really just a character in a television program? In a way this film deconstructs this trope, as an overabundance of explanations are provided by other characters, though which (if any) is the truth is never revealed.
This troper once saw a French movie called Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, which had some pretty trippy scenes in it, namely the one where the prince fantasizes about flying through the sky with the title character. Given the sixties' special effects, this scene is very weird.
Videodrome
Give My Regards To Broad Street has some Mind Screwing - partly from symbolism, partly because of Dream Sequences started and ended with very little warning.
The Oscar-winning French/Canadian/Belgian animated movie Belleville Rendezvous.
The ending of The Ninth Gate caused everybody this troper knows to make that sound Scooby-Doo makes when he's confused.
Repo Man for sure, but played for laughs.
Last Year in Marienbad, considered one of the most famous mind screws in French cinema. The film has no discernible plot other than apparently two people who may or may not have had a affair a year ago in Marienbad (German name of a Czech city) meet each other again at some sort of elite social gathering. Other than that, it plays out like some sort dream over loosely connected scenes. This troper still has no idea what exactly it was about, but the cinematography was beautiful.
Barton Fink. Granted, nothing the Coen Brothers have done is completely straightforward, but when John Goodman is on a shotgun rampage through a burning hotel screaming "look upon me," and no, it does not make sense in context, you start to wonder what you've gotten yourself into.
- Looks like someone hasn't been shown the life of the mind.
The collected works of Mr. Charlie Kaufman.
- Synecdoche, New York is an absolute Mind Screw from start to finish. From the ridiculous jumps in time to plays within plays within plays to a woman living in a perpetually burning house before dying after 30 years from "smoke inhalation".
Jacob's Ladder is a Mind Screw from start to finish.
Watch the Argentinian film Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (Man Looking Southeast) and try to decide which of the explanations is true. You'll be lying in bed thinking about it, seriously, as it's just that freakin' bizarre, and ends unanswered.
After it runs out of material and stops being a comedy, Art School Confidential wants desperately to be a Mind Screw, it tries so hard! But somewhere along the line someone missed the point of what a Mind Screw actually is and the movie doesn't even really bother to actually try to confuse you with anything, because it's so proud of how it's got a grown up plot about a guy who commits murders and makes paintings out of them, only he dies and someone else gets arrested for it, instead of some silly story about art students.
Memento lacks any overt symbolism, but the ending (which is the middle) will make you wonder what you just watched, especially since which story told by Teddy concerning the protagonist and the death of his wife is true, among other factual discrepancies, is never explained in the movie. Then again, that may been the point.
I Love Your Work isn't as extreme as others on this list, as a simple "I guess it was all in his head" makes sense of it as a whole, as the ending makes that seem like the most likely explaination. But some scenes are still pretty odd.
Brazil is a prime example of this. It's about a man living in a corrupt bureaucratic government who uses his dreams as an escape. It gets difficult to separate what's real and what's not, especially at the end when he's going insane as his best friend tortures him. In the original ending, at least.
Stay. It all makes sense at the end the entire film is the product of Ethan's dying mind absorbing his immediate surroundings, but through the course of the narrative, good luck trying to make sense of anything.
Unless you're a Beatles fan and have some basic knowledge of the 60's counterculture movement, Across the Universe can be anywhere from "slightly confusing" to "incomprehensible acid trip on film".
- Topped a few months later by I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' attempt to quantify the existence of Bob Dylan by presenting him as SEVEN SEPARATE CHARACTERS, including a woman, a small black child, and Billy the Kid. If you have an extensive knowledge of the man, the metaphorical touchstones are fairly easy to follow, but if you're even but a casual fan, entire chunks of the movies will leave you stonefaced or completely confused as to their relevance.
Anything directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky.
In Total Recall, Quaid describes the real plot of the Big Bad as "the best mind fuck yet." And then Hauser shows up on video chummy with Cohaagen... The real mind fuck—for the audience that is—is the ending, which forces the audience to ask themselves if the entire movie did or didn't take place in Quaid's mind. On second viewings... it's still not clear. Fairly well done for what is otherwise a fairly standard action movie.
- Word Of God is no help on the matter. In fact the director has said both interpretations are consistent with the facts, and it was set up that way on purpose.
Westworld is an odd case in that it almost makes sense, and keeps setting itself up as if for The Reveal. By the end, we've still got a decadent amusement park where a bunch of Ridiculously Human Robots started killing people for no apparent reason. Add in gallons of What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, and you've got yourself a headache.

Close Film

Alice In Wonderland
The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (which actually contains something called "Operation Mindfuck"), and ended with the main character realizing that it's all a book and that nothing is real However, when he tells his friends about this, they either reject it as untrue, or dismiss it as unimportant. Also its sort-of-sequel, the Schroedingers Cat Trilogy.
- This is lampshade-hung at the end of the trilogy, at which point the main character breaks the fourth wall to criticize the authors for placing too much importance on symbolism, and not enough on writing a satisfying conclusion.
- Also its sort-of-prequel, Masks of the Illuminati, which is relatively conventional until the last chapter, at which point sanity is thrown out the window.
Any dream sequence in A Song Of Ice And Fire. Besides these there is the House of the Undying.
Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves ranks with the most convoluted in any medium. You might not understand what happened in the book, but you might have trouble with poorly lit areas afterwards.
- His next book, Only Revolutions, makes less than 0% sense.
- It basically says that the house changes based on whos in it, so Your Mind Makes It Real. Also, the book isn't about a house, but a guy who made a movie about a house which is bigger on the inside. The book is a book about the movie about the house. Its also got hundreds of footnotes, sometimes going for pages, and they can be severely screwed up1 ~~some passages are also struck out, sometimes for whole pages~~, and there is a lot of blank space and sideways and backwards ~~or both~~.
  - 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
While its symbolism is clear, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday has a definite Mind Screw ending, as the last two chapters change it from a suspense novel with some philosophical undertones to an allegory of the Sabbath.
Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren actually begins and ends with schizophrenic word salad.
Pretty much anything written by T.S. Eliot. Especially The Waste Land.
- Possibly an even worse example is Four Quartets. All together now:
  What we call the beginning is often the end
  And to make and end is to make a beginning.
  The end is where we start from.
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is quite straightforward. So why did Andrew Lloyd Webber decide to throw in a fragment from Four Quartets as "The Moment Of Happiness"?
- Once the magic words are explained, though, it all falls into place. In the case of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the words were "impotent" and "whorehouse."
Steven Brust's novel Orca ends with two of these in a row. First, we discover that Kiera the Thief, who actually narrates a lot of the book, is really Sethra Lavode, vampire, sorceress, and all-around Bad Ass. Then, in the last sentence of the epilogue, Kiera lets slip that she's been hiding another secret all through the book: Vlad has a son. The all-around effect is that since everyone's been hiding things from each other and it's clearly established that the characters are telling stories after the fact, both Kiera and Vlad may be hiding things from us, too. Of course, Brust has something of a history of this; halfway through the first book in the series, Jhereg, we find out that Vlad is the reincarnation of the founder of house Jhereg.
The Brothers Karamazov is billed as a murder mystery and courtroom drama. Yet, characters make key revelations towards its conclusion (especially in Book Eleven, which features a conversation with a demon that might not be there) that qualify it as a Mind Screw. With everyone playing mindgames against each other for different reasons, peeling through the layers at the end and dissecting the motivations and the symbolism just blows one's mind.
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. There's a plot in there somewhere, amongst all the sex, drugs, violence, bizarre philosophy, and Dead Baby Comedy, but this editor is damned if he can get far enough into the book to find it.
- There really isn't. Burroughs himself has said as much. It's a collection of pieces jigsawed into an arbitrary order—if you see a plot in there, it's your own damn fault. This troper has read it several times, for the record.
The book of Revelation in The Bible, making this Older Than Feudalism. Revelation has so much symbolism that interpretations of it range from "it all already happened in the first century" to "some has already happened" to "it'll all happen sometime in the future". Interpretations on who the "Beast" is ranges from the Roman Emperor Nero to the Pope to Ronald Reagan to the Mass Media.
Don't forget Thomas Pynchon's V, which has possibly one of the 10 densest plots in any medium.
- And don't even try to start Gravity's Rainbow...
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. A series of vaguely connected short stories about decadent artists living in an alternate version of the The Roaring Twenties, linked by a mind-destroying play script whose plot we never learn, but we keep getting little excerpts. Filled with Unreliable Narrators, Ax Crazies, Cosmic Horror, and falconry. By the end of the book, it makes no sense, but is absolutely terrifying.
The very end of Pontoon by Garrison Keillor, starting just after Raoul dies and continuing for the last five or six pages.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. The reader is left with the sense that the novel was symbolic of something, but unsure of what exactly. The plot is mindscrewy enough, let alone the twist ending. Plus, at one point people die from seeing a colour that has never been seen before. Yeah.
- Yeah, but isn't it about bicycles?
The whole of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is written by Charles Kinbote. Or was it? Maybe it was written by John Shade using Charles Kinbote as a narrative device to tell two mixed stories of a daughter's suicide and a king's romantic retreat from his country in turmoil. Maybe Charles Kinbote is real but also insane, and wrote the whole thing from mountainous seclusion, planning to end his life shortly thereafter. Or perhaps the whole book was written by one minor character who is mentioned twice in the entire novel. It's all there in the book; who wrote it all and for what is up for grabs though.
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Does Addie's monologue imply the existence of an afterlife? Is Darl a psychic, or just a psycho? And WTF was up with all the Bananas? There's even an entire chapter which consists of a character declaring his dead mother to be a fish.
- To add to the Faulkner list, The Sound And The Fury. Does Benji serve any purpose besides narrating the first part of the novel? What the heck is up with the last chapter? And don't get me started on Quentin.
  - The fish thing is explained in the book. Which Quentin? And Benji is there so we don't guess something is up at first with the two Quentins. (Yes, this troper is a fan, why do you ask?)
  - Check out Absalom! Absalom! from your local library. Then you can ask about Quentin. (A fellow fan here as well.)
Jorge Luis Borges drifts around between a bunch of genres, but spends a considerable amount of time in Mind Screw. One such story - entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - is about the narrator finding an article in an encyclopedia about Uqbar, a country that doesn't exist, which in turn has literature about Tlön, a world that doesn't exist - but by the end of the story, the real world has started to fade away, leaving only Tlön. I think.
- This troper read a Jorge Luis Borges story, "El Otro, El Mismo" ("The Other, The Same"), in which he - as an older, middle-aged man - meets himself as a teenager on the bank of a river. Each sees the river as the location they are in at that point in their/his life (half a world apart) and they attempt to figure out if they are both real or if one of them is dreaming or hallucinating, and if so, which one. Eventually, Borges speculates (from the older man's POV) something about time being a circle and he had somehow crossed through the middle to intercept the boy while he was dreaming... Not only is the reader left wondering about the two, but also if Borges actually had this encounter in real life and decided to write about it. It didn't help that it was written in Spanish and Spanish is not this troper's native language.
Happens a lot in Gravitys Rainbow, especially what exactly happens to Slothrop, the chapter set in Hell, Slothrops' sodium pentathol dreams, and the ending where the final V2 rocket kills you, the reader
Pretty much anything by Carlton Mellick III, titles include Razorwire Pubic Hair and Satan Burger, which are pretty much what the titles would lead you to expect.
Trying to dissect Only Revolutions, eh? Well, break out the LSD and textual criticism cognoscenti, let's get this party on! (Note it's by Mark Z. Danielewski.)
God's Debris by Scott Adams consists entirely of a dialogue between a delivery man and a crazy guy he has a package for. Apparently, the book was laced with hypnotic suggestions and, in the foreword, asks you to identify the single fault in the crazy guy's logic. The sequel, the Religion Wars, on the other hand, provides more comfortable mind screws in the form of a Xanatos Roulette, Memetic Mutation, and What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, as well as having an actual plot.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series is another example. Although it is convenient that you can start reading any of the books at any point in the story, put it down and walk away, and come back a year later. Nothing will make sense, but that's okay, because nothing makes sense in that series anyway.
The closing chapter of Robert Sheckley's Mindswap hits this trope full on. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have successfully returned home. In this troper's humble opinion, Sheckley simply didn't know how to finish the story and went for a rave-up ending.
Just about anything by Philip K. Dick, but especially apt is The Unteleported Man, in which the protagonist makes the journey through a strangely one-way teleporter to the planet Whale's Mouth. Soon afterward, he's hit by an LSD dart, and the world dissolves into Mind Screw for the rest of the novel.
Garth Nix's series "Keeper of the Keys". This troper can't tell if it's veiled Christianity, a metaphor for bureaucracy, or just weird.
- "The Keys to the Kingdom" is actually the correct title, and the story's actually pretty straightforward (at least initially) if you don't start trying to read symbolism into it. If you do... well, let's just say that Garth Nix pretty much took a whole heap of disparate material - from Greek Myth, Christianity, folklore, nursery tales and classical poetry to name a few sources - and put it in a blender. It's an inextricable morass of disparate bits and pieces - which is what your brain will probably end up like if you start trying to actually fathom a deeper meaning behind it all.
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, is the ultimate embodiment of this trope. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of a phonetic Irish accent, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which to this troper, is awesome.
- Also by the same author is the more coherent but still rather mind screwy Ulysses. As a good comparison on how mindscrewy Ulysses must be: everyone who watches Evangelion tends to form the opinion that Mr. Anno is depressed and has mother issues. With Ulysses, Carl Jung read it, and concluded that Joyce was schizophrenic.
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a classic 19th century Mind Screw.
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Not only is every single of the three stories mind-screwing in itself, they get even weirder when you consider Paul Auster's statement that they were essentially one and the same story told three times from differend perspectives.
A very mild version of the trope, but one which seems to be trying for an effect outside the book, occurs in the final volume of Harry Potter, when Dumbledore and Harry have a discussion inside Harry's head/at King's Cross station.
Dumbledore: Indeed, this is all happening in your head, but why should that make it not real?
Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. Until the end you never no if the protagonist is insane or if she really is a member of The Organization, an outfit that sounds like the MIB on serious medication. And don't get me started on the Scary Clowns.
The majority of Haruki Murakami's work uses this to some extent, but After Dark has it in place of the plot.

Close Literature

The Prisoner ended with such a colossal mind screw that fans reputedly harassed series star Patrick McGoohan for months demanding his explanation of the series. How bad was it? Well, any really, really bad Mind Screw will get compared to Evangelion, right? Okay, so now realize The Prisoner is what Evangelion gets compared to!
- The remake's website seems to be gleefully continuing this tradition.
Twin Peaks could be considered a mind screw. Alternately, it was just weird.
Reality TV example: Criss Angel's Mindfreak. Much like the name of the trope itself, it is also watered down version of the term best used to describe his feats.
Every last damn thing about the Battlestar Galactica season 3 finale. "There's too much confusion", indeed.
Lost. They can fill the rest of this page with arguments back and forth about whether or not Lost is "really" that much of a Mind Screw, but, in all honesty, this trope is pretty much the show's whole reason for being. Either Lost is a Mind Screw, or else this either isn't a trope or Lost isn't a show. I'll leave it up to you to decide which. Like Lost does. Examples:
- In the early season 1 episode "Walkabout", part of the past of main character John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) is revealed through flashbacks. However, it is not revealed until the last flashback scene of the episode that Locke had been confined to a wheelchair for four years, which is helped by the fact that he regained the use of his legs following the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, which started the show's main narrative, thus having shown no hints of his previous condition until this episode.
- The opening scene of the season 2 premiere appears to be taking place in a sunny apartment, causing the viewer to wonder if this is a flashback, and for which character. However, just before the opening title sequence, it turns out that this scene is actually taking place inside the "hatch" on the island that has been blown open in the season 1 finale.
- The season 2 episode "Dave" suggests that all the events of the entire show might have actually taken place inside the mind of Hurley, a main character who had previously been an inmate in a mental ward. However, Word Of God says that this will definitely not be the ultimate resolution for the show, because it's considered a "bad idea" outside a "what if" one-off story. Still, in a case of Executive Meddling, ABC rejected the original draft for this episode, fearing that it was offering a solution for the show as a whole rather early in the game. It's unknown what changes, if any, have been made to the plot to address ABC's concerns.
- The opening scene of the season 3 premiere repeats the concept of the previous season premiere, this time supposedly taking place in a small suburbian neighborhood, only to be revealed at the end of the scene to be taking place in the secret home village of the mysterious "Others", with Oceanic Flight 815 breaking apart right above their heads.
- The opening scene for the season 3 episode "Not in Portland" inverts that, this time by showing a scene with Juliet (a member of the "Others") sitting on a beach, then entering a worn-out building and meeting Ethan, another member of the "Others", thereby implying that the scene was taking place on the island. Instead, it turns out the scene is actually taking place in Miami, before Juliet was recruited by the "Others".
- The first flashback for Locke in the season 3 episode "The Man from Tallahassee" again plays with viewers expectations, this time by implying that Locke is already confined to a wheelchair by this point. However, the scene eventually ends with him standing up and walking away, and it's not until the last flashback of the episode that he actually ends up in a wheelchair.
- The first flashback scene for the character of Nikki in the controversial season 3 episode "Exposé" is eventually revealed to be part "Exposé", a Show Within A Show Nikki was guest-starring on (starring Billy Dee Williams, played by himself in the Lost episode). The original idea for the episode was to have all Nikki flashbacks be part of the fictional show, and only reveal their true nature by the end of the episode. However, those plans for Nikki's story were cut short due to negative fan backlash towards her character.
- The season 3 finale features a number of flashback scenes with a really devastated, bearded Jack. Only at the end of the two-hour episode it turns out that all the "flashbacks" in this episode were actually flash-forwards, and the Jack shown in those scenes actually made it off the island, as did Kate, whom he meets at the end.
- The season 4 episode "Ji Yeon" apparently features flash-forwards for the Korean couple Jin and Sun, who seem to have made it off the island, with Sun delivering her baby by the end of the episode. Only then it turns out that all the "flash-forward" scenes for Jin, who was never shown together with his wife in this episode's flashes, were actually flashbacks, and Jin is considered dead in Sun's flash-forwards.
- The season 5 finale ends in such a way, that NOBODY can predict what will happen. It ends with Juliet successfully activating a nuclear explosion directly on top of a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy. We don't even see the explosion...just a fade to white. Whether or not this destroys the island or the energy is anybody's guess.
- On top of that, a moment in the season 5 finale fits exactly with the original meaning of Mindfuck - We discover that the Locke we've been following since he got back to the island is actually a mysterious entity which opposes Jacob. This completely changes not only the viewers perception of Locke over the season, but the viewers perception of the ghosts all through the show.
Life On Mars, especially the final episode.
- Life on Mars is actually pretty straightforward (weird as all get-out, but straightforward), and Word Of God says it was all in his head/he died. Individual interpretations may vary.
- Or on the other side of the pond, he's an astronaut from the year 2035 and the 125 precinct is really a manned voyage to Mars... nice Title Drop BTW
Reichenbach Falls. A BBC Four one-off drama based on an idea by Ian Rankin. DCI Jim Buchan is an Edinburgh policeman whose personality and cases are similar to those of Rankin's Inspector Rebus (the Rebus novels sometimes tend towards mildly Mind Screwy in any case). He resents his former friend Jack Harvey (a pen-name used by Rankin) who is a famous crime novelist, and occasionally argues with the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (hence the title). He gradually becomes aware that he's a fictional character created by Harvey, and the author is planning to Drop A Bridge On Him (again, hence the title). He therefore decides, at the launch of Harvey's new book, that he's going to kill the author first. After that it gets weird...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer does this in the final episode of the fourth season. The second-last episode is the climactic battle against that season's Big Bad; the actual final one is some kind of shared dream/hallucination involving a guy with cheese on his head. (Joss Whedon said that when he set out to write it he realized after a bit he was attempting a forty-minute tone poem.)
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer also has an episode in season 6 in which Buffy is poisoned by a hallucinogen-producing demon and is torn between two realities: being a Slayer and being an insane girl in an asylum, with parents who love her and are trying to make her sane again with the help of a psychiatrist. But then, when the episode ends, it does so with an image of Buffy in her normal-crazy-girl reality, not as Slayer Girl, leaving you with the impression that the entire show, including the later seasons, are all a product of an insane girl's overactive imagination. Joss Whedon said he considers the series to be actually happening, but put that in just for fun, and if people want they can consider the whole series to be the delusions of Buffy.
- Which would also make the entire Angel series part of that hallucination, too. At least it's not as bad as that Tommy Westphall crap...
- There's also the scenes in Buffy's mind in Weight of The World, featuring lots of symbolism, doppelgangers, repetition, and Buffy's Issues.
The Angel episode "Awakening" ends with a Mind Screw. The entire Indiana Jones-inspired segment where Angel saves the day and ends up with Cordelia is all a fantasy in his head as his soul is removed.
- Even bigger is the reveal that the entire series has been one big Xanatos Roulette to bring forth Jasmine.
The Star Trek Deep Space Nine episodes "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Shadows and Symbols" heavily imply that the events of the entire series may have simply been the imaginings of a mentally unstable African-American pulp-fiction writer in the 1950s. "Shadows and Symbols" does, however, state that it was a "false vision" the Pah Wraiths attempted to use to trick Sisko.
- It has been said in the series companion book that there was discussion for the final scene of the final episode to be Benny Russell holding the series script standing in a studio lot (presumably at Paramount), which would have been the Mind Screw to end all Mind Screws.
  - It would also have been an Audience Screw, invalidating not just the show they were watching but other shows with it (both TNG and VOY had used elements from DS 9, after all). Good thing they thought better of it.
Elsewhere in the Trek franchise, Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise had their share of these episodes — and most can be traced back to one inveterate Mind Screwer. Brannon Braga absolutely loves stories like this. The results are mixed: Braga's Mind Screws include some of the best and worst episodes of these shows.
Though Firefly is notable for being extremely straightforward in most respects, the scenes in the episode "Objects in Space" involving River's hallucinations can be considered a mild Mind Screw. It gets worse in the Big Damn Movie, where River's hallucinations become much more pronounced and vivid.
Even Supernatural got in on the act with Dean's fantasy world in What Is And What Should Never Be. Would that sweet little four year old in the pilot have turned out to be a jerkass if it wasn't for emotional abuse, neglect, a tight leash and a massive martyr complex or does he just think that little of himself? Does he think that Sam's a wuss, Mary's perfect and his soulmate is pretty much death or were they all part of him? But whatever way you look at it, it's still a profoundly disturbing tearjerker that sets up the It Got Worse events of the finale nicely.
- They did it again with Mystery Spot. Was it all just a dream? Did Dean actually die and go to hell? The people that were killed (by Sam and the Trickster), do they remain dead? And the fact that Dean's "We can't be martyrs anymore" speech (which has so many things wrong with it that I don't know where to begin) in No Rest For The Wicked is almost an exact copy of the Trickster's speech just carries the Mind Screw further.
Classic Doctor Who managed its Mind Screw with the middle four episodes of Trial of a Time Lord (it being called Mindwarp should have been a clue). The final two episodes of the arc attempted to clear up the Mind Screw elements. Due to a number of reasons, especially Executive Meddling and Author Existence Failure, it failed miserably.
- The final season of Classic Who is notorious for this sort of thing, mostly due to editing-room decisions made to shoehorn the stories into the X-episode serial format. 'Ghost Light' is especially full of it - even the DVD-issued Special Edition is best tackled with a notebook and pen.
- From the Expanded Universe: The Blue Angel. Parallel universes. Space warthog Valkyries. The Doctor giving birth to a winged baby from his leg. Claims that the Doctor's mother was a mermaid. Giant space owls. A Star Trek parody starship called the Nepotist. One character is an elephant (a green one, no less!), another gets turned into a giant squid for no adequately explained reason. Parallel universe Dalek-analogues who are humanoids made out of glass. Twenty questions that manage to be clever, patronising, and headache-inducing all at once...yeah, it seems to be a product of an acid trip during a Classic Who marathon.
Sarah's dream sequences in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
St Elsewhere: The Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis. It is best just to ignore it.
- You can't ignore it, they have charts!
Quite a few Monty Pythons Flying Circus sketches, and all the Deranged Animations. Not due to an over-reliance on symbolism, but rather ignoring everything except the Rule Of Funny.
There's a great Japanese show called Uchu Keiji Shaider. You can bet it will contain something like mind-controlling dolls,or people doing a demonic dance or some really odd-looking chroma key!
Carnivale: Considering it was heavily influenced by Twin Peaks, this is unsurprising.
Heroes relies on this to an extent. Much of the symbolism (the "symbol", cockroaches, etc.), the religious subtext, and the obvious puberty / Have You Tried Not Being A Monster themes that generally pop up in this genre. And that's not even getting into the Season 3 finale...
During the taping of one of his comedy specials, comedian Howie Mandel once executed a Mind Screw on a person from one of the front rows who got up to go to the restroom. As soon as the poor unfortunate was out of earshot, Mandel had the audience in the vicinity of his seat rearrange themselves, and then continued with his act. When the audience member returned and stood, confused, in the aisle trying to find his seat again, Mandel stopped his act to "help" him for several minutes while the audience went wild, before revealing the gag and letting everyone go back to their original seats.
Fringe. The name says it all.
"Failed pilot" Virtuality, which I can only describe as 2001 meets Serial Experiments Lain meets Big Brother IN SPACE (with some Ghost In The Shell and Ex Is Tenz for flavor) from the producers of Battle Star Galactica. The Mind Screwiness is made worse by the fact that it's an unfinished pilot. Breaking it down:
- 2001: The crew is trapped on a very long journey with a possibly unreliable AI. Hypersleep is averted because the ship is propelled through space by carefully exploding small nukes, which everyone needs to be awake for.
- Brother: In order to help with funding (I think, I missed the first 30 mins), the ship has become a Big Brother-style house, complete with Confession Cam booth.
- Lain: When the captain is killed by an inexplicably malfunctioning airlock, a crew member mysteriously finds his VR goggles in her quarters. She goes into his last simulation, and discovers that the captain's consciousness may have survived.
- Ghost: One of the crew members is raped while inside her own simulation, and it appears that another crew member knows the assailant, a program(?) posing as a gynecologist. However, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?
- Existenz: The captain flexes his hand as though he's still in a simulation when the VR developer/psychologist asks him if he's certain of reality, and, again, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?

Close Live Action TV

Primus. Full. Fucking. Stop.
Don McLean's song "American Pie" is a Mind-Screwy combination of imagery and references to other songs and historical events.
- Some of McLean's lyrics allegedly reference Bob Dylan (The Jester). Who, incidentally, is famous for his own well-known, mind-screwy song: "Desolation Row". ...to name one of MANY in Dylan's catalog.
  - "Desolation Row" is child's play compared to "Changing of The Guards", "Brownsville Girl" and "Highlands", all written and recorded long after Dylan's most reputedly mind-screwy era.
- There have been many analyses of this classic song. One of the best is one of the earliest, by Bob Dearborn. One of my favorites is the very Mind-Screw-friendly site IMISSAMERICANPIE.COM.
Many people have put forth their theories on The Eagles' Hotel California, particularly regarding "the beast" that the residents just can't kill. Others just figure it's about a guy who does a bunch of drugs in a cheap hotel.
- This troper once read that the song is a metaphor for the music industry, and that interpretation makes a surprising amount of sense.
  - This is what Word Of God says.
- This troper always thought it was just a creepy ghost story about a haunted/evil hotel.
  - This troper always thought it was vampires. After all, it mentions "mirrors on the ceiling". It doesn't say if anything is reflected in said mirrors.
- The music industry idea is a good one. But I think it's drug addiction. Specifically "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell", "Wake you up in the middle of the night..." and "Check out any time you like but you can't ever leave."
  - No, it's academia. I've tried to leave the university world twice now and failed miserably both times. And yes, it wakes me up in the middle of the night to check computers/breed flies/get drunk with friends.
- Has anyone else seen the uncanny similarities to "Lord of the Flies"? A "Beast", the idea of never escaping, a surreal environment, etc.
- Whether the song is about Satanism is a subject of controversy. Lyricist Don Henley has stated that the Hotel is "just made up", but at least one web site quotes him as saying "it was about Satanism." Snopes.com disagrees.
- Isn't it about a sanitarium?
- This troper was first able to make out the lyrics at the age of six and took them literally, imagining the singer fleeing in mind-numbing terror at the sight of the guests at the feast being unable to kill their beastly dinner as it lies (struggles?) upon the platter. That the last line of the song prevents this escape was Nightmare Fuel at that age, though the troper now wishes someone would do the filmclip as he once imagined it.
- In this troper's 12th grade english class, we listened to the song after reading the play "No Exit", and I was surprised at how much the song and the play fit together.
Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Especially the part right after the guitar solo.
Nightwish. What a grand old time it is to figure out what half of the lyrics are saying, especially since half of them are of word salad quality. Stargazers, The Poet and the Pendulum, and Ghost Love Score are all huge mind screws, especially the second one with all of its mood whiplash.
Most of the output of They Might Be Giants falls into this territory. Especially Particle Man and Doctor Worm.
- The Statue Got Me High is in this troper's opinion probably the best example, or at least the most literal.
  - I always thought that "The statue got me high" was about the oracle at Delphi. Supposedly (or so I heard) the fumes that gave the oracles visions were routed through statues. Thus making it quite literal. But that's just my interpertation.
Most of the Anglo-French band Gong's work hit this trope while Daevid Allen was in charge. Prostitute Poem from the album Angel's Egg seems to be a deliberate attempt to induce a bad trip in any listening acid heads. "I am breaking off a piece of your mind... I am eating it..." Brrrrr.
"Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by the Pet Shop Boys. The song itself is relatively straight-forward, but the music video's a bit of a Mind Screw, with a strong dash of Nightmare Fuel.
- Minus the Nightmare Fuel, the same goes with the music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart. "Turn around bright eyes...".
The Ayreon rock opera "The Human Equation" appears to simply be a look into the mind of a comatose man dealing with a lifetime's worth of angst and misdeeds... until the very end of the final track, where It's revealed that it is simply a computer simulation being run for the benefit of an advanced alien life form.
- This will completely fly over the head of anyone who hasn't been keeping up with Ayreon's ongoing Forever of the Stars story line, though. Guide Dang It actually applies to music for once!
  - More like All There In The Manual; there are no less than six albums linking their stories together into the same overarching space opera metaplot as of 2009, and more may be coming.
The Dropkick Murphys (!) song "State of Massachusetts" seems like a straightforward song about a single mother, until you pick up on the clues (the title being the most obvious) that the whole thing is to be taken as an allegory, at which point it becomes an incomprehensible meditation on the SJC, the academic élite, the "culture wars," television's influence on society, and Boston's place in history.
David Bowie's 1995 concept album "1. Outside" is a story told in anachronic order of a 25-year-long investigation into illegal trade in body parts harvested in ritual murders centered in Oxford (NJ) and London (OT), which also seems to be a metaphor for Bowie's own career, including an apparent disco/industrial elegy to Major Tom. The fact that it was planned as part of a scrapped 5-part cycle does not help.
- Let's not forget Life on Mars, which has been described as "a cross between a Broadway musical and a Salvador Dali painting." A girl leaves her house as her parents fight, goes to the movies, and then there's something about fighting sailors, corrupt cops, and Mickey Mouse.
- Heck, a lot of David Bowie is like this, and that's not even counting Labyrinth. 1984 is pretty screwed up, too. It's either about, y'know, 1984, another futuristic dystopia entirely in which the main character may or may not be a prostitute, or a whole bunch of other stuff entirely.
The music video for Genesis's Land of Confusion, which involves puppet-version of the band, as well as the Reagans, a swamp with heads instead of plants, and the keyboardist using his own tongue as a hot dog bun.
Mr. Bungle. Look them up.
- I don't think Bungle's nearly as much of a Mind Screw as Fantomas is. Of course, if you ask Mike Patton, Fantomas is perfectly straightforward...
- A lot of things involving Mike Patton are like this, usually combined with various levels of Nightmare Fuel
"Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine..."
- Also, "I am the Walrus." Reportedly, John Lennon commented, "Let's see the fuckers figure that one out," after recording it.
- And "Yellow Submarine." It's not actually about them on a freaking sub, people. Neither is the movie, for that matter.
Anything by Frank Zappa that's supposed to tell some sort of story will eventually turn into this to some degree, but a pretty extreme example is the album Lumpy Gravy. In between music concrete collages of an unfinished ballet and other leftovers, a group of people, who are apparently hiding inside of a giant drum, discuss encounters with boogey-men, pigs, and vicious ponies with claws, and speculate that the entire universe is one musical note.
- Joe's Garage is a full double-album Mind Screw. The first half sounds like a pretty straightforward story of a guy guy playing music in a totalitarian society where music is illegal (ok so far) who discovers he likes to have sex with appliances (ok, so maybe not so straightforward) but by the end of the second disc, it, uh ... well he ends up working in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, pooting little green rosettas onto muffins. All narrated by The Central Scrutinizer — a cheap looking flying saucer kinda thing about five feet across covered with stupid looking headers and exhaust hoses and some spoked wheels but who actually gets around by being dangled from a string held by a union guy eating a sandwich.
Many of the songs by Lemon Demon have a very mind skrewy lyrics, such as The Saga of You, Confused Destroyer of Planets or Your Evil Shadow Has a Cup of Tea.
- Your Evil Shadow is a deliberate attempt at this. Ben Bernanke is another mind screwy song.
Roisin Murphy's "Night of the Dancing Flame". The music makes this troper think of skeletons controlled like those puppets where you pull the strings, and the lyrics are screwy as hell...
- And by the way, this troper actually loves this song.
- "Ramalama (Bang Bang)" is another one. Of course the fact that this troper's introduction to this song was at a dance concert where the dancers were dressed (and moved!) like [[Nightmare Fuel jerky wind-up zombie dolls]] didn't help much.
Pick a Tool music video. Any Tool music video. Also frequently overlaps into serious Nightmare Fuel territory.
- Even their stage on Guitar Hero: World Tour is a Mind Screw!
- Seeing as it uses the artwork from their music videos and studio albums, that's kind of a given.
The band Yes dodged this trope all the time, and did so by explaining that they mostly composed their lyrics based on how the words sound rather than what they mean. However, Siberian Khatru (on the album Close to the Edge) is supposed to be about life on the Siberian steppes, but at the same time is about a balmy summer day by a riverbank in England. Figure that one out!
Devin Townsend, a Canadian musician, has distilled this into the purest form possible with his album "Ziltoid the Omniscient". Beginning as a somewhat lighthearted tale of the titular Ziltoid invading Earth demanding coffee, it ends with him questioning the state of the universe, the creator revealing that they're all 'just puppets' and it finally turning out that it's all a daydream in the mind of a coffee shop employee. Not even mentioning that it tends to shift from speedy metal to weirdly dissonant ambient music seemingly at random, and EVERY SINGLE VOICE on the album is the same man singing, up to and including whole choral arrangements of just his voice. Oh, and he made the puppets he mentions in the story. In fact, THAT'S THE INSPIRATION FOR THE WHOLE THING.
The video for Goldfrapp's 'Ride a White Horse'. Anyone who has seen it will agree. Totally off, and very strange.
- Not to mention "Oompa Radar". After listening, this troper exclaimed, "What the fuck was that?"
Queensrÿche's Rock Opera Operation Mindcrime. The main storyline is a flashback suffered by a man in an insane asylum, and it's possible that none of it actually happened. And that's just the surface twist.
Arguably, many forms of classical music fall into this category for the non-academic listener (and even the academic, for many of the modern compositions). Embedded within the music of the Romantic era through the twentieth century are such dense layers of symbolism and mathematical placement of notes that we often find pieces that look good on paper, but are not necessarily enjoyed by everyone. Even studying these compositions or attempting to play them can be a nightmare.
- Twelve-Tone, atonal, and minimalists compositions often elicit mixed reactions from the audience, and generally a negative response from anyone outside the classical circle. It is very difficult for the average person to find coherency in just one listen and not looking at the score.
- Complex forms of counterpoint such as the Fugue can also be mind screws because there is so much going on at once that it can sometimes be hard to latch onto the theme or subject, etc., without looking at the score first (It also depends on how well it is performed).
The Proctol Harum song Whiter Shade of Pale is a classic example. Much like Hotel California most people have their own idea about what it means. Word Of God says the band members came up with the song while sitting around drunk.
When it comes to trippy concept albums, you'll have a hard time topping Pain of Salvation's "BE". Themes cover practically everything from mankind's relationship to God and vice versa through to the state of industry and consumerism; the myriad plotlines include both a Space Probe which becomes God and a greedy misogynistic billionaire who has himself cryogenically frozen and wakes up after having become immortal, the last man left alive on the planet. Songwriter and lyricist Daniel Gildenlow cites dozens upon dozens of sources in the accompanying booklet. Musical devices include the recitation of population statistics, two-minute long dramatic monologues, God's answering machine and a track which consists of the sound of a heartbeat, followed by four minutes of silence and then a young girl chirping, "There's room for all God's creatures, right next to the mashed potatoes!"
Several songs by the group Renaissance have imagery that tells some kind of story but the listener is stumped as hell trying to figure out what it's really talking about. Take my descriptions with a grain of salt - as I said, I've no idea what these are on about either. Favorites include:
- "Trip to the Fair" where a lady goes alone to a fair that is completely abandoned, then everything starts moving on its own (and either starts attacking her or she half-faints in terror) and as soon as she can't take it anymore everything becomes normal and the fair is full of people wondering what she's afraid of.
  - From the CD notes of Scheherazade and other stories: "...a delicate story of Roy Wood and Annie Haslam showing up at Hampstead Heath for a fair that had closed down..."
- "Black Flame", where the only thing that's certain is that the singer has been somehow taken over by a 'black flame' that now has full control of her, feeds off her, and apparently hurts. There's a lot of weird imagery of being mouth sounds "I am words, I am speaking", "I'm just a sigh, just a crying" and in the bridge the singer is talking to someone as though she is inside them, while still telling them to try and escape.
- "Running Hard", where someone just seems to be slipping through a world of weirdo nightmare images and metaphors, and the more they try to escape or find reality, the freakier it gets.

Close Music

Pretty much any play written by Samuel Beckett, with Waiting for Godot probably being the most well-known example.
- For that matter, anything written by other Absurdist playwrights - Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet. (This troper also humbly adds Harold Pinter to the list, although Martin Esslin only wrote about the first four in his 1962 essay.)
August Strindbergh's Ghost Sonata is this combined with Nightmare Fuel. "She sucks all the gravy out of the food and replaces it with water."
The interrogation sequence from Anyone Can Whistle, an extended musical scene ironically titled "Simple."
Philip Glass's opera Einstein On The Beach is all symbolism and no plot.
Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. The Peanut Gallery becoming characters, the characters becoming peanut gallery, and somehow it's a revenge murder plot by a scorned critic?
- Also, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Harold Pinter's Old Times. A wife and husband (Kate and Deely) invite a guest (Anna) over for dinner and talk for the remainder of the story. The ending implies that Anna doesn't actually exist.
Gene Doucette's Deus Ex Quanta. A dark comedy about a murder investigation and quantum physics, performed in Anachronic Order.

Close Theatre

Please tell me what you just have accomplished after playing Rez. Are hacking and electronic music....... LIKE THAT ?
The Lost videogame Via Domus, true to the TV show it's based on, features a major mind screw at the end. Throughout the game, the main character, Elliott Maslow (a survivor of Oceanic Flight 815 who has never been seen on the show), who is suffering from amnesia, has been trying to retrieve his lost memories. It turns out that Elliot used to be a journalist who ratted out his girlfriend Lisa, also a journalist, and took a photo of her being shot in the head by the guy the two were after. On the island, he is repeatedly haunted by visions of Lisa, eventually making him regret his selfish ways. The game ends with Elliott leaving the island on a sailboat, only to witness Oceanic Flight 815, the very plane he had crashed with, break apart above his head. Suddenly Elliott wakes up on the beach (instead of in the jungle, like he did in the beginning of the game) amidst the burning wreckage, when suddenly Lisa comes running towards him, relieved that both of them survived the crash. It should be pointed out that this ending was explicitly suggested by Damon Lindelof, one of the show's executive producers/main writers, and the concept of time travel had already been established on the show by the time the game came out.
- Fans of the show are torn whether this ending is really bad, or one of the few things that are actually good about the otherwise critically panned game.
Anything made by developer Goichi Suda (b.k.a. "Suda51").
- Killer7 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, No More Heroes. If you claim to fully understand what the heck is going on in Killer7, you are dead wrong.
- The plot of Contact is largely ambiguous and open to interpretation, especially the Professor's and Mint's motives. The ending is pretty confusing as well, and probably creates more problems than really solves any; there's a divide amongst those who've played the game as to whether it was really unique or just anticlimactic.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The ending. Well, calling it an ending would be a bit of a stretch, the thing practically ended midway through act II.
Metal Gear Solid 2. Nobody had tried using postmodernism to question the links between character, player, and designer in a game before. It's going to be a long, long time before anyone tries it again.
At the beginning of Sanitarium, you wake up in a mental hospital with no memory and bandages wrapped around your face. Flashbacks appear sporadically as you play through the game and alternate between roaming the grounds of the hospital and going into bizarre settings where you actually seem to be other people, to the point where it's unclear what's real and what's delusion. Turns out that it's all delusion - more specifically, it's a big dream you had while you were in a coma after your car wrecked because your evil business partner cut your brake lines. However, the symbolism of the settings and actions during the dream is still of great note.
The original Silent Hill game screws with the player by taking things a step further than simply having a confusing plot: the game has no third-person narrative; it's played entirely through the point of view of the Player Character. Because he's kept in the dark over what's going on, the player is never let in on things either. It isn't until Silent Hill 3 that the full story is finally revealed.
- The game screws with you more in Silent Hill 3, where it's implied that the monsters you've been killing are innocent people, and all the dangers you've faced are all in your head.
- SH 2 gets really mind-screwed in its second half, with the stuff that goes on in the Historical Society Abyss and the Hotel.
The ending of Neo Quest II. Watch and be confused.
The plot of the fourth ending of Drakengard defies explanation. That goes for the fifth ending as well.
Shadow Of Destiny is a more mild example than some on this page, but nevertheless tends towards this. The game is designed so that you have to play all of the Multiple Endings to know what's going on, but at least two of said endings directly contradict each other; the ones that DO let details slip don't explain what they mean; certain details are revealed and then re-revealed as something completely different; and the only character who knows what's going on refuses to enlighten the rest of the cast. Lampshade hung when one character admits that The Reveal she's just given you is based on things she's been told and that "not all of it may be true".
- Its Spiritual Successor, Time Hollow, falls squarely under this too. Don't expect to understand the real motivation behind anything or anyone until the epilogue, and even then it's a bit iffy.
Earthbound: Children with giant heads attacking wildlife everywhere, possessed street signs, a glowing neon Dark World of backwards talking shadows, talking dogs, an afterlife that looks like a Grateful Dead album cover, and let's not mention the final boss...
- While certainly strange, Earthbound is arguably the most straightforward game in the trilogy. Its predecessor, for one thing, had you entering someone else's mental world, by... touching a seashell and reading a diary? And then came Mother 3, which is even stranger.
The ending of Final Fantasy Legend AKA Sa Ga 1. You've been climbing up a tower that leads to various worlds. You fight the apparent Big Bad. And then you walk through the door that leads to the top of the tower... only to walk into a trapdoor leading to what appears to be the very first world, at which point you can enter the tower after using the various orbs you acquired up to this point; the door to "paradise" opens, and... you're in a featureless white room. Wandering around leads you to The Creator of the World, who says you've won "the game"; you promptly decide to fight him. You see a door behind him that he wanted you to go through, but decide to go home instead. The Gameboy equivalent of Neon Genesis Evangelion, that ending was.
- This also seems to be the plot behind the Architect and Neo's little conversation near the end of Matrix Reloaded.
SD Snatcher is probably the closest to examining the innards of Hideo Kojima's brain most people would like to come. The plot's perfectly straightforward (if a bit odd) until about halfway through, where it begins a slow downwards slide - starting from Gillian being forced to pretend to be Solid Snake in order to clear his name after killing a priest and ending with Snatchers in fursuits and clown suits colonising a ripoff of Disneyland (hidden behind a painting) because it looks like the Kremlin. Actually, no, it's probably when the master Snatcher manifests out of a pool of liquid skin.
Don't Eat the Mushroom.
- Don't forget Carousel. MAH BRAAAIN. To play these two, though, you'll need to download Knytt Stories, a fun platforming game you can make levels for.
- For those who can't access the linked forum, there's a video LetsPlay of Don't Eat the Mushroom on this page (scroll down a bit to find it). It's screwy. Very mind-screwy.
Second Sight's last few levels, though not as bad as most of the entries on this page, was still rather mind-screwy. Mutant kids eating the Big Bad! The present is the future! The past is the present! Jayne's dead! Jayne's alive!
The Xbox Live Arcade Game Braid has a highly confusing story to go along with it's tricky time-manipulating gameplay. Absolutely everything is metaphorical. What appears to be a simple tale about rescuing a princess turns out to be a complex story of a man's obsession, and the atomic bomb, or something...
Eternal Darkness...at least when the sanity gauge gets low, anyway.
The entirety of Mondo Medicals and its sequel Mondo Agency. Unless you have a complete understanding about CURING CANCER BY SHOOTING PEOPLE WHILE THINKING LIKE A STAR or how killing indians in order to save technology will somehow save the president... before you kill him, then you are pretty much fucked with these games.
The little-known Baroque, which takes place in a distorted world where people physically transform into a metaphor for their twisted delusions. It's confusing enough from the very start that, by the time you learn that the flying babies with deformed faces are actually the physical manifestation of God's pain, and you've been firing them out of your Infinity Plus One Gun, you'll be relieved that the plot is starting to make more sense.
The Stinger of Bubble Symphony aka Bubble Bobble II can act as a kind of Mind Screw. Were the four children (or original protagonists and girlfriends, whatever) just pretending to have Involuntary Shapeshifting and go on that quest, or did it really happen and they all managed to make or receive suits of their bubble dragon forms and toys of the items, Plot Coupons and cute baddies, and play around with them afterwards? Why don't you take a look and suggest something?◊
- The Downer Or Was It A Dream Endings do not have any relation.
The Elder Scrolls series retconned five of Daggerfall's conflicting endings into a single canonical event by making it so that they all happened at once, breaking the relationship between time and reality and causing all sorts of incomprehensible chaos.
- On a related note: ANYTHING written by Michael Kirkbride. 36 Lessons of Vivec is an excellent example.
Shade. To avoid unnecessary spoilers... let's just say that it starts getting weird fast, and ends with one of the most cryptic, incomprehensible scenes this troper has ever seen. How did the tiny human figure crawl out of the sand if it's dead, and what did it mean by "You win. Okay, my turn again"?
Marathon Infinity, when jumping between different timelines in order to find the one where the universe can still be saved from the W'rkcacnter, you go through very strange "dream" levels. The terminal messages found on Where Are Monsters In Dreams are perfect examples of this.
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time involved a massive Mind Screw late in the game. It was revealed that the entire universe was, in reality, a MMORPG for 4D beings, thus making all the characters computer programs that happened to gain sentience. If that wasn't enough, the Big Bad succeeds in deleting the entire universe. It no longer exists, but it still happens to exist because people still thinks it exists even though it got deleted. Is your head splitting open yet?
Both F.E.A.R. and Project Origin's hallucinations are generally chaotic mindfucks that in a lot of cases don't make a whole lot of sense at first glance....or even after you've got the proper context. And in Project Origin, there is a literal case of a Mind Screw, where Alma rapes Becket during a hallucination.
Most of Yume Nikki, and how.
See also the Chzo Mythos.
The Mirror Lies, a freeware game by freebirdgames.com, fits this trope perfectly. See also Shrug Of God.
Vampire The Maquerade: The coffin is a mindscrew. The player is filled with legend speculating on it's contents, is given a life-threatening mission to recover it, and the one character who begs you not to open it is acting pretty out of character...who wouldn't open it?
Vagrant Story, particularly the ending; though most of the game involves the protagonist trying to figure out what in his head is real and what isn't.
Kingdom Hearts the opening music videos to both main series games.
- The opening to the second game (not counting the trippy lyrics) was pretty much a recap of KH 1 and Co M, and the vast majority of the images makes perfect sense to anyone who's played them or at least read the summaries. The rest forshadow major points of the second game and make sense after you've finished it. The game itself on the other hand, just has a Mind Screw for a plot device. The specifics of the body/soul/heart, Person/Heartless/Nobody combo and how the Heartless can be made of a corrupted heart while lacking hearts themselves is pretty much impossible to explain to someone new to the game. I've tried, several times. The fact that nobody explains anything in the first half doesn't help.
- Come to think of it, the ending was screwier than the beginning. The setting of the Final Battle made absolutely no sense and didn't even have the decency to remain in one inexplicable place. While the Ansem-spaceship in KH was strange, KH 2 had a spaceship captained by Xemnas in a knight's armor surrounded by warp holes spitting flying buildings, a random silver dragon-ship with lasers from nowhere, a huge laser-engine something that looked stolen from Star Wars and a giant-white-black-hole space where Xemnas turns into freaking Darth Maul. So was the whole thing in the Realm of Darkness? Or was it in the World That Never Was? Or did TWTNW break apart into this weirdo place? I love this series to death but hell if I can figure that finale out.
  - While we're on the subject of final battles what the feck is the titular MacGuffin light dark Sora? Also is TWTNW an actual world, a creation of the fake kingdom Hearts, or created by Xemnas the place is in a constant state of flux with structures being much larger inside than out (IE the castle even up close doesn't look as big as it is..though it gets larger than perspective would allow as you get closer) also the "moon" also changes size depending on where you are at any given time. The whole world is meta as fuck
Ever17 in increasing amounts as it becomes increasingly obvious to the player, if not the characters, that things just don't add up. They manage to explain it all into a single continuity even but until then you may have to pause to ask yourself things like... actually, explaining the mind screwiness would actually be spoilerific. And even then there are a few strings dangling.
A lot of The Path has this, for example, pictures and patterns randomly flashing over the screen, the random items you find littered around the woods and anything you see in grandma's house after encountering the wolf, especially if you've unlocked the secret rooms.
There's a fairly minor one in Baldurs Gate- in the catacombs under Candlekeep, you meet Elminster, Tethoril and your stepfather Gorion- who was murdered at the end of the prologue. They tell you that Gorion was actually poisoned and made to look as if dead, and that for some time you've been trapped in a grand illusion created by the Big Bad and his doppelganger minions- and you've just murdered most of your childhood friends, believing them to be doppelgangers. If you believe them and follow them, they lead you past a load of apparent Doppelgangers, who chase you- and the three characters turn into Greater Doppelgangers and, if you aren't careful, kill you. Bastards.
Tales Of The Abyss makes perfect sense right up until the ending, at which point it suddenly enters full Mind Screw mode and refuses to explain what happened.
An obscure Atari Jaguar game called Attack of the Mutant Penguins is so convoluted that it requires an Angry Video Game Nerd to [a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/video/angry-video-screwattack/47108?type=flv"]explain it to you[/a].

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Dresden Codak does this to varying degrees. This one is a complete Mind Screw.
- The author admits to having been influenced by A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible which seems to be nothing but a Mind Screw. Have a look.
Kagerou. The main character's Split Personality is actually pretty realistic (he's unaware of his other personalities, and none of them are really functional human beings), suggesting that the author perhaps has some personal experience.
Expecting to Fly by Daniel Østvold.
Adventurers! lampshades this trope in the some sort of symbolic climax.
Grounded Angel (link). Let me save you a couple of hours of mediocre art and predicable plot twists: the main character turns out to be an angel who is being chased by demons and a cat-man who leads a cult, they want the power of a book that only she can open. And in the end when she gets to the book? Turns out humanity is not yet ready for the way she wants to use it, and she gets to return to the start and do it all over again with her memories of the whole thing erased; oh, and she's been doing this for 176 years. Yeah, everything in the story occurred at least 64,240 times.
The Sluggy Freelance guest arc "The Sluggite Koan" does this in a big way. What at first seems like a somewhat straightforward Refugee From TV Land and Trapped In TV Land story delves into weird symbolism, philosophy, and loads and loads of Metafiction. Figuring out what's "real" in the context of the story is beyond this Troper.
Yu+Me: Dream starts of as a straightforward Girls Love strip (albeit with an ebonics-spouting conscience), until the last ten pages of issue 9, when the entire comic up to that point is revealed to be All Just A Dream, with a minor character actually being a Morpheus-like being...and then it gets weird.
The final arc of the fifth book of Fans, "What Dreams May Come" focuses on a wish-granting artifact granting a kind of (extremely geeky) Instrumentality, apparently a metaphor for the afterlife. A few of the earlier and later introspective storylines could get a little Mind Screw-ey, but this one (being the intended finale) was just plain insane.
Templar, Arizona. The main characters are straightforward enough, but everything about the world around them is some twisted reflection of our own.
Level.
Occasionally, Gene Catlow wanders into this, mainly due to the strange mix of philosophy, spirituality and sheer silliness.

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Certain veins of lonelygirl15 videos veer toward this. Specifically, while LaRezisto consistently has a few clear points amongst the smoke and mirrors, OpAphid just seems to be weird-for-the-sake-of-weird half the time.
- OpAphid is like that. It's even worse in Redearth88.
The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions had some moments: the idea that it was both a story of superheroes in the future & a TV show about superheroes in the future was one; the Queue's explanation of how they created the LICC universe was another; although the Gerber Elf was the only one we know was an intentional Mind Screw on the part of an author.
The Nostalgia Critic references one chase scene near the end of the Tom and Jerry the Movie. The scene is shown while The Critic goes a little nuts himself. It's pretty complicated to explain so I'll let The Critic himself describe it.
Nostalgia Critic: A cat and mouse are driving a ship trying to save the daughter of Indiana Jones while being chased by a purple people eater, a dog on a skateboard, a performing ship captain, his hand puppet Squawk, two Mexican wrestlers and a doctor riding an ice cream cart. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mind Fuck.
- And now we have Top 11 Nostalgic Mindfucks which will all no doubt be joining this article very soon... if they aren't here already.
- He also suggests that Moonwalker should've been named 'Mind F***er' instead. Of course, considering what happened a month or so later.......

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Even though Ralph Bakshi's animated films are more known for their adult material, some of his films, especially Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, have trippy sequences that could be considered mind screw.
Twelve Ounce Mouse
Parodied in Perfect Hair Forever: "I wish these hot dogs and cats were not symbolic of anything, and this was all just a dumb anime mindf***!"
Transformers: Beast Machines was more of a Heavy Mind Petting, but it was still pretty clouded with symbolism, and the fact that it could be deciphered tended to raise another problem when the message didn't go over well.
The final episode of Teen Titans was really more of a No Ending, but it was such an over-the-top and inexplicable No Ending that it has to be mentioned here. It has been stated in interviews that the show's staff wasn't too keen on explaining things in the story; what transpired here can be best described as that policy's logical conclusion.
- It should be noted, though, that the sort of question Glen Murakami wasn’t keen on answering were things about the characters’ non-suited lives, and the “how did villain X get out of the Cardboard Prison last time?” sort of things that he considered unimportant, a distraction from the main plot. This was the only episode in which nothing was made sense of. (Well, Beast Boy does move on after the Terra incident - which we’d thought him over three seasons ago. The rest is pure randomness.)
Xavier: Renegade Angel is basically one massive, nonsensical mind screw after another, until the whole thing resembles a 3D-animated acid trip Gone Horribly Wrong.
The episode of Totally Spies, "Deja Cruise". To make a long story short, it was like the girls' dreams were having dreams. After watching the episode, this troper joked that the WOOHP contract has this clause on it: "CAUTION: Prolonged employment at this occupation may cause you to lose the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality."
ReBoot had an episode that only makes sense when you realize it is a homage to The Prisoner, oddly enough. The end of the episode revealed it was All Just A Dream, but the Mind Screw elements make more sense because of that, and Matrix received some Character Development bordering on a World Of Cardboard Speech.
MTV's Aeon Flux in its entirety. Even the writers have admitted not knowing what the hell it was all about.
Ed Edd N Eddy: in "One Plus One Equals Ed", the titular trio try and know everything so they can become super-smart and famous. In their quest for knowledge, however, all of reality breaks down- trees are flat as cardboard, Eddy eats the sun, Nazz turns into a dinosaur, and on and on. The madness only ends when the Eds are flying on a balloon that gets popped by the animator's giant pencil. And they never speak of it again.
Parodied in The Simpsons, where an advertising company produce a TV advert for The Plow King, featuring a opera-singing woman screaming at a snow-globe before smashing it on the pavement. In black and white. The family's response sums it up well.
Bart: Dad, was that your advert?
Homer: ...I don't know.
The Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat is probably the most Mind Screwiest western animation films ever. And unlike the film it's a sequel to, Ralph Bakshi had absolutely nothing to do with it.
At least one episode of The Angry Beavers suddenly starred Mexican Masked Luchador El Grapadura (The Stapler) and was voiced entirely in Spanish with English subtitles that were clearly not what was being said.
One in the Time Travel episode of Gargoyles, to quote the Nostalgia Critic: basically, they make it back to Manhattan, but it turns out Xanatos took over in the forty years they were gone, but then it turns out that it isn't Xanatos at all, but a computer with Xanatos' memories, but then it turns out it wasn't the computer, but Lexington, who was overtaken by madness, but then it turns out that the whole thing was an illusion created by Puck to get the time medallion, but then it turns out that it was all a dream, but it may not have, interesting? Yes. Confusing? Oh, hell yes.

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The May Day Mystery, an uncategorizable and indescribable series of bizarre documents, possibly the coded annals of a conspiracy. Sure, it could all just be an (insanely) elaborate hoax, but What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic?
The Time Cube website - either his mind is screwed up or everyone else's is.
Fan Fiction quite often drifts into this trope, either by being so full of personal in-jokes and/or bad grammar that it might as well be written in Sumerian, or simply by having a writer who enjoys playing with his/her readers' heads.

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Modern quantum physics: If two particles that have been separated, and you influence one, then the other gets influenced too. No matter how far the particles are removed from each other. Also, observing a particle always changes its behaviour.
- Really, everything about Quantum Mechanics following this point is just really unnecessary. You can sum up in two little phrases: It's Broken, and It'll Break You.
- If I remember correctly, this particular idea was first proposed by Einstein, who thought it was the greatest mistake he had ever made (funny that it turned out to be true). To be precise, the phenomenon is that two quarks can be "synchronized" so that if one has its spin change, the other will also change. Instantaneously. No matter how many light-years apart the two quarks are. Which is against the rules by Relativity — nothing can travel faster than light. Honestly, this is perhaps less weird than the concept of quantum superposition — when nothing is looking at something, it is in a bunch of states at the same time — or the Many-Worlds interpretation — at every quantum event, a Universe is created for every possible outcome. And this is what the books that try to explain things to normal people say...
- It should be pointed out that the thing above about observing a particle makes a lot more sense if you think about it for a moment. Consider how we observe things in the normal world: photons get thrown at things, and we watch what they send our way. Now, the things we're talking about here are significantly smaller than light particles. So in order to "observe" a particle, you need to throw another particle at it, and then observe the result. It's a bit unreasonable to expect the first particle to not move if you throw something just as big at it, isn't it?
- QM
  1. The Uncertainty Principle is a statement about the process of measurement; no matter how big or small the particle you'd throw at the first, there would still be an irreducible relationship between the uncertainties in the measurement of its momentum and position (or time observed and the energy observed).
  2. Einstein thought the Cosmological Constant his greatest mistake; it now looks like he might have been wrong about that in general, though right enough in the particular (he introduced it to avoid an expanding universe as a solution to his General Theory of Relativity, now it may help refine the theory).
  3. The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky thought-experiment was originally proposed by Einstein et al as a way of disproving quantum mechanics as then formulated. It certainly is a poser; however, it is not about particles 'influencing' each other over a distance—-you can't make the measurement be "UP" so that the measurement on t'other end will be down. It's just that suddenly, you know something about a potential measurement made (say) light-years away, but you don't know whether it has been made or will ever be made, and they'll never know if you've made a particular measurement or not, unless one or both of you send emissaries out to tell each other, which will happen causally. The statistics for measurement of the particles at each end are unaffected.
  4. Even though the EPR experiments don't disprove locality, Bell's Theorem does.
- Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once stated that anyone who thinks that they understand quantum physics doesn't. He also purportedly shot down a colleague's theory by stating that it made too much sense. On the opposite end of the scale, he once dismissed a theory as being "[...] not even wrong."
- The fact that educators seem to be engaged in a long-running "who can explain quantum mechanics in the most counter-intuitive way" competition doesn't help matters.
  - Although QM is counterintuitive, and logically a counterintuitive method is the only way to understand something that is itself contrary to your intuition. Really, it's the ones who are trying to make it intuitive you have to watch out for - they're the ones who'll try to "teach" you something incredibly stupid.
The programming language Haskell is purported to have a similar effect on some unwary programmers for its extensive use of unusual programming concepts — everything from lazy evaluation, to algebraic data types, to currying — and some large amount of borrowing of concept from category theory, a branch of mathematics that even other mathematicians call general abstract nonsense. Also possibly the only programming language with a case of What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic for its use of the term "Monad" to refer to one of its central concepts, which has nothing to do with the Monad of the Pythagoreans or of Gnosticism.
- Category theory has gained quite a bit of respectability among mathematicians in recent years, partly because of its applicability to computer science (not just Haskell, but all kinds of things). The Monad in question is actually a straightforward implementation of the category-theoretic concept, so the category theorists are to blame for the nomenclature, which I believe was influenced by Leibniz. Haskell isn't so much a mind screw itself; it just points up how much of a mind screw programming is when reduced to its essence.
- If you think that Haskell is a mind screw, try using Lisp (for the record, this troper found Haskell to be fairly straightforward, as long as he didn't look at the compiler code or the runtime). The parentheses alone will drive you insane. The fact that the language only has one type (functions) will also generally throw programmers unfamiliar with non-object oriented programming into fits.
  - Haskell is straightforward - as long as you've never tried programming before. Once you get used to it it makes a lot more sense than, say, C. Most programmers are just too used to thinking about things the way the machine does them, rather than following an intuitive logical process.
- The esoteric language Homespring, on the other hand, was pretty much intentionally a mind screw. It might have been created to make a language higher level than anyone could ever need or want. The name? It stands for Hatchery Oblivion through Marshy Energy from Snowmelt Powers Rapids Insulated but Not Great. And a paradox is explicitly defined within the official language documentation, just to make sure no-one manages to fully implement it.
- Brainfuck.
  - Brainfuck is actually pretty simple. Try Malbolge instead.
Abstract algebra, topology and anything in mathematics that isn't immediately usable in some engineering/economics field (and even those aren't completely exempted). Forget everything that you claim to know about such "trivial" things as addition, multiplication, division, space (space, as in 3D space), etc. Remember, that some of the trippier aspects of quantum-mechanics are just special cases in mathematics.
- Mathematically, Quantum Theory is quite simple, really. It's in trying to make sense of it that things get ugly.
Don't forget Fractals. Taken from the right perspective, it's impossible to tell a tiny sliver of melting ice from a glacier hundreds of square miles in size. Many natural features exhibit self-similarity across a boggling number of scales.
- Similarly, such features as the length of a coastline or surface area of an object appear larger when they are measured with a finer resolution, since closer examination reveals more elaborate convolutions.
Also, the work of the french philosopher Jacques Derrida is nearly completely composed out of Mind Screws and openly admits it.
The religion of Discordianism, which either inspired Illuminatus or was inspired by it, claims to have a long-running project to undermine consensus reality known as "Operation Mindfuck". They also cheerfully admit they might be lying about it.
Biggest Mind Screw in Mathematics or a faulty proof?
"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
- i.e. for "xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ you can only find values for x, y and z that will produce a valid equation where n <= 2.
- Considering that it was never mentioned by Fermat again and that the eventual solution was 150 pages of extremely complex math involving mathematical concepts that didn't exist during Fermat's time (i.e. before basic calculus), it's almost certain that Fermat discovered his proof was wrong and never mentioned that fact, or had no proof at all, but we may never know.
Any theory, of any prominence...especially the officially sanctioned "magic bullet" one...regarding the Assassination Of President John F Kennedy.
The Banach-Tarski theorem states that any sphere can be divided into pieces and reassembled into two spheres the same size as the original. Irregular Webcomic offers an explanation in (almost) layman's terms as to how this is possible.

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