Recursive Reality - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Marvel Vs. DC crossover and the Amalgam Universe that resulted was explained by setting Marvel and DC continuities (each with their own fiction, past, present and future, parallel dimensions and alternate timelines) in discrete multiverses created by entities called "The Brothers". This troper hasn't read that story, but those guys had to exist somewhere.
- It's referred to as the "Omniverse", which supposedly contains every real and fictional universe ever.
Hasse's He Who Shrank inspired a number of similar comic book stories: Lost In The Microcosm (originally printed in the EC series Weird Science #12, 1950), The World Beyond (Strange Tales #32, 1954) and I Shrunk Away to Nothing! (Journey Into Mystery #56, 1960), the latter two published by Atlas, the predecessor to Marvel Comics.
A short Darkwing Duck comic published in an issue of Disney Adventures (titled "Cogito Ergo Something") has Launchpad holding up a dandelion and positing the existence of countless Recursive Realities to Darkwing. Sure enough, the perspective changes, and we see another world inside the dandelion seed where an alien Launchpad is presumably saying the same thing to an alien Darkwing about an alien flower. Then the perspective changes to inside the alien flower, and we see the "normal" world again (inside the inside), where Darkwing promptly blows the whole idea off as nonsense and blows the dandelion seeds to the wind.
Marvel's Microverse is actually a subversion of the Russian Doll World - originally it was treated as one of many microscopic universes, but it was retconned to Another Dimension accessed by shrinking so far that one crosses the Pym Barrier. Also, once in the Microverse, characters cannot shrink any further.
Grant Morrison's The Filth shows several microcosm-style environments (including a city contained by an enormous ship and a miniature world populated by "I-Life"). The Hand's base, The Crack, is implied to be a microscopic base created to harvest the ink leaking out of the pen Greg uses to write the note for his (probably failed) suicide. The Crack, in turn, is home to the Paperverse, the fictional reality that The Hand mines for exotic technology.
Warren Ellis's Planetary sums it up best itself:
- "This is the shape of reality. A theoretical snowflake existing in 193,833 dimensional space. The snowflake rotates. Each element of the snowflake rotates. Each rotation describes an entirely new universe. The total number of rotations are equal to the number of atoms making up the Earth. Each rotation makes a new Earth. This is the multiverse."
- Said by someone who developed a quantum computer in 1945 which uses the shape of the multiverse to compute and create situations upon their Earth to solve problems. That's right: using the entire multiverse to effect changes upon one single world within it. So fractal it hurts.
All-Star Superman shows Superman, wondering how the world will function without him, creating a miniature Earth in a miniature universe. It grows relatively quickly, and the last panel of the issue shows someone drawing a comic-book character, declaring "This time, I'll change everything..." The character is Superman - it's our world, the man doing the drawing is Joel Shuster, and we have a loop.

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The Mac Guffin that draws Edgar Bug to Earth in the first Men In Black film is a miniature galaxy. The final scene reveals that our galaxy is just like the Mac Guffin, and lies several layers down within a miniature galaxy-orb that an alien is playing marbles with.
- Men In Black II pulls a similar gag by showing a world inside a locker where K's watch is a symbol of worship, then at the end, K shows J that their world is also simply inside a larger locker (doesn't work quite as well as the first film, due to Fridge Logic).
The Thirteenth Floor has one computer-generated Earth within another computer-generated Earth.
Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, is about a playwright who, as part of his new play, creates a life-size model of New York in a warehouse filled with thousands of actors. This model contains a warehouse, which contains another life-size model of New York, which contains another warehouse...
Kaufman's earlier screenplay, Adaptation, is the result of his struggle to write an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, and is about the story of a screenwriter character named Charlie Kaufman, who struggles to write an adaptation of a novel titled The Orchid Thief. The fictional Charlie gives up, too, and writes a screenplay titled Adaptation, which is about, well, you can probably guess...
In the movie SpaceBalls, the villains actually put in a video of their own movie, and go to the scene where they are watching it, seeing an infinite number of themselves watching themselves.
Get Shorty ends with John Travolta's Chili Palmer getting Danny DeVito's actor character to portray Chili in a film of the plot the audience just watched. It's not explicitly stated, but one can infer that DeVito's character's character goes on a similar quest to get Hollywood to make a movie of his story.
The Matrix sequels hint at some metaphysical layer of unreality to the real world which Neo occupies, inasmuch as Neo's "firey truth vision" in the real world echoes his "green numbery vision" in the Matrix, but the idea isn't properly developed and God only knows what was actually intended.
- This troper interpreted it more simply as Neo being a cyborg capable of detecting the electronic signals of the Machines - he canonically has cybernetic implants, so why shouldn't the One have more than the standard plugs?

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The Arabian Nights makes this trope Older Than Print and is the Trope Maker for the metafictional version - For example, Scheherazade tells the story of The Fisherman and the Genie, where the fisherman keeps the genie from killing him by telling it The Tale of the Vizier and the Sage Duban, during which the evil vizier tells his king The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot.
- The 19th century novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa has a similar structure - Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines, or reads about a number of colorful characters in intertwining stories, in the course of his journey to Madrid.
One of the simpler examples, the Total Perspective Vortex that Zaphod confronts in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe is a model within a pocket universe within "the real thing".
Brian Aldiss' Report on Probability A presents a circular sequence of worlds. Mrs Mary is being watched by her three servants, G, S and C, who are being watched by some aliens from a parallel universe, who are being watched by scientists observing a rift in reality on the top of a hill, who are being watched by... until we come to the observers in the "outermost" reality, who turn out to be the figures in a painting in the cafe that G, S and C frequent.
In Piers Anthony's Xanth series, Princess Ida has a tiny moon the size of a baseball that orbits around her. The moon contains a whole world with its own Ida, and that Ida has a moon with a different world on it, but that moon also has an Ida, who has a moon and so on and so on and so on. Faun And Games was about exploring these moons, and the main character goes through at least six layers.
House Of Leaves is about Johnny Truant, who's editing a manuscript about Will Navidson, who may or may not be fictional in Johnny's universe. This is the most simplified description possible.
Philip K Dick's novel Ubik: The Stinger indicates that Runciter is in a deep-freeze afterlife just like the main cast was, and there's another version of Joe Chip feeding things down to him just like he fed things down to the "dead" Joe Chip. And Here We Go Again...
Toyed with in Diane Duane's The Book Of Night With Moon. There's a Prime Reality, but it certainly isn't our Earth, and there's nothing better or worse about a given layer. Those layers closer to the prime reality have rippling effects on the surrounding realities, especially those further down the line, though. Taking a chunk of the biggest Russian doll is bad. Smudging the paint on the smallest might be universe-destroying for the bigger dolls.
Greg Egan's Diaspora is a Recursive Reality, beginning with the computer network the posthuman protagonists live in and ending in a more or less endless number of non-euclidean universes.
In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, all the worlds of literature exist in a parallel multiverse called the Bookworld.
- First Among Sequels features two fictional versions of Thursday herself. If you think about it the books they come from must contain another version of the Bookworld itself.
  - And, of course, the "Outworld" - the real world that Thursday comes from - is a fictional world written by Jasper Fforde. She doesn't think so, but occasionally something happens to make her wonder.
In Jostein Gaarder's Sofie's World, Sofie and Alberto break out of their fictional world, written by Albert Knag, into the "real" world... Which is, of course, also fictional, since it was written by Jostein Gaarder. And who knows how many more layers there might be...?
One of the oldest science fiction examples is He Who Shrank by Henry Hasse, originally printed in 1936 in Amazing Stories. The protagonist is injected with a serum that causes him to shrink smaller than an atom, where he discovers that every atom is a solar system, with a nucleus for a sun and electrons that orbit like planets. He shrinks through several universes until he lands on our world, and tells his story to a writer who unsuccessfully tries to sell the story to a newspaper as nonfiction.
- Also notable because Science Marched On eleven years before the story saw print - quantum mechanics began to supersede the Bohr-Sommerfeld orbital model as early as 1925, although the Bohr model is still taught today because 1. it accurately predicts the behavior of hydrogen atoms and 2. ease of depiction (subsequent models are heavy on equations and don't actually look like anything.)
- One of the Choose Your Own Adventure books did that too, but with quarks as universes.
  I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility.
Stephen King's first Dark Tower book implies that Roland's universe is a Recursive Reality, specifically an atom in a blade of grass in our own universe. Later books muddle this somewhat.
- More specifically, the Dark Tower setting is more like a mobius strip of recursion, wherein our world simultaneously contains and is contained within Roland's universe, each being both lesser and greater than the other. The Dark Tower tends to be somewhat insanely metaphysical.
The Cyberiad: Fables for a Cybernetic Age (1967) by Stanislaw Lem has a robotic prince trapped in recursive virtual realities.
In CS Lewis' The Last Battle, the stable in Narnia has another Narnia inside it, which has another inside it — and it is observed that the further in you go, the bigger each one is.
- This idea is in the John Crowley novel Little, Big: the world of the Fae is smaller than the human world and exists in cracks and crevices of the latter. By the time a slow-motion, Dark Ages-like Gotterdammerung comes around, the Fae have abandoned their world, apparently for another, smaller one, and the few humans aware of the Fae have taken their places in the Fae world. Crowley also used the idea "the further in you go, the bigger it gets."
In the Science of Discworld novels, the wizards create a "model universe" they christen Roundworld. Roundworld is, of course, our world - which implies that eventually Roundworld will contain an author named Terry Pratchett who will write stories about a Discworld in which wizards create a Roundworld, etc.
- At the end of the first Science of Discworld, Hex actually states (er, writes) definitively that recursion has in fact occurred.
- Another Discworld example, this time from the main series. In Sourcery, the main characters have to travel across the Circle Sea, and do so in the djinn's lamp being carried by one of the characters, which they still have in their hands inside the lamp. This only works because one of them is carrying the lamp and is moving... because they are inside the lamp being carried. It stops working when the universe realises what's going on, so they are told not to think it through, leading to one of them doing exactly that...
Horton Hears A Who, in which an elephant discovers a whole world in a tiny dust speck. The TV special of it has an ending in which the main Who finds another dust speck with its own world. At one point in The Movie, Horton wonders if the universe he lives in itself could exist as a speck of dust to another universe.
Not exactly "literature", but the Australian picture book Puzzle Worlds is based on this. A gaggle of hapless airline passengers find themselves in a world inside a well in a town on a flea on a zoo animal... and various nested worlds inside that.
In a story in Bigot Hall by Steve Aylett, the protagonist and his friend go out to a small island in the grounds of his home. The first thing they find is a tiny fence, when they tread on it, and then a model of the hall, including a little lake with another, even smaller model of the hall, which has a tiny lake with tiny model...and at this point they freak out, fearing that if look up they'll see giants above them. His father finds them later, hiding under a tarpaulin and says he knew they were out out on the island when he saw that part of the fence had been flattened.

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The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Ship In A Bottle", where the Professor Moriarty created on the holodeck to outwit Data is discovered to be sentient and demands that the Enterprise crew work to transfer him into their world. Data later discovers that Moriarty appears to exist outside the holodeck because he actually exits the holodeck on an Enterprise he created within the holodeck on the "real" Enterprise. They make Moriarty think he receives what he wants by transporting him to the simulated holodeck, which runs a simulation of the Enterprise's shuttle bay that makes it seem as if he and his companion are free to explore the universe. As if that wasn't headache inducing enough, Picard wonders aloud whether the "real world" could be yet another simulation, which prompts Barclay to test his hypothesis.
- His exact words are, "All this might just be an elaborate simulation running inside a little device sitting on someone's table." After he leaves the room, Barclay nervously says, "Computer, end program." Turn off your set at exactly that moment and try not to laugh.
In Mork And Mindy, Mork once shrank down to microscopic size and ended up in an alternate world.
The Doctor Who serial "Castrovalva" features a variation on this, where the entire town (a town called Castrovalva) had been warped in on itself. One of the cliff-hangers had a hilarious line from the Fifth Doctor.
Doctor: Recursive occlusion! Someone's manipulating Castrovalva! We're caught in a space-time trap!
In the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode Normal Again Buffy is poisoned by a demon that makes her hallucinate that she's in a mental institution, and has been hallucinating her life as a Slayer in Sunnydale.
- An Or Is It ending implies that the entire Buffyverse exists solely within her mind...but the existence of Angel proves that the Buffyverse is greater than the sum of events that Buffy learns about or experiences.
- OR maybe there are two realities -one where Buffy's crazy and the other where she's the slayer- that just crossed paths at that point in the timeline before splitting again.

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In a reversal of the He Who Shrank scenario, Calvin once grew to the size of a galaxy and finds a door that leads back to his own room.
A Pearls Before Swine comic strip featured Pig meeting Atlas who held the Earth on his shoulders. Pig then points to the part of the Earth where he is, and his giant hand comes down and pokes his eye.

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The 1st Edition D&D modules I6: Ravenloft and I10: The House on Gryphon Hill, could be played either as stand-alone adventures, as an adventure and its sequal, or as interlocked adventures in which P Cs who retired for the night in one module would wake up in the other, and vice versa. This last option could be played as a recurring It Was All Just A Dream, as a recursive Dream Within A Dream, or as the result of genuine shifts between realities.

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Johnny Test has an episode similar to "He Who Shrank" - Johnny shrinks to smaller than a quark, and it turns out that each quark is an entire universe.
Futurama: In "The Farnsworth Parabox" our heroes end up owning a box that contains the universe that contains them.
- In another episode, Amy plays a game of virtual virtual skeeball— a simulation of a game of virtual skeeball.
- In yet another episode, Bender gets a software upgrade for compatibility with the model 1-X robots, which he experiences as a simulation of a situation that culminates in willingly seeking assistance from a 1-X robot.
- In yet another episode, Leela experiences the Dream Within A Dream type. She slowly realizes she's in a dream (or going insane) and keeps trying to escape only to end up in more bizarre situations. She meets Fry each time who tells her she needs to "wake up". Turns out she was in a coma, and she was hearing the real Fry (at her bedside) pleading with her to "wake up".
South Park uses the fourth type for 1 Episode. In the end, it turns out that Stan has emotional problems, so he, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny (who didn't technically die this time) go for ice cream. The End.
The short film The Killing Of An Egg, by Paul Driessen. A man hears a voice coming from the soft-boiled egg he is cracking and maliciously crushes it. He then hears knocking outside his house, and finds that he is now the one being crushed.
A Couch Gag on The Simpsons begins with a reverse Astronomic Zoom from the Simpsons' couch to outer space, revealing it to be an atom in one of Homer's hairs.

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There's a PBF strip (is the site back up yet?) in which an astronaut somehow lands on his own helmet; when he takes it off he can see a minature figure of himself standing on it holding a miniature helmet with an even smaller figure of himself standing on it holding...
- And to make his day even worse, he's balding.
- The strip◊ in question.
There's a one-off joke in El Goonish Shive suggesting that the author, Dan, is actually a fictious character created by Sarah.

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During the board game battle between the two Bonapartes in Psychonauts, you can shrink down and travel on an enlarged version of the board game. This allows you to look inside the windows of the prop houses on the board where, in one house, you can find the two Bonapartes playing the board game!
In Fallout 3, this is the basis of the Church of Atom, a cult that worships the "creative" power of nuclear bombs—they believe that every atom is an entire universe and the splitting of atoms equals the birth of whole new universes and, well, just don't let them near your nukes.
- Nobody ever explain fusion bombs to these people.
At various points throughout the Pokemon games, the player will encounter NPCs who themselves are playing Pokemon. Presumably, these games also contain NPCs playing Pokemon, and so on.
In the Sierra point-and-click game Torin's Passage, the worlds are all physically nested within each other, and accessible through warp gates called Phenocrysts. The worlds all have their own atmosphere and sun except The Null Void, so it's not clear if the worlds exist within the same dimension.

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This lithograph◊ by MC Escher depicts a man in an art gallery looking at a picture of a harbour. As the eye follows the scene clockwise the harbour expands into a city, which expands into a detail of a building containing a gallery full of Escher's drawings, which turns out to be the gallery in which the man is standing.

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The cover of the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma is a photo in which a variation on the same photo is hanging on the wall, which itself contains a variation on the photo and so on.

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The final scenes of the play Stones in His Pockets concern the main characters trying to get producers to look at a script they wrote, called "Stones in His Pockets"
And let's not forget [title of show], the musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical.
- "A, D, D, D, D, F-sharp, A... will be the first notes of our show..."

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At the amazingly fast rate we're adding tropes to this site (as well as some other stuff), this site will soon contain all the tropes that could possibly exist (and those that can't either). But if we put all the tropes that (don't) exist together, we are, in fact, describing the universe (and, indeed, all possible universes that can and cannot exist), so effectively, this site will contain all the universe within it, including this site! Which, in turn, will contain this site within it, and this site will also contain this site within it, ad infinitum. How's that for a Mind Screw?

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There are any number of magazine covers in which somebody on the cover is holding a copy of the magazine with the cover that they're in etc. Here's a recent example.
- Hell, Games Magazine made a puzzle out of it.
  - It's Games Magazine. They make puzzles out of everything.
- Numerous commercials have used a similar effect, where a photograph in one scene expands and animates, becoming the ad's next scene. Usually, this also has a photo or other image in it, which also expands and animates...
Raëlians believe that our universe is a tiny particle within the body of a living creature in a much larger universe, and that all atoms in our universe also contain smaller universes similar to the one we live in.
One of the arguments for intelligent design is that nothing can spontaneously come into existence, therefore there must be a creator. However, this leads to the counterargument that, if something or someone must have created the universe, then something or someone must have created the creator, leading to an infinite line of creators. Also compare the "Turtles All The Way Down" argument.
- That argument is actually Older Than Feudalism. Aristotle uses that argument against Plato's Theory of Forms
- According to most Mormon sources, 'God the Father' himself was once (like a) human, and lived on a planet with his own higher God to look up to. It's kind of implied that this keeps going up the ranks, and outright stated that in the afterlife, you too can become a god and make your own world, full of people. Try to guess what happens to them in the afterlife.
- The argument, also known as the "creatio ex nihilo" Argument, is rather stated that everything that has begun to exist must have been created. At the end of the line, therefore, for the argument to work, is the Ur-Creator, who is 'Himself' not-created, since 'He' has somehow *always* existed, even before the beginning of time. This is a definitional issue, and the standard definition used by most proponents of this argument. In any event, in real-world situations the only people who do NOT use this argument are steady-staters; whether you believe in the Big Bang, Quantum Handwaving, or God Made It, *something* kick-started the universe. And logically, that something must predate the universe.
  - This is the main reason why a lot of theoretical physicists these days are leaning on the circular universe explanation, or a variation thereof that doesn't require a "beginning" or an "end". The problem is that their calculations have so many interpretations that no single theory has been able to prevail over the others, meaning that that the rest of us still have to read about a Big Bang as the start of the Universe in our high-school textbooks, because these non-scientist types just can't deal with uncertainity.
  - Realistically speaking, most scientist types have trouble dealing with it as well. The human brain really just isn't equipped to deal with concepts like "infinity" and "eternity" on any level beyond the symbolic.
Have two mirrors face each other and look at what you see in them.
Recursive Reality: click it and see what happens.

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