Your Mind Makes It Real - Television Tropes & Idioms

"It was only an illusion, but the more you believed in it... the more real it became."

—Dr. Vink, Are You Afraid Of The Dark?

"I thought this wasn't real."
"Your mind makes it real."
"So if you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?"
"The body cannot live without the mind."
— Neo and Morpheus, discussing the nature of The Matrix.

You'd think that it being All Just A Dream would let you do lots of cool and risky things, since it's not real anyway, and you therefore can't get hurt.

Not so.

There's an old wives' tale which claims that if you die in a dream, you die for real. It's not exactly clear how anyone could have determined this, since the only witness would be unable to confirm it. Yet it persists, and a lot of people believe it.

So, if you're in a dream, hallucination, or VR simulation, death can be plenty lethal. By extension, if you're a hacker in a high-tech futuristic world where Cyberspace is a realistic simulation, intrusion countermeasures can kill you dead. To be fair, certain depictions of Cyberspace require users to electronically link their brains to the network, which would provide a relatively obvious threat to incautious intruders. However, even hackers who operate in worlds without such dangers may be vulnerable to seizure-inducing graphics.

Let us be very clear: there is no obvious or immediately compelling reason that dying in a dream or hallucination would actually kill you, unless you are really gullible and you live in a world where the placebo effect is much more powerful than it is in real life. Obviously, magic spells can do as they like, but the only reason that you would be actually harmed by dying in a VR simulation would be if the VR simulator was intentionally and specifically designed to murder the operator. This makes sense if it's part of a Death Trap (insofar as a death trap ever makes sense), but usually this is some commercial, publicly available system, often meant for playing games.

Often cyberspace ICE (intruder countermeasure electronics) is said to work by channeling lethal voltages into the brain of the invading hacker, but any techhead with an ounce of sense would put at least a fuse or circuit breaker, not to mention a voltage regulator, on any line connected directly to his brain. Authors who put a little more throught into the matter who don't come up with some variant of the motif of harmful sensation imply some kind of malicious out-of-band signal which triggers a nasty (usually fatal) seizure in its victims or blows up their computer (which is presumably, Made Of Explodium). Presumably most users do not know about such things, given their willingness to use an interface that could turn them into a vegetable or corpse at a moment's notice.

As an extension, perhaps to justify this trope, such systems often propose that the user's mind actually is inside the machine, having been literally downloaded out of his physical brain. Thus, destroying the machine would leave the user with a blank brain — but destroying the physical body might leave the mind intact to have a go at possessing someone else. This is, frankly, just silly; downloading doesn't work that way.

This tends to apply to video game levels that are All Just A Dream or a virtual reality simulation. You don't wake up when you die; death is still a Game Over.

When you are Talking In Your Dreams with someone else and they go to kill you — this may come into play.

See also Synchronization and Self Inflicted Hell. When your mind actually changes the physical world, it's Clap Your Hands If You Believe.

Examples

Anime

Ghost In The Shell averted and then played straight in Ghost In The Shell. There is no cyberspace, and one can consequently not die in it. However, since brains are computerized, minds can be deleted, partly on in whole. As a countermeasure, brains can be disconnected, and firewalls and counter-viruses ("Attack Barriers") are used and released to prevent deletion. However, deep syncronization with the brain of a dying person runs the risk of dying with it.
Anime subversion: In Scrapped Princess, the titular character enters a VR program to save her brother from being brainwashed, only to be promptly impaled by him when he fails to recognize her. There is a moment of shock, and then she slaps him in the face and continues to shout at him with his sword still stuck through her.
This is probably how the Tsukuyomi power of the Mangekyo Sharingan is supposed to work in Naruto. Itachi Uchiha uses it to pretty much overwhelm the victim's mind.
Get Backers is fond of this trope, and used it in the IL and Divine Design arcs.
In the .hack series, characters hit by the Data Drain attack within The World are usually sent into a coma in the real world, and are temporarily knocked unconscious at the very least.
- Some characters eventually realize that somehow their minds are taken inside the game world, experiencing it with their character's own senses instead of being at home with a headset and gamepad. Naturally, they become deeply concerned about what's going on with their physical bodies, and what happens if their characters are "killed" in this state.
Digimon Adventure: Towards the end of the second story arc, Local Boy Genius Izzy figures out the Digital World is a world made out of the data of the world's network infrastructure and hence all the human protagonists are more than likely made of data in that world. Although he tells everyone to be careful in spite of this new development it doesn't sink in with Tai, the goggle boy leader of the group, and he starts acting like a jackass under the flawed logic that he'll somehow survive regardless of what happens. It takes Izzy telling him that he would more than likely die in both worlds if he messed up to put a stop to his nonsence. Unfortunately, this happens right after a member of the team is kidnapped and they're about to cross an electrified gate to go after her. He, of course, loses his bravado right there and the kidnapper gets away more or less scot-free, leading to a short term Heroic BSOD for Tai.
Subverted somewhat in Hunter X Hunter's Greed Island arc, in that the game's titular island IS in fact a real island that the players are teleported to when they start playing the "game", rather than a virtual world.
Justified in Jojos Bizarre Adventure, where this is the power of the Stand Death 13: it pulls its victims into a dream of an amusement park and then kills them while they're trying to figure it out.
- In a later example in the same series, the trope is used to make people believe that they are snails due to subliminal messaging. Yeah, didn't make all that much sense in context either.
Half of the story arcs in Yu-Gi-Oh are about soul-sucking Virtual Reality games. The other half are about soul-sucking millennium items.
- Attemps of the writers to give a scientific explanation for this (Noah's brains were kept alive in a feeding, protective sphere, and directly connected to the VR world he existed in) were mercilessly shot down by the same writers when Noah happily walked off in Mokuba's body, without ever considering taking his brains with him.
One of the many plot points in Chaos;Head is based completely around this trope.

Comic Books

Subversion: In the Doc Samson miniseries, Tina Punnett is trapped in a VR game that's been modified to cause psychosomatic damage to the player. To get out, she runs herself through with a sword, causing lots of pain but also causing the game to end.

Film

A Nightmare On Elm Street.
The Matrix is the trope namer. Possibly justified, since the sentient AIs who are running the place have every reason to want the rebels to die for real, and probably can't have it both ways.
- However, in The Matrix Online, safeguards have apparently been put into place that when a redpill is killed in the Matrix, an emergency switch jacks them out of the Matrix, forcing them to re-enter at a hardline after some recovery time.
- The Thirteenth Floor was sneakier: You enter a virtual world by possessing one of its inhabitants, and if killed in this state, YOUR mind dies: The possessee's mind is transferred to your body instead.
In Brainstorm, a character dies while hooked up to a tape that records thoughts and experiences. Someone else "watches" it, and has the exact same heart attack, dying in the process because they didn't disable the pain generators.
- The tape also records brainwaves and some physical indicators. So playing that tape unmodified literally gave the watcher the same heart arrhythmia.
In the film Stay Alive, a group of beta testers realize that they are slowly dying off one by one in the exact same fashion that their avatars in the game they are testing die. It is later revealed that playing this game summons the ghost of a sociopathic killer who delights in killing you in the most horrendous ways possible.
Dreamscape, which includes a guy entering the president's dream in order to kill him.

Literature

Justified when used several times in CS Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a metaphor for how people "only see what they want to see" or "only believe what they want to believe." In The Magician's Nephew, said magician, Uncle Andrew, so thoroughly convinces himself animals can't talk, he really can't hear the animals talk. In The Last Battle, after being tricked along with all of Narnia into believing in a false Aslan, a band of dwarves are so determined not to be tricked again, they refuse to believe they're in Aslan's Country (Heaven), and therefore can't see it.
The Wheel Of Time books include a special dream world that can be accessed through special artifacts, training, or blind luck. Injuries and death carry over.
- In fact, it actually explains people dying in their sleep for no apparent cause as them accidentally dreaming themselves temporarily into the dream world long enough for something fatal to happen to them.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book series' fifth book, Mostly Harmless, Ford enters a virtual world in which some inhabitants carry laser guns- if they shoot you, you're dead, as you're "as dead as you think you are".
In Piers Anthony's Killobyte, two VR players are trapped in the game and the trope is justified by having one character with a weak heart which gets shocked by the mild feedback used in the game to simulate virtual pain and one character who is wasting away due to real-life diabetes.
- The feedback in question was only for dying ingame, and while it's been a while, this troper vaguely recalls the problem as having been a pacemaker. So long as he didn't die, he was fine. The second was an inversion of some sort, as the diabetic's virtual persona was being affected by the real one, the opposite of this trope's point.
In The Pendragon Adventure, the territory of Veelox has a virtual reality system called Lifelight that initially averts this trope. It is stated that if you die during a Lifelight "jump", you simply wake up from it. However, once the Reality Bug is introduced into Lifelight in an attempt to make it less perfect and addicting, this trope gets taken to absurd levels. Not only do you die in real life if you die during a jump, but any injuries you get appear on your real body, even damaging your clothing. And after the Reality Bug manifests in a jump as a giant shapeshifting monster, it is somehow able to enter physical reality by burrowing down through the ground. Bobby even admits that all this violates the laws of physics as he understands them.
In G. A. Effinger's When Gravity Fails, eight people lie down at a Virtual Reality couch, and only seven get up. One of them figured a way to make one of the others fail to go back to their body, causing their "soul" to be purged when the machine shuts down.
In William Gibson's Neuromancer, and other stories set in the same world, console cowboys interact with computing environments through virtual reality on a deep enough level that they risk brain damage or death from tangling with the wrong entities.
In Tek War, failing to hack a computer system results in real injuries ranging from brain damage to death. Fortunately, most hackers can spare the brain cells lost in minor skirmishes.
In Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, the villain is killed in a sword-fight, but it was stage fighting, and the sword is just held under his arm. However, he (and everyone else in the opera house) has been so immersed in drama and fiction for so long that it kills him because he expected it to.
- But then again, one of the explicit rules of the Discworld is that belief itself is a powerful enough force that enough people believing in something can make it true.
Averted in Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind. There's a reason why Johnny Maxwell was referred to as "The Hero With A Thousand Lives" by the inhabitants of the computer game...
A variation: In the Ben Elton novel This Other Eden a character is killed in real life while playing a VR game; inside the game his fellow player sees his dying thoughts.
In Hyperion, a cyberspace hacker's head explodes when he is exposed to a section of cyberspace inhabited by AIs, which is normally inaccessible to humans.
Subverted in a book of short mysteries This Troper read, and the subversion was key to the solution. A man, accused of murdering his (morbidly obese) wife, claims she died in her sleep, and gives a vivid description of how she had repeatedly dreamed she was being pursued by a truck. He then goes on to describe how in this night's dream, the truck caught her, and she suffered a fatal heart attack as a result. The cop has him arrested - if she did die in her sleep, how on Earth would he know what she was dreaming?
Russian cyberpunk literary classic Labyrinth of Reflections (part of a trilogy, though this troper hasn't read the others) used a massive VR world...based on DOOM. Considering the state of the nigh-post-Soviet information network in 1991, that makes some sense... The trick was a hypnosis program of sorts known as Deep that put the user in a trancelike state; the relatively limited visuals they were given were filled in by the brain's natural ability to add extra data (akin to limited side effects of sensory deprivation) and an immersive world was created. The trick was a very small, professional group of "Divers" who could bring themselves out of the trance-state at will, and interface with the system as it actually existed.
In the third Hellgate: London novel, a demon used a device which made the target relive his/her past in the dream, which will go horribly wrong and kill them, or make them go crazy.
In Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, Esk meets the Things From the Dungeon Dimension in her dreams, and they assure her they can kill her there.

Live Action TV

See also the X-Files episode "First Person Shooter", written by William Gibson. Played for comedy, like the entire episode.
Also, Sliders did an episode that ripped off Nightmare on Elm Street, but with these evil nerds that called themselves "The Dream Masters". The nerds were defeated once the characters banded together, realizing that it was all just a dream, and overpowered the nerds' minds, resulting in an inability to be harmed.
The classic episode of the Star Trek The Original Series, "Spectre of the Gun," has the landing party trapped in a surreal nightmare that recreates the Shootout at the OK Corral. Spock realizes the whole experience is an illusion that is only as real as their minds accept it to be, but, as McCoy says, only someone as emotionless as a Vulcan could have the iron-hard certainty required — even a shadow of doubt would be lethal. Spock mindmelds with the others to make them just as sure of the illusion as he is, making them invulnerable to it.
The ever present holodeck in the Star Trek universe is a bizarre combination of Your Mind Makes It Real, Tim Taylor Technology and Super Powered Robot Meter Maids. It's a holographic simulator, with enough power to make the holograms real to the point you could be actually killed by them. Safety protocols are supposed to "throttle back" the simulation so that it can't really hurt you, but these fail so often (or are easily subverted by someone) that you wonder why any sane person would use one. No real compelling reason is ever given why the technology was designed with a "kill" setting in the first place.
- In one instance ("The Thaw") an alien simulator had working safety protocols, but still turned deadly because a malicious digital entity has discovered it could terrify users into having (real) heart attacks.
  - "The Thaw" is also an exception in that it is established early in the episode that the trick Spock used in "Spectre of the Gun" wouldn't work. Actually acknowledging and explaining a difference from the rest of Star Trek Canon? How uncharacteristic of Star Trek Voyager.
- Actually, I believe the holodeck has the ability to make real items, the safety protocols are designed so that the real items don't damage you. The problem is the name holodeck implies something that uses holograms, which are just light and can't create objects, while the actual holodeck can create material objects. As seen in one movie where Picard shoots some Borg with real bullets that the holodeck created.
  - Handwaved as the specific application of forcefields in combination with holography. This is fascinating of course as it seems to imply that forcefields can penetrate other forcefields (as the Borg were well known for a form of personal shielding). Another handwave comes when they mention replicator technology. (Replicated food and such is used, safety protocols prevent replicating bullets...oops.)
  - I think the idea was that "holodeck bullets" was a completely new weapon to the Borg, and like every new weapon, it's good for bypassing their protective fields and taking down a couple drones before they fully adapt to it. Whether something is a hologram or replicated seems to depend only on whether or not the characters need to leave the holodeck with an item or not.
  - Canonically, the holodeck uses replicator technology to create objects and forcefields combined with holograms to create living things. So that tommy gun was real. As the bullets. Safety protocols simply disintegrate materials before they could do harm to anything from outside the holodeck.
A subversion from Star Trek Deep Space Nine: In the episode "Move Along Home", several of the main characters appear to die in an alien game, to the point where other characters are panicked. Just when it appears that the game is over and all of the characters trapped in the game have "died" they appear back on the ship, much to the shock and relief of the other characters. On seeing this shock, the alien says "...Of course [they survived]. It was only a game."
- The holodeck's tendency towards malfunction led to a Lamp Shading in one episode of Deep Space Nine: Worf (who had just joined the cast) laments that he misses the Enterprise, saying 'there was nothing we could not do', to which O'Brien cannily replies 'Except keep the holodecks working right'.
One episode of the original Twilight Zone, "Perchance to Dream", justified this: the character at risk of death was suffering from a severe heart condition, bad enough that having a particularly scary nightmare would give him a lethal heart attack. Unfortunately for him, his last few dreams appear specifically designed to give him said heart attack...
Near-subversion: One episode of Farscape had VR "game blobs". Dying inside of the game only returns you to the start of the level — the real problem was getting out of the game. Chiana does mention, though, that brain damage resulting from the games is not unheard of.
Stargate SG-1 episode Avatar: Teal'c gets trapped in a VR simulation that shocks him every time he dies in the game. While the simulation itself can't harm him, the continual shocks force his body to produce extra adrenaline, which eventually can kill him.
Stargate Atlantis episode "Doppelganger", Dr. Heightmeyer dies in her sleep after dreaming that she fell off a balcony onto a pier below.
- Of course there were other factors involved in that death...
Lois And Clark had an evil genius who trapped the main characters in a VR system. In the end, the system was shut down while he was still hooked up (and "downloaded in"), resulting in his mind being separated from his body, and the last shot is him screaming inside a computer screen.
- Another episode had a master hypnotist (the second master hypnotist, not the first one) whose hypnotic illusions were so real that Jimmy bumped his head on an imaginary desk and got a real life bruise. The hypnotist used this power to cause people to die from illusions.
Subverted in Eureka. During an episode of shared dreams, one Red Shirt died in reality and in the shared dream at the same time... but it turned out to be coincidencial.
In VR5, dying in VR does not literally kill you, but it leaves you brain-dead. (In fact, it's claimed that dying in something as primitive as a flight simulator will have this effect!)
Lexx: "Patches in the Sky". We're told, offhand, that "If you die in a dream, you die for real," as if it's obvious.
War of the Worlds: "Totally Real", the loser of the VR game lost his life — though this turned out to be the entire point of the simulator's design.
First Wave, a number of times.
In the Doctor Who serial "The Deadly Assassin", the Gallifreyan Matrix works like this, as death in the virtual reality overloads the person's mind. (In "The Trial of a Time Lord", on the other hand, the Doctor and his opponents physically enter the Matrix. Don't ask.)
Supernatural did this twice. The first was a demon born out of a Deadly Prank and who kept existing because people believing in him and the second was this dream-trope in a nutshell.
Season 2 of Torchwood had a villain who only existed in the altered memories of the staff. He faded from existence when they used the humorously named drug Ret Con to erase their memories of the time he'd been interacting with them (all of two days, though he himself had retconned the staff's memories to include him further back. it only required 2 days erasure to get rid of him, though.).
Both the TV series and the novel of Red Dwarf justify the trope with the virtual reality game Better Than Life, which reads the user's subconcious and creates a perfect world where all their desires are realised. In-game effects won't harm you or kill you, it's just so convincing that most players don't even realise that they're playing a game, and stay plugged in until they starve to death.
An episode of Charmed featured a man who could enter dreams, and when women rejected him he killed them there.
In a recent episode of Heroes, Matt telepathically enters Angela's mind to free her from her comatose state. Arthur uses HIS telepathy to put an image of Daphne in Matt and Angela's shared mind world thingy. This imaginary Daphne stabs Matt in the stomach. When this happens, the real world Daphne, who's right next to Matt, realizes that Matt has a stab wound right where mind-Daphne stabbed him. However, when Angela (trapped in her own mind) convinces Arthur (who personally entered her mind near the end) to free her and Matt, Matt awakes and the stab wound is gone.

Radio

Adventures In Odyssey: This seems to apply to all of Whit's virtual reality inventions, the Imagination Station being the most frequently used. At least, if a hacker got a hold of the controls and changed the adventure to put you in the crossfire of cannonballs, the threat was very real, just like threats during the adventure from, say, a ruler who would have you executed for refusing to bow to false gods.
The Doctor Who Big Finish audio adventure "The Mind's Eye" is a textbook example, with the local flora putting Erimem and Peri into a dream-like state (the Doctor isn't ultimately that affected), where they will die for real if they die in their "dream".

Tabletop Games

The RPG Shadowrun uses the "lethal biofeedback" version in its cyberspace; however, a hacker can avoid the feedback by using what's referred to as a Cold ASSIST interface (as opposed to the Hot ASSIST interface that most deckers use). However, not only does using Cold ASSIST cause severe penalties to your die rolls, but all the other deckers will think you're a giant wussy. One of the major events of the metaplot had the Matrix crashing, which resulted in people either dying or suffering irreparable brain damage when their cyberpersonas were cut off from their bodies.
Dungeons and Dragons has several illusion spells (most notably of the Shadow sub-school) that function this way, e.g. Shadow Conjuration and Shades. These spells create illusory constructs or facsimiles of spells from other schools, and have reduced effects on characters that successfully "disbelieve" them. Naturally, they always have this reduced effect on objects and creatures with low intelligence, such as constructs.
- Arguably, some Phantasm spells like Weird could also fall under this trope.

Video Games

Inverted in Psychonauts. You don't have lives, you have "astral layers", and if you run out of them, you're kicked out whatever mind you occupied back into the real world and need to restart the level. Great idea, except that it works the same in the real world, so now that doesn't make sense (Epileptic Trees say Ford Cruller did it).
The titular virtual reality program in Sam and Max: Reality 2.0, works like this, and our heroes take advantage of this to solve at least one puzzle.
In Fatal Frame/Project ZERO 3, 'The Tormented': Rei, Miku and Kei travel into the House of Sleep when they dream. If they lose all their spiritual health in the dream-world, they are confined there forever; leaving nothing in the physical world but a bunch of scorch-marks.
Central to the plot in Valve's Dystopia, where players work with each other between Meatspace (the solid world) and Headspace (Cyberspace). Headspace obstacles such as encryptions, passwords, or ICEs are physical to the player's avatar, and entire fights wage on in Headspace. If one dies in Headspace, they are yanked back to their physical bodies with disorientation and bodily damage (HP loss). It is also possible to sneak behind a jacked-in player in Meatspace and kill them. The player's avatar is told that their Meatsack (body) is taking damage, and death simply deletes the Headspace avatar in the middle of whatever it was it was doing.
Mostly averted in Fallout 3. The "Tranquility Lane" quest takes place in a virtual simulation where a Mad Scientist tortures the other inhabitants of the simulation, frequently killing and resurrecting them without serious harm to their bodies... aside from the crippling physical atrophy acquired after decades in virtual reality. However, the player can turn off the "fail safes", allowing the scientist's victims to die for real and thus be put out of their misery.
In the PC adventure game Ripper, the killer known as the 'Ripper' has the ability to kill anybody who once played the online game Ripper (the 'Ripper' is one of the original players, the protagonist has to figure out which one of the surviving players it is). The 'Ripper's ability takes the form of a 'software rewrite' of the victim's 'brain software': the hormonal and electrical layers of the human brain. When triggered (through use of a Brown Note telephone call), the fluid and air pressure within the victim increases rapidly causing them to violently explode. The protagonist has to have his own 'software' modified with an immunisation so that the 'Ripper' can't use the 'long range doohicky' any longer. (He is still vulnerable if the 'Ripper' chooses to attack him 'face to face' in the virtual world.)
- Later, the 'Ripper' calls all of the surviving characters into the virtual world, and demands the protagonist choose who they think it is. The protagonist at this point has armed himself with a single-use 'virtual weapon' in the form of a pulsing orb of energy. Each of the characters make their case to the player, and the player must use the 'virtual weapon' on the character they think is the 'Ripper', presumably killing them, as the ending narration is spoken in the past tense. Choose badly and not only have you killed an innocent person, the 'Ripper' attacks the protagonist directly and kills him as well.

Web Comic

A subversion: In a Metroid-based webcomic called Metroid: Third Derivative, Samus is "uploaded" to the Space Pirates' main computer, and put into a training simulation by a mostly-friendly pirate. Samus asks the Pirate, "And I suppose if I die here I die in the real world too?" The Pirate answers, "What? No. That's stupid and completely defeats the point of virtual training." To which she replies, "Chalk up a rare victory for common sense then."
A webcomics example from Perry Bible Fellowship◊
Parodied on xkcd (of course): If you die in Canada, you die in real life!

Western Animation

The Fairly OddParents, "Power Mad", also hinges on a similar plotline, though this is because the main character has wished himself fully into the game.
Kim Possible has an ep involving a VR system, where its malfunction resulted in extreme aggression if the players were removed without winning the game.
Subverted in Batman The Animated Series, "Perchance to Dream", as Bruce escapes from the Mad Hatter's dream world by deliberately leaping to his "death" from a tower, causing himself to wake up in the real world. However, in the exact same series, The Riddler hooked Commissioner Gordon up to a virtual reality computer program that could do such a realistic simulation of high-G loads, that Gordon's physical body would think it really was happening and suffer cardiac arrest. In the same episode, Riddler himself gets his brain fried when the computer crashes while he's still hooked to it.
- In fairness, Batman had an unfair advantage; the Mad Hatter's dream world was so perfect Bruce knew it for a dream, and one too painful to continue living in. The Riddler was Hoist By His Own Petard, since the Batman villains never expect their own devices and plots to backfire on them.
- Also, the Riddler's device was designed as an assassination tool. Mad Hatter, at least the animated version, is much less quick to kill.
Code Lyoko is an exception, sometimes; when Ulrich, Yumi, or Odd lose all their lifepoints, they are merely rematerialized into the real world. If this happens, they simply return to the material world too weak to stand up. Also, thre's a twelve hour cooldown between respawns. However, this return only works when the scanners that allow access to Lyoko are functional. Also, Aelita, who was tied to the computer for the first two seasons, would have been lost forever if she ran out of lifepoints. Unsurprisingly, she was never actually devirtualized until the tie was broken, but plenty of times after that. Also, it appears that no matter who you are, falling into any of the Bottomless Pits surrounding the areas appears to prevent you from ever coming back. On at least one occasion someone attack their own ally to prevent this from happening.
Used in the climax of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arc in which the four are trapped in a memory virtual reality program. Complete with a Shout Out delivered by Michelangelo to The Matrix.
Parodied and possibly subverted in the Futurama episode "Parasites Lost." When most of the Planet Express crew take a Fantastic Voyage through Fry's body, it isn't the actual chacters who go on the trip. The ship really did get hit with the shrink ray, but the people inside it are actually nanobots remotely controlled by the crew interacting with a VR simulation of Fry's innards. Toward the end of the episode, Leela chops the other characters to bits with an axe while they're all still in tiny robot mode. Immediately afterwards, we see the actual characters taking off their virtual reality equipment back at the office. When someone asks if everyone is okay, they cheerfully agree that they are.
Re Boot: "Game Cubes" (no relation to that other game cube) randomly come down onto Mainframe and start up a game; if a Mainframe character dies in a game, they're dead. On the other hand, considering that everyone in Mainframe is a "program" in the first place, and Re Boot plays fast and loose with how much of a metaphor the whole thing is, this may make perfect sense. Or not. Why would anybody play games on a computer that annihilates the programs? Who the hell programmed that thing?
In Teen Titans, Robin is exposed to a hallucinogen that causes him to see and fight Slade, and received real injuries as a result.

Real Life

Some Buddhist monks are said to have been capable of willing themselves to death.
Australian Aborigines, or at least certain groups of them, can become so convinced that they are going to die, often due to an incantation from an mystic or some other sign of impending death, that they end up dying for otherwise no apparent reason.
And the Placebo and Nocebo effects in general both give this trope a very strong real life basis. A famous case involved a man given experimental medicine to get rid of cancerous tumors, which worked well, until he read an article which said that the medicine was supposed to not work, which caused him to relapse. His Genre Savvy doctor, realizing what was going on, told him he was being given a special brand of the medicine, which caused his tumors to go away again... until he read another article saying that the entire line of medication was absolutely useless, upon which he had a fatal relapse. And there are dozens upon dozens of cases of people curing themselves of diseases, that doctors claimed were surely going to kill them, by sheer force of will and optimism.

Vision Quest

« Dream Tropes »

Your Worst Nightmare

Your Mind Makes It Real

« Magic And Powers »

Bad Powers Bad People

You No Take Candle

« Speculative Fiction Tropes »

Your Universe Or Mine