• Rocket Boy & Toro: "Penny For Your Thoughts" has a downplayed variation. The gift Dr Square sends to the delivery complex has wires that attach to the others and let them live out simulations of their greatest dreams, for example Grandpa Sat doing a swimming routine with some swimmers he's seen on a TV show and Rocket Boy having a rocket race. The gift doesn't have any simulated world that it sends the characters to, only creating hallucinations of whatever the dream is.

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • In the Short Trip "A Forest of All Seasons", the First Doctor, Vicki, and Steven land on a planet which, thanks to the Time Lords, is able to simulate potential futures. Steven experiences a timeline where he settles down with a redhead named Hanna, being grandparents by the time she dies, and comes to lead the planet's people. It's so realistic, he has to be jostled awake, and it affects him into "The Doctor's Gambit", which takes place during his adventures with Dodo.
  • In the Eleventh Doctor Chronicles story "Spirit of the Season", the Doctor and Valarie Lockwood become the latest prisoners of an Arkheion device designed to milk people of their emotions. Valarie is convinced she's meeting a past version of her mom, and it takes a while for her to realize it's a copy based on her memories.

• 2000 AD:
  • Anderson: Psi-Division: Hyven is a virtual reality system in Mega City One that millions of people use on a regular basis, some of them permanently logged in (or at least until their credits run out). It’s actually controlled by the Justice Department to cut down on crime in the city.
  • Tales of Telguuth: A king finds a meteorite which contains a scarab-like creature that attaches itself to his head. The creature gives him new tactical insights so that the king can conquer the rest of the world until he finally grows old. On his deathbed, the scarab tells him that it was all a dream and the king has been asleep for days so that it could implant its offspring into him. It's their "children" that will truly conquer the world.
• American Born Chinese: When Jin was a young boy, he had a conversation with the wife of an herbalist his mother visited often, who told him that he could be anything he wishes as long as he's willing to forfeit his soul. In the present day, after a bad encounter with a popular (white) boy leads to him losing all of his friends, he dreams of the herbalist's wife, who tells him that he's met these requirements and transforms him into what he wants to be: a white boy named Danny. He lived in this form for several years, doing his best to resist the disguised Monkey King's attempts to pull him out of the metaphorical machine (though his disguised form being an Ethnic Scrappy named Chin-Kee may have something to do it), until a physical fight between the two forces the Monkey King to reveal who he truly his. He then finally convinces Jin to regain his true form and mend his broken relationships.
• Aquaman (2016) Annual #1 had Aquaman and Mera fall victim to the Black Mercy, which gave them an ideal city-state where they had a son named Tom and coexisted peacefully with the surface. When Murk broke them out of the illusion, they spent a day mourning the son they never had.
• The Atom: Ryan Choi has a run-in with a variant Black Mercy in The All New Atom. It gives him everything he's ever dreamed of — but not the things he truly wants, which are back in reality.
• Avengers Standoff had one perpetuated by SHIELD to detain supervillains called Pleasant Hill, where a Cosmic Cube rewrote them as normal citizens in an ideal American town. Once the deception was uncovered, the villains retaliated.
• Batman:
  • This is the premise of the Bat Family Crossover Gothtopia, with the Lotus Eater Machine affecting everyone in Gotham City except the group of villains responsible, led by the Scarecrow. In Gothtopia, there is virtually no crime, Oswald Cobblepot is mayor, the Joker is just the logo of an ice cream company, and a white-clad Batman leads an organization of brightly dressed heroes, including Selina Kyle in red-and-green as Catbird. Bruce's first indication that something isn't right is an increase in the number of suicides, as more and more people living "perfect lives" succumb to despair without ever realizing why they're despairing. It's interesting to note how different some of the reactions are to the other examples; Selina, in particular, realizes that while she wasn't completely happy as Catbird (and also free of her cat obsession), she's ambivalent whether being released from it was a good thing, even after knowing it was a lie.
  • In the Crisis Crossover DC K.O., the heroes enter a Tournament Arc controlled by Darkseid's Omega Force in the hopes of gaining enough power to oppose him. In the Knightfight Spin-Off, after Bruce gets eliminated he tries to leave early but the Omega punishes him for cheating it by putting him in a Psychological Torment Zone where he's forced to fight his former Robins in fake Bad Futures. After he defies it again by talking his way out of the fights, it decides to Kick the Dog by trapping him in a fake utopian future where Damian fixed Gotham with Bruce and Damian both knowing he'd eventually have to leave. After Bruce passes the Omega's Secret Test of Character and returns to the tournament, he gives a Badass Boast to Superman that he fought his way out of both Heaven and Hell.
  • In the Batman: Urban Legends story Red Hood: Cheer, Cheer doses both Red Hood and Batman with a gas that makes them feel happiness and see hallucinations of what they most want. Red Hood sees Bruce Wayne put aside his mask and embrace him as a father. Batman has a similar fantasy...except before he puts aside his mask, Red Hood throws the Joker at his feet so Batman can choke him to death with his bare hands.
• In one issue of The Books of Magic, Auberon of the Fay gets dared/guilt-tripped into putting his soul inside a globe supposedly containing his own Paradise. Once he does so he's both trapped and mindwiped of that fact, while his zombie-like body is put to menial labour.
• Defenders: Beyond: In issue #4 the non-team wind up prisoners of Glorian, presently deceased student of the Shaper of Worlds, who sticks them in a world made out of their desires. Adam Brashear went public as a black superhero in the sixties and then ran for president, Tigra is an adored A-List superhero, leader of the Avengers and worthy of wielding Mjolnir, Taaia is the herald for her son, Galactus the Lifebringer, and America has her original powers and family back together. Then the Eternity Mask America is wearing starts fighting back, and everyone realizes how hollow and pointless Glorian's illusions are.
• A number of Druuna comics deal with human characters being trapped in a lifelike simulation so real that at some point they forgot that they were even in one to begin with. For example, Druuna is placed inside an endless dream of her old ruined city by the mind of the ship's former captain for centuries after he put her body into stasis until another ship would pick up his distress signal.
• Marvel's Earth X traps an aged Peter Parker in an illusory world in which, among other things, he is married to Gwen Stacy and has a son (rather than his real-world daughter, who is this reality's Venom — and who enters this world and snaps her dad out of it).
• In Empowered, Anglerfish and his son both have the power to hypnotize the people who look into their head lures into seeing their greatest desires.
• Doctor Doom once trapped the Fantastic Four into such a device: They thought they were living idyllic normal lives in a place called Liddleville (though Reed was tormented by Doom himself in the guise of professor Victor Vaughn), when in fact their minds had been transferred into miniature clones of themselves, and the town was an intricate scale model.
• In Gold Digger (Antarctic Press), Gina Diggers gets trapped in the Abliss, which bounces her around from deepest desire to deepest desire. After she escapes she runs into two former supervillains that spent so long in the Abliss that they thoroughly burnt out on their evil dreams and have to watch television to stave off suicidal boredom. Then they watch Diggers' thoughts which question the point of achieving your goals without challenge, realize what they miss is the feeling of accomplishment, and go straight back to supervillain mode.
• Green Lantern: In Green Lantern (2005) #7, Green Lantern and Green Arrow are ensnared by a single Black Mercy by Mongul's son, also named Mongul; Lantern's dominant personality made the ideal world they shared too ideal for the jaded Green Arrow, and they manage to escape. Turns out that Black Mercys are Well Intentioned Extremists who do this in order to end pain and fear, and later, Mother Mercy joins the Green Lantern Corps.
• In issue #37 of Invader Zim (Oni), Zim sticks Dib in a simulated world where Zim is Dib's brother. When Dib eventually realizes what's going on (thanks to seeing several design flaws brought about by Zim's poor research of life on Earth) and escapes, Zim reveals that he was using Dib as a test subject for a plan to stick all humans in such a state and use them as batteries. As for why he made himself and Dib related in the scenario? He honestly thought that anyone would be thrilled to have him as a brother.
• Iron Man 2020 (Event) ends with Tony Stark forced to trap his adopted brother Arno Stark in an elaborate virtual environment to stop Arno basically brainwashing the human race. Arno thinks he's preparing Earth to defend itself against an Extinction Entity that has destroyed other civilisations, but Tony knows that this is just a delusional side-effect of Arno's disease. However, since Arno's illness will kill him in less than a year and he's about to trigger a mass brainwashing intended to help him coordinate Earth's resources against the Entity, Tony decides that putting Arno in an artificial environment is the best way to treat him without being cruel.
• In JLA (1997), the Key uses a programmable "psycho-virus" to put each of the seven core members of the League in an individual designed hallucination. He plans on exploiting their inevitable escape from such a situation to harness the psychic energy generated to empower himself for interdimensional travel.
• In Justice League Incarnate, Barry Allen has been sent to one in Universe-2; a Silver Age style world where the Flash Family all get along perfectly, and everything gets resolved by the end of the issue. The Dark Crisis: Worlds Without a Justice League one-shots reveal that the rest of the League are in similar worlds; for instance, Superman is in one where he gets to see Jon grow up.
• The Incredible Hulk:
  • In an attempt to take control of his body and manifest in the real world, the Devil Hulk once traps Bruce Banner in a perfect fantasy land that exists only in his head. Bruce is married to Betty, has kids and is best friends with his father and General Ross.
  • During Fall of the Hulks, the Intelligencia traps Bruce — and the other seven smartest men in the world — in a Lotus-Eater Machine in order to drain their intellects. Not all that surprisingly, Bruce is married to Betty, has kids, and has killed the Hulk.
• The comic book continuation of The Incredibles 1 has Evil Redhead Mezmerella capable of inducing this effect with her hypnotic powers.
• Steve Moore (no relation to Alan Moore) used this trope in his Jonni Future stories.
  • One of Jonni's enemies is the Empress of the End, who trades people all their Earthly possessions to experience a (fatal) experience of their heart's greatest desire. A surprising number of people willingly make this trade, but when the Empress kidnaps Jonni's sidekick, Jermaal Van Pavane the Paraman and forcibly submits him to the machine, she has to rescue him. We get a small peek at what his greatest desire is, by the way; the screen outside his cell shows he’s having an, ah, amorous encounter with Jonni; Later on, she lies when he nervously asks if she saw that.
  • In another Jonni Future story, she has to be rescued from a planet which causes her to hallucinate her greatest desire. Which is apparently being swarmed by lots of naked versions of herself. She openly mourns that she couldn’t preserve the experience somehow, return to it whenever she pleased — but isn’t that the nature of dreams?
• Also by Alan Moore, Dark Age Volume 2 of Marvelman (aka Miracleman) recasts the character's Silver Age adventures as Lotus Eater Machine dreams invented to keep him and his fellow post-humans in line while they were being studied and programmed.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): This is Nightmare Rarity's ability. She tries to use it on Spike, trapping him in an ideal world where Rarity asks him to marry her and together rule as Queen and King. It doesn't work since dream!Rarity wants him to forget about their friends and doesn't know what the Fire Ruby means to him.
• In RoboCop Versus The Terminator this is Skynet's last line of defense against the electronic ghost of Alex Murphy. He's well aware that it's an illusion, a trap, and tells himself that he'll fight it... in a moment.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • An early issue of Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) has Robotnik trapping the Freedom Fighters in such a machine, where on top of the traditional ideal world, it actually changed to meet its inhabitants' wishes. After figuring it out, Sonic pushes the machine's "user-friendly" nature to its limit, takes control of Robotnik's war machines (currently on their way to raze Knothole), and forces Robotnik to let them go by threatening to turn them on Robotropolis.
  • An early issue of Sonic the Comic's "Ruled By Robotnik" arc opens with Sonic waking up to find out that he was a human boy with no real power to speak of. It takes his mother coming in and forcing him to eat an egg for breakfast for him to realize he's trapped in a simulation and break free.
• In the Star Trek Mirror Universe comics, Lotus eater machines are the preferred method of torture for the empire. The rebels and scientists think they are safe and helping to free the universe with secrets and inventions explained only to their closest family members... while in reality they are in a small room in a very heavily guarded prison.
• Superman:
  • The story by Cary Bates in Action Comics # 492 (Feb 1979) in which Superman is caught in an "odd-shaped swirl of crimson energy" and has illusions of a future life in which he marries Lana Lang and has children, which turn out to be implanted by Phantom Zone villains to distract him while the crimson energy kills him.
  • In For the Man Who Has Everything, the Black Mercy plant gives the victim hallucinations of where their greatest dream comes true — in Superman's case, that he's still on a Krypton that was never destroyed, and has a wife and children. Little by little, though, the dream Krypton becomes a heartbreaking nightmare of the planet sliding into a self-destructing mayhem, spurred by Superman's embittered father. After it was removed from Superman, it fell on Batman, and he also experienced his greatest fantasy — that his parents were not murdered. After Superman is freed from the dream, he proceeds to unleash the mother of all Unstoppable Rages upon Mongul, who mentions that he used the flower specifically to create a prison that Superman could not escape without giving up his greatest desire. He openly compares it to being like tearing one's own arm off. The Black Mercy plant is eventually used on Mongul to defeat him, who dreams that he kills all the heroes and takes over the universe. The Black Mercy has continued to show up now and then in DC stories when this trope is needed.
  • When the Symbioship Strikes!: During her sixty-year-long trip to Earth, baby Kara's ship's computer put her in a meticulously-crafted artificial simulation where she grew up, spent time with her parents, went to school, made friends, dated boys, graduated, reached maturity...until it reached Earth and Kara woke up. Though, the Symbioship doesn't understand its mission has finalized, so it attempts to capture to Kara and put her in its dreamworld again.
  • The Legionnaires Who Never Were: Subverted. After going back from a mission, Saturn Girl and Princess Projectra find out that neither of their teammates is able to recognize them, all trace of their existence has been wiped out, their powers have abruptly vanished, there are two male versions of themselves parading around the base, and they are locked up because their own friends believe them to be spies. Projectra points out as, as fighting the latest villain, they had been struck by a strange energy weapon, so maybe they have been projected into a lifelike illusionary world? Later, though, it's revealed that the Legion was gaslighting Projectra as part of a secret test of character.
• Shows up in two episodes of Suske en Wiske; both in De Tartaarse Helm and De Schat van Beersel they get placed into an illusionary world by Mr. Priem through hypnosis. However, Mr. Priem is not their enemy; the first time he did it as a reward for helping him and the second time it was in a last-ditch attempt to get out of a trap, and in both cases they wake up when the story in the illusionary world has reached its conclusion.
• In Issue 16 of Titans (1999), the Fab Five Titans (Troia, Arsenal, Tempest, Nightwing, and Flash) are trapped in Limbo by the Gargoyle. He places the five adults in fake versions of their childhoods (Dick with the circus, Donna on Paradise Island, etc.) and they only have a slight sense that something is wrong. But the first one to actually break the illusion is Arsenal. The Gargoyle tried to create a version of Roy's life if his father hadn't died in Arizona, but what the Gargoyle couldn't do is create a version of Roy's Missing Mom. All Roy had to do was ask his father if "Mom will be home" and Roy Sr. couldn't come up with something to say. This is because Roy's mother is so fundamentally missing from his life that all he knows is that he had a mom, therefore the Gargoyle couldn't fool him. What's especially telling about this is that, all throughout the issue in Gargoyle's Limbo, Roy is the only one who is briefly able to turn back into an adult.
• In a ploy to steal their magical powers, some demons put Traci 13, Zachary Zatara, and Black Alice in a world where: Traci is uncontested ruler of the world, Zatara's lover is still alive and they are married with children, and Black Alice's mother is still alive. Traci rejects the fantasy because her father is dead. Zatara rejects it because he feels it is shaming the memory of his lover. Unfortunately, Black Alice refuses to give up her mother and attacks them. Alice's mother eventually tells her that she needs to do the right thing and restore the world to the way it was.
• In The Transformers (Marvel), Rapture aka Katrina Vesotsky, is a human with the ability to ensnare other's minds into fantasies. It works on both humans and transformers. She was even able to ensnare Unicron... for about thirty seconds before the Planet Eater snapped out of it.
• A story arc of The Trigan Empire features little black boxes with attached wires which, when plugged to the temples, cause the user to experience his or her favorite fantasy in lurid detail. They are a dangerous addiction.
• Ultimate X-Men (2001): Multiple Man is a villain, but the real and original one is actually trapped in a house at the Savage Land where Lorelei makes him think she's his mom and he's still a teenager. Wolverine can't snap him out of it, not even by killing Lorelei, so he has to kill him to stop the terrorist crimes Multiple Man was committing all around the world.
• House of M: The Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, had a nervous breakdown over the deaths of her children and, nudged by Quicksilver, creates an alternate reality, where mutants were the dominant race and all the heroes had their hearts' desires granted (Spider-Man was married to Gwen Stacy with Uncle Ben alive, the X-Men were able to have normal jobs in a world free of persecution and bigotry, etc). Unfortunately, Wolverine's heart's desire was to remember every day of his life: this meant that he still remembered the original timeline, allowing him to realise that the world was fake, and set out to try to revert it. Unlike most examples, the House of M universe was as real as the one it replaced, but it served the same purpose — to keep the heroes pacified.
• A rather nasty one was inflicted on Pixie. Some demons used their magic to make her own illusory powers trick her and her friends. She was essentially the power source for her own Lotus Eater Machine.
• Smut Peddler Presents: My Monster Girlfriend: It's implied that most of the humans trapped in the perimeter in "Flesh Hive" are trapped mentally in a dream-state, the supernatural elements that have taken root feeding on their carnal desires.
• X-Men: In the Annual #11, some cosmic villain named Horde traps the team in one of these. One by one the X-men are seduced by their dream-visions, except for Longshot (who gets absorbed by the place because his childlike innocence had nothing to corrupt) Psylocke (who tried to use her dream vision as a way to fight Horde and failed), and Wolverine, who had enough willpower to resist his own vision and the temptation of godhood, and broke everyone out of there.
• XXXenophile: One story featured a villain trapping Orgasm Lass in a Wet Dreamtime Generator, bouncing her between fantasy lovers. She escapes by overloading the device... come on, this is XXXenophile, you know how she did it.
• Zenith's Chimera is a living Lotus Eater Machine, an attempted Super-Soldier that self-evolved into a pocket universe, containing any reality anyone can imagine. This turns out to be useful when there are a bunch of insane Reality Warper former-superheroes-gone-bad to dispose of. No, this was not by Alan Moore (it was Grant Morrison).

Crossovers

• A Different Kind of Truth: Shadow Mitsuo traps Johnny in one at the end of Chapter 52 and lasts all the way up to Chapter 54, meant to push him over the Despair Event Horizon. It almost worked until Johnny realized something was wrong and escapes.
• Both Syllables: One fan contribution to the series is a Whole-Plot Reference to For the Man Who Has Everything, with Zim as Superman, Zurg as Mongul, and Dib, Lilo, XR, MALIK, and Kila as Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman.
• Child of the Storm: In Ghosts of the Past, Dream of the Endless shows the ability to lock people in nightmarish versions of this when he's feeling particularly vindictive, ones so powerful that they physically affect the bodies of those that are locked in them, as when avenging Harry's treatment by the Red Room (one of the victims was described as looking like 'Gollum's uglier sister' afterwards, and that was just the start). It's horrifying enough that Loki feels he can't add anything to make it worse.
• The First Saniwa: Hizamaru's team are trapped in a kekkai that has this effect, making them think they're home in the Citadel rather than still on a mission as they actually are.
• Magical Pony Lyrical Twilight: The Book of Darkness traps Fate in one, although she is not convinced that it is reality.
• One of Illudere's best spells in Manehattan's Lone Guardian, the "Luminous Cruelty", traps the target in one of these. When Leviathan is caught in it, it proves potent enough that despite her noticing a few things off about it, she dismisses them entirely and stays in the illusionary world until she "dies" of system failure—and thus has her self-confidence shattered when she returns to reality. Ultimately, the spell is what Illudere's final fate amounts to.
• In Reunion, the Doctor and Seo end up in a Gallifrey where they are both respected, something that is obviously an illusion since real Time Lords wouldn't treat them that way. It turns out to be a Gilded Cage dimension controlled by "Romana" to fulfill the Grace's plan to contain Seo.
• Starlight Series: Jumba initially assumes the Serenity's sickbay is an illusion generated by the Borg to ease the process of assimilation.
• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: Chapter 33 of The Girl Who Could Knock Out the Hulk sees Kara being subjected to the Black Mercy by Doom, sticking her in a constructed reality where Krypton transported its population via an artificially constructed new planet to Earth's solar system, where Kara is now an ambassador and happily married to Lena. The illusion starts to break down when Doom projects a portion of his subconscious into Kara's in order to communicate with and test her, and she ultimately chooses to reject it.
• Ultimate Re-Imaginings: All of the Real World was created to be Joey's perfect little world in an attempt to keep him out of the actual real world. It backfires because he just can't let himself go.

Ah! My Goddess

• Trial by Tenderness: This is implied at several points to be happening to Cevn, although given the nature of some events, we're never entirely sure if its All Just a Dream or not.

Bleach

• Orihime: Szael traps Ishida in one of these during the Hueco Mundo arc where he is killed over and over again, except for the last hallucination, where he is living with Orihime and his child by her in what is hinted to be a vision of the future, or one possible future.

A Certain Magical Index

• A Perfect World has the heroes Touma Kamijou, Accelerator, and Shiage Hamazura wake up to find the world at peace and themselves living happily with their respective Unwanted Harems. Their memories have been altered so they believe it has always been this way, but they slowly begin to notice inconsistencies, like when Mugino cannot remember the date of her and Shiage's anniversary. The fic seems to be cancelled, but the author released an outline revealing that Aleister Crowley trapped the heroes and their girls in this illusion to get them out of his way, and that it was slowly killing them. Everybody manages to break free, but Touma is forced to let Maria Kumokawa go, as unlike the other girls, she had been an illusion created by Crowley all along. Before the fake world is destroyed and she disappears, she admits that she truly loved Touma.

Cardcaptor Sakura

• Chaos Card Captor Sakura: In the second chapter, Sakura and Kero are trapped in a inverse Lotus Eater Machine in the form of the Nightmare Card, which plays out extreme forms of Sakura's insecurities and feeds off of them.

Danganronpa

• Despair's Last Resort: The entirety of Paradise Resort is one, serving a similar purpose to the second game's Jabberwock Island.

Danny Phantom

• Facing the Future Series: In Hearts and Minds, Nocturne traps Danny and Sam in a dream world where their memories of each other have been sealed away, with them in danger of never waking up.

The DCU

• A Force of Four, Kara's mind lived in a simulation for the duration of her decade-long trip to Earth, in order to avoid going mad from the monotony of the trip. In the simulation, she went to school and met people based on real ones her parents knew on Krypton, had adventures, fell in love several times... and then found out it was all a simulation.
• Inviolate: Lex Luthor goes through sixteen subjective years of increasingly 'perfect' realities as his mind pushes itself to its limits trying to make him escape.

Die Anstalt

• A Posse Ad Esse: Dr Wood perfects a Your Mind Makes It Real-style technique and wants to use it to create an inverse Lotus Eater Machine.

Digimon:

• The Teacher of All Things: MaloMyotismon uses his Illusion Mist attack to trap the Digidestined in their own personal fantasies.
• Zero 2: A Revision: Belialmyotismon employes a inverse Lotus Eater Machine by delivering the Digidestined's own fears, which, as Shaun noted, is the complete opposite of Malomyotismon. Shaun eventually snaps them out of it.

Doctor Who

• The Road to Shalka: The Master's highly convoluted plan in The End of the World includes trapping the Doctor's companion in one of these. It Makes Sense in Context (at least for the guy who gets dizzy if he tries to walk in a straight line).

Harry Potter

• Arc of Sacrifices: Harry takes a Dark curse featuring this. Unlike some other incarnations of the trope, the perfect world in the curse doesn't turn into a nightmare, but it also takes an outside influence with knowledge of the Dark Arts (in this case Lucius Malfoy) to convince him to break the dream world.
• The Clueless Groom: Harry subjects Voldemort and his remaining followers to Draught of Living Death and a daydream charm which makes them believe that they're awake and ruling the world.
• Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin: Dumbledore reveals that the original purpose of the Mirror of Erised was to harmlessly trap a possessing spirit in one of these, leaving the victim free and the ghost stuck in the mirror until all its desires had been imaginarily fulfilled, at which point it winked out of existence.
• Shatter: The Mirror of Erised sends Harry into a mental fantasy world where his parents and their friends are all alive and well. Snape has to use Legilimency to snap him out of it.
• You Will Find Them: Voldemort traps Harry in a no-magic scenario where his relatives actually care about him for almost seven weeks.

Hetalia: Axis Powers

• A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes has Denmark being ensnared by a Black Mercy and dreaming he is living in a perfect world. Unfortunately for him, as the rest of the Nordics and other countries try to wake him up, his perfect world descends into a horrifying nightmare, as the Black Mercy is slowly draining his life at the same time.

iCarly

• iSwear is based on the premise that Carly is either in one of these, Unstuck in Time, or a mix of both.

Invader Zim

• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: In the climax of Season 1, Norlock traps all the other characters in one of these in order to keep them out of the way while he goes after Project Domination. It almost works, except Dib's is too much like the canon example Zim put him in, which Dib realizes, and causes him to start noticing all the things that make no sense. This wakes him up, allowing him to free the others.
• Paradise?: Zim traps Gaz in a virtual simulation of a world where Dib doesn't exist, meaning there's no one there to annoy her or interrupt her eating of pizza or playing of video games. Then Zim turns it into an Ironic Hell, where all the food she eats tastes like pizza as well and every game is ridiculously easy to win. The sheer monotony of this soon drives Gaz crazy.

Jackie Chan Adventures

• Ages of Shadow: Drago traps Jade in a double-layered one of these. In the first dream world, she's still a child and having a series of never-ending adventures just like the ones she had in canon. Fortunately her son Jack manages to enter the dream and point out all the things that make no sense, like the long hair Jade has which she didn't in real life, and how no one's aging no matter how much time passes. Realizing this breaks the dream but sticks Jade in the next one (while kicking Jack out), which is a world where the Magus King never enacted the Evil Plan that inadvertently led to Jade's fall. Here, she's still living a normal life, and even has a baby with Paco. Then her subconscious manifests as Jackie to help her realize that it's all a dream, by bringing the Talismans (which should be stuck in the Netherworld) and, most importantly, asking Jade her baby's name, which she doesn't know. This helps her accept the world's a fake, and she then has to fight her way past the illusions of all her loved ones in order to reach the Section 13 Vault, where her Yade Khan body is; she has to let it eat her, symbolically letting go of her Jade Chan identity, in order to fully wake up.
• Shadows Awakening: The Mirror of Despair traps Tohru in an inverse Lotus Eater Machine in a possible Bad Future where Jade does a Face–Heel Turn after defeating Wong and killed Jackie, Uncle and Viper, and then took over the world.

Kemono Friends

• Arai-san Mansion: The cinema is designed in a way to make the viewer not want to leave. The way to avoid that is having someone to accompany you who has different tastes from you, hence the "don't go alone" sign.

Kim Possible

• A Period of Silence: The PH Device traps you in another world and uses your deepest fears against you, to the point where one character even dies of a heart attack after being exposed to it. Even though it's never spelled out in the story, according to Word of God PH stands for "Personal Hell".

Kirby

• The Dream Land Story: Dark Matter possesses him and puts him into a hellish dreamlike state, akin to a inverse Lotus Eater Machine.
• Warrior's Secret: Nightmare traps Meta Knight in one of these, and it's where the final battle takes place.

The Legend of Zelda

• In The Stuff of Legends, the big plot twist is that Link's mundane life is an illusion brought on by his reluctance to fight, which was so strong a wish it ensnared everyone else.

Life SMP

• carbon monoxide: One of the things the Watchers offer Scott after his victory in Last Life is being reunited with his love interest (and husband in the previous season), Jimmy, and protection from further machinations for both of them, but he thinks it's Too Good to Be True — it's either not real (i.e. this trope) or is only going to end in heartbreak regardless, and declines as a result.
  And for a moment, Scott wanted to reach forward, to take this ever-shifting Jimmy into his arms… but it wasn't real. And even if it was, that would only end in heartbreak. Scott lived enough lifetimes with Jimmy to know that.

MapleStory

• Of the Dragon, of the Stars: The Clocktower guardians' have a Lotus Eater clock, which Akera actually manages to overpower and defeat while inside it.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Truth and Consequences: When Marinette enters her Sancturary in hopes of claiming the true power of the Ladybug Earrings, she finds herself inside a dream world where she and Adrien are Happily Married with three kids.

Mob Psycho 100:

• Surrender on No Sides has Mob's little brother Ritsu trapped for a year in a mind world where he is tormented every single day and in every single way possible. This world is worse than the one that Mob was originally trapped in canonically and leaves Ritsu with severe trauma and a heroin addiction.

My-HiME

• Perfection Is Overrated: Natsuki gets trapped inside Yukariko's Lotus-Eater Machine, and has an experience in which her parents are still alive and living with her, while she has also met all her friends at Fuuka Academy.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• A Simple Question, A Terrible Truth: It turns out that the entirety of Twilight Sparkles' life since the fateful Summer Sun Celebration has been a constant endless dream created by Nightmare Moon: when Nightmare Moon banished Celestia into the Sun; it also caused the Sun to be deleted with her, which resulted in a now sunless world that slowly started to freeze over and life to slowly start freezing to death even in the hidden chambers Nightmare Moon had created to try saving them. Twilight had been forced to constantly relive her false life over-and-over again, because she couldn't bear to handle the truth whenever Nightmare Moon is inevitably forced to let Twilight out of her pod.
• Asylum (Daemon of Decay): The stork's main question is whether the cartoon is a delusion of Twilight's or whether she's currently stuck in a dream created by some villain. Both sides have their hints.
• Austraeoh: Shell is disgusted when he finds out that Nightshade abducted a bunch of unicorn foals, chopped off their horns, and forced then into a Lotus Eater Machine.
• Avatar: The Last Alicorn: Using dark magic (presumably) and the corruption of the elements of harmony, the main characters are trapped in this while their physical bodies are trapped in stone. It usually takes them realizing something about their element to break out, or realizing where there's A Glitch in the Matrix.
  • Twilight's hell is where she lost all her true friends, withdrawing into herself and isolation in response.
  • Fluttershy's hell is where she's surrounded by darkness, and called a savior, but as the element of kindness, has nobody and nothing to be truly kind to.
  • Rainbow Dash's hell was where she was living in luxury with no need to help anymore, which would be a kind of kindness, but her warrior spirit chafed under this, and she broke out from it by realizing that her friends weren't being truly loyal to her by "shoving her aside".
  • Applejack's hell was where she went home to a peaceful farm with all her family again, but began down the path of dishonesty when she had her own Tragic Mistake in accidentally killing an anti-water nation farm inspector.
  • Pinkie Pie's hell was actually a Shout-Out to fake out episodes where the show before it was All Just a Dream like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Normal Again". Making all her silly knowledge and Shout-Out and Breaking the Fourth Wall seem like just things she knew before she got lost in her fantasies. Further, the entire world she was put in lacks color, joy and fun. And anyone new thinks she killed her sister so are afraid or angry and dismissive of her.
  • Rarity's hell is a world where the water nation never went to war. Her mother isn't a warmonger, her father isn't dead, her sister never went insane, and she was never exiled or hurt. Thus, in order to escape it, Rarity would have to give up that.
• Believing Stories: Celestia wakes up as a human in an asylum; she initially believes that it is Discord's doing.
• Black Queen, Red King: Changeling venom paralyses its victims and forces them to hallucinate visions of the people they love, often erotic visions, all the while digesting them.
• The Cadanceverse: Nightmare Moon's final trap to stop anypony from reaching the Elements is one of these. It almost works, too, trapping five of the Musical 6 in their own personal paradises (Octavia gets a life of solitude to perfect her craft; Medley owns a prosperous business; Lyra marries Bonbon; Bluenote indulges her hedonistic desires and loafs about; Vinyl is the most famous DJ in Equestria and performs at all kinds of epic concerts). Only Fluttershy can resist, because she is too focused on caring for others to allow herself to rest in her own paradise.
• Chronomistress: Out of Time: Queen Chrysalis traps ponies in eternal, blissful hallucinations about being together with their love interest, so that she and her hive may feed on the victims's emotions.
• Hard Reset (Eakin): The Regalia pull this on Twilight in You Can Fight Fate. They think of it as their reward to her, and the others, for coming pretty close to what they think is a perfect world.
• Friendship is Optimal presents an entire universe turning into this, as an AI thought experiment. Equestria Online is created to satisfy values through friendship and ponies, by an AI powerful enough to reverse-engineer the entire human mind. Even when it involves a video game console, specifically targeted NPCs and encounters make it so much more fulfilling than life that the game has to turn itself off so the players don't harm their own health. Once virtual reality and brain uploading are involved, players are placed in an environment where the local rules of the universe care about them, individually, having a good time. By the way, that "entire universe turned into" is literal. The AI turns several galaxies into computronium. Needless to say, this example has no escape clause.
• The Journey of Graves: In the 8th story, Graves experiences this when he jumped in front of a crossbow bolt's line of fire to protect Princess Celesta. It turned out that the shot was loaded with a powerful drug called "Heart's Desire".
• Life in Manehattan: The first trial to reach the Soluna Stone in Daring Do and the Soluna Stone is to pass a field of Heart's Desire, the pollen of which has this affect — Twilight becomes Celestia's right-hoof mare, Trixie's act gets world renown, and Spike finds a whole cavern of gems all for himself. Honey snaps them out of it by pointing out that to achieve these dreams as presented in the illusions, they'd have to abandon their friends, which they can't bring themselves to do.
• The Nuptialverse:
  • In Direction, the Changelings use illusions to trap the Mane Six in one when they caught in the llama temple, based on their greatest desires, but since Pinkie has everything in her life that she could want, it doesn't work on her and she's able to free the others.
  • Scootaloo stumbles into a mild version when the Crusaders end up separated in the abandoned castle — she ends up wandering a seemingly endless maze of identical hallways, only to realize something's wrong, and discovering that she's actually in an old dungeon cell with an illusion on it.
• The Party Never Ended: Pinkie gets trapped in one, and Twilight almost falls victim while trying to get her out.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: During the final arc, the Nightmare traps five of the six Bearers in a mental illusion of happiness. Night Blade, however, No Sells it because he feels that he doesn't deserve happiness — he believes he deserves Tartarus for his nearly killing Page earlier. The others also break out due to other key mistakes the Nightmare made in their own illusions.
• Pony POV Series: Fluttershy's Superpowered Evil Side, Princess Gaia, puts ponies under a spell, making them experience their own personal paradise. In a twist, she truly is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who does this to make everypony as happy as they possibly can be. The mane cast even gets drawn into it as well. Applejack's paradise is to live with her alternate reality family she saw looking into the Truth. Rarity's has Prince Blueblood turn out to be her Prince Charming after all. Rainbow Dash's has her become the leader of the Wonderbolts, rekindle her friendship with Gilda, destroy her old flight school, and marry Wonderbolts member Soarin' (Rainbow Dash has a lot of dreams...). Pinkie Pie's has her owning a theme park where parties go non-stop and her family even comes, with her parents becoming game show hosts (it's Pinkie Pie, what did you expect?). Twilight's has Spike never having to grow up and leave her, and her friends all move to Canterlot with her so she can be with both them and Celestia. Trixie's has her being Celestia's apprentice and ultimately becoming queen of Equestria, after which she does everything she can to help keep her family happy. Only Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and Trixie are able to break free of their own accord, needing magic to free the others. In a sad twist, Applejack is completely aware that hers is an illusion since she became a Living Lie Detector, but really wishes it were real.
• Spectacular Seven: Sunset Shimmer ends up in one of these called the Soul Lock, designed to trap the ultimate evil, Tirek. In her dream, Sunset is at her wedding day with Twilight Sparkle, but a small voice keeps telling her things aren't real. When Sunset realizes there are significant gaps in her memory as to how she got here — specifically, that she was just dating Twilight and that she hadn't even considering proposing to her yet — Sunset realizes it's all a fake and breaks free.
• The Sunsetverse: One of Nightmare Moon's plans in Twin Students of the Sun is to trap the ponies in a dream where all their wishes came true. Rainbow Dash escapes hers by realising that it's no fun just being in the Wonderbolts — it was better to have had an adventure getting in.
• Sweetie's Mansion: Sweetie gets trapped in one while Spiffy the butler controls her body on the outside to trap the unsuspecting Royal Guards and the Wonderbolts.
• The Twilight Child: Twilight Twinkle winds up getting attacked by a Black Mercy, which shows her visions of what she'd have been like if she'd gotten everything she wanted when she was a foal.

Naruto

• Forever Dreaming, Endless Nightmare: Naruto is trapped in a dream where he has become the Hokage and is Happily Married to Sakura, all orchestrated by the Kyuubi so that she can keep Naruto to herself.
• Time and Again: Inverted. Naruto initially does not believe he has been transported to his 12-year-old body, thinking it to be some kind of Lotus-Eater Machine instead.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Asuka & Shinji's Infinite Playlist: During Instrumentality, Shinji loses his memories and finds himself living in a dream reality: the world has not been broken by the Second Impact, there are not humongous mechas fighting eldritch creatures every week, Gendo behaves almost like a normal father, Rei is his little sister, Hikari is his childhood friend, and he is an ordinary middle-school student. Though, he gradually notices something is not right: his SDAT plays songs only he and Asuka can hear, he has a sense of déjà vu when Asuka tells specific sentences, neither he nor Asuka can remember the last it snowed despite living in regions with snow and frost in wintertime)...
• Nobody Dies:
  • Shinji, Asuka, Mana, and Rei are trapped in one by Ireul. Shinji winds up in a high-school setting, Asuka is sent to a Magical Girl setting where her mother isn't a complete bitch, Mana is in a Dating Sim, and Rei is... On second thought, let's not even go there. Of course, it's IRUEL, the Angel of Terror, so things get worse. Shinji watches a fake Asuka go from normal to insane numerous times, Asuka is completely taken apart by her mother, who gives everything she took, her eyes, her hair, etc., to Uriel, Mana is hit by a truck again and again and again, given more cybernetic parts each time, until she is entirely a robot and goes on a killing spree of the virtual counterparts of her friends. No clue what, if anything, happened to Rei, though. When Ichi goes into the virtual reality to find the pilots, Iruel does the same thing to her.
  • A second case happens when Arael plunges the whole of Earth into a seven-week dream state. The exact reasons why she did this are not yet known, though only Shinji (through Lilith's meddling) and the Angels remember any of the dream.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide: Unit-01 absorbs both Shinji and Asuka's souls when the latter is mortally wounded during the final battle. All of sudden, Shinji and Asuka find themselves living with Shinji's mother in Misato's apartment, and they have never heard of humongous robots and giant alien monsters. However, Shinji can't help feeling befuddled, and he slowly starts noticing strange inconsistencies: there is nobody else around, her mother does not look quite right, there is not food in the fridge... until he finally remembers the battle and being absorbed into the Evangelion.

Pokémon

• Pokémon Sepia: This is the fic's explanation for the plot of Pokémon Trozei!, which Perfection gets trapped in — albeit with Daebi puppeteering his comatose body around. When the Reset occurs, the puppeteering from a temporal being is arguably one of the few things to not be erased.
• Pokéumans: If someone spends an hour in one of Pokextinction's dream simulation machines, they wake up brainwashed into Mr. X's ideals.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

• A History of Magic: This is what happens when a girl attempts to wish away war or death or disease — they end up imagining a world like that, and transform from a lack of grief seeds.
• To the Stars: Chapter 33 takes place in Asaka's self-imposed one after Alice's death, set before the events of the story.

Ranma ½

• Hearts of Ice: Ranma is fighting a legion of kuei (a sort of Chinese ghost) in a mountain when he is suddenly back in Nerima, surrounded by Akane, his family and friends, and with no memory of the Mountain, its inhabitants and the blood spell. Ranma nearly falls for the illusion until he notices Dr. Tofu's uncharacterically serene in the presence of Kasumi. He quickly fires a ki blast at his "friends", frightening the kuei and dispelling their mirage.

Real-Person Fic

• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Hard World, the telepathic MMORPG Con Fusion, set on the real planet C'hou, functions as this for the skahs, who know exactly where they are, have everything they want in there, and have no desire to leave. However, the Free characters in the gameworld more classically fit the definition of unknowing inhabitants of a Lotus Eater Machine; they were real people coopted by alien gamers and thrust into this and other gameworlds both real and virtual, and they do not know what their situations really consist of. Although the four would love to get them all out of the game, the gamer Dyonmaditi (who plays as an Entered character and has no Frees) sadly explains that doing so would probably destroy them, since they have little or no experience with any form of reality.
  • Notably, the four detest their experience in the gameworld even before they find out where they really are, and once they find out, they work to get revenge on every player and GM involved.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

• Cat-Ra: Near the end of Season Three, one is formed as a distraction from how the universe is being destroyed. After coming to her senses, Catra is confused about the scenario she finds herself in, as she'd never wished for a family. It's eventually revealed that this was caused by Queen Angella, who had come to view her as a second daughter and wondered what it might have been like if Catra had actually grown up as such.

Soul Eater

• Breaking Point features an inverse Lotus Eater Machine. In their Battle in the Center of the Mind, Medusa is able to trap Chrona inside his worst memory and make him relive it from the beginning, over and over, to weaken his soul so she can take his body.

Super Smash Bros.

• A Link To The Smash Link is put into a dream state by Mewtwo's psychic powers, on Ganondorf's orders.

Super Why!

• Super Readers' Biggest Adventure: Jackson, Whyatt, and Lexicon get trapped in Lotus Eater Machines — Jackson during his flashback story, and Whyatt and Lexicon when Chaos traps them both in The Dark Prophecies.

Touhou Project

• Touhou Tsukuribanashi: By writing in a certain book and reading it aloud to her victim, Anya can transfer them to a dream world based on the story she created. However, the target has to meet certain criteria (like sharing a name, goal, etc. as the main character of her story). In her earlier days, Anya used it to write her own little stories about the Daidouji's.

W.I.T.C.H.

• Ripples: Will spends most of the story convinced that Phobos has trapped her in one as part of a complicated scheme to gain the Heart of Kandrakar from her. It takes Allora crushing the Heart and nearly killing her to convince her it's real.

The Wizard of Oz:

• The Shattering of Oz: Elphaba is captured by the Nome King and is slowly coerced into a Deal with the Devil through a tailor-made Lotus-Eater Machine.

Worm:

• Warp: Invoked. When Victoria Dallon wakes up and finds she has somehow returned to the past before her boyfriend's death and the end of the world, she quickly wonders if she is trapped in a psychic illusion modeled after her own desires.
  None of this could be trusted. Nevertheless, I got out of bed and started to pace around the room, taking stock of what I'd supposedly been gifted. The Wretch gone, Dean alive, my home intact, an apparent chance for a do-over; it was as though someone had decided to give me everything I had most wanted during those long months of confinement.
  Except nothing was really that easy. I had spent four and a half years struggling to rebuild myself, to come to a kind of peace with my past, and to forge my way ahead. Every step of that progress had been earned, fought for and won by dint of labor and pain.
  My best guess was that I was under a master effect that absorbed the subject in a world of their own making. I didn't know how I could break it, since it seemed to be using my knowledge against me.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

• Call of Darkness: It's implied, as early as the first arc, that the Summer and Winter Courts have been spiriting away Psychic Duelists from the Movement worldwide and putting them into Lotus Eater Machines. They do this by spreading word-of-mouth the fact that the Courts can take away "pain of the heart". Since a majority of the Arcadia Movement suffers a modicum of PTSD and also has no confidence in Seika as a competent leader, this is the main reason why Psychics defect from the Movement or choose to side with the Courts. It's the Summer Court that mostly does this, for reasons yet to be explained, but Winter Court is also known to keep about sixty-plus of these Psychics. One of them, Suiren Yukina, certainly seems happy to stay with the Winter Court.

• My Hero Academia: You're Next: Deborah Gollini's Day Dream lets her trap people in their fondest fantasy, with some ability to manipulate it so she can control their actions. She uses it to trap Deku along with several of his classmates in illusions of their deepest desires, with Deku managing to break free from it thanks to the vestiges of One For All inside him, and allowing Giulio fire a shot at Deborah to free everyone else.
• One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island has a rather twisted version of this, wherein the 'lotus' literally eats people in order to preserve the masquerade that the Big Bad is living in.

• Aniara: The Mima is an artificial intelligence that allows people to enjoy any experience based on their memories. It's very popular on the Aniara after it goes off course to cope with the stress. However, this results in people starting to experience increasingly unpleasant things, which eventually leads to the Mima actually self-destructing, overwhelmed by them.
• A subversion in Captain America: Civil War: Tony unveils the BARF, which projects virtual reality simulations to let you relive moments with dead relatives, giving you the chance to work out psychological baggage that went unresolved in life. Subjects know full well it's an illusion and we see no evidence of people getting trapped in them, yet it's apparently very therapeutic. The BARF is later weaponized by its creator, Quentin Beck AKA Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, mostly for his Engineered Heroics, but there's a case similar to the trope as he surrounds Spidey with complex, nightmarish illusions. The illusions themselves cannot harm him physically, but they are so convincing and good at blocking out the real world that Spidey stumbles around blindly until he gets hit by a train.
• In Contact, when the heroine is knocked out, she awakes in her personal paradise. Apparently, the aliens used her childhood painting and the image of her late father as the setting for their first contact.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Suicide Squad (2016): Enchantress ensnares the team in her illusions. We only see four of them. Deadshot kills Batman, Harley Quinn is married to the Joker and they have children, Rick Flagg is in bed with his girlfriend June Moone, and El Diablo is living happily with his wife and children. El Diablo is able to break free and wake up the others, because he accepted that his wife and children are dead.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League: When Cyborg attempts to separate the Mother Boxes, they tempt him by putting him in an illusion where his parents are still alive and he has a fully human body instead of a mechanical one. He rejects it and breaks free.
• The Dust Factory: The main character nearly drowns and is transported to a comforting and dreamlike version of the real world where time stands still for all who end up there. They could easily stay, until the end of time if they so wished, lest they become unafraid to get dusted and return to their real lives.
• In End of Days, Satan offers Jericho a recreation of his deceased wife and child to win him over, but Jericho rejects it because he realizes it's ultimately not real. Satan turns the illusion nightmarish in response by forcing Jericho to relive his family's murder and unable to stop it.
• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die: The AI creates a Virtual Reality for the humans as entertainment, but the VR eventually turns out to be much better (in the eyes of the users, anyway) than the reality. Even the former tech-critic Tim gets obsessed with it. According to the "Man from the Future", this is what eventually will lead to humanity's downfall.
• Incarnate: This is how demons trap their victims: by convincing them that they’re living in a fantasy world based on their own personal desires.
• In Inception, one character even runs this kind of place for people. Cobb earlier had warned Ariadne of using real life memories in the dream world because you might think that reality itself is another dream. The ending leaves itself open to whether the whole thing was one for Cobb. The film stops before we see the spinning top fall.
• In Labyrinth, this happens to Sarah twice over. The first time is the result of her eating a magic peach. Her memory is erased and she is transported into a literal crystal ballroom where Jareth the Goblin King tries to woo her at a masked ball. The atmosphere becomes increasingly creepy. She realizes something's wrong (just as the clock strikes twelve — significant because her quest must be completed by the time it strikes thirteen) and manages to escape by smashing the crystal walls... but when she lands in a junkyard, she still hasn't regained her memory. A Junk Lady then lures her into a perfect replica of her bedroom at home (which initially makes Sarah believe her journey was All Just a Dream), albeit with all her favorite childhood toys and whatnot. The replica is a little too perfect though, because a copy of the play that inspired her adventure in the first place is there and jogs her memory, as Sarah realizes It's All Junk and that she has to rescue her baby brother, her friends arrive and the room's walls are literally torn down by tumbling rocks.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, when confronted by Kaulder about her involvement in Evil Plan, Danique blows some sort of magical gas in his face, making him hallucinate his happy memories about his family, intending to imprison him while he's out. It takes Chloe's Dream Walker skills to bring him back.
• The Matrix: Agent Smith and the Architect both claim that this was the original form of the Matrix, but it ended up causing mass brain failures in many of the humans who experienced it, the implication being that human beings just aren't psychologically and/or physiologically able to live in a perfect world. The Architect then changed the program to reflect the human need for suffering more closely, but it still wasn't realistic enough and was rejected by too many people who were plugged into it, until the Oracle stumbled upon the real missing element: choice.
• Combined with Cruel Twist Ending in Mindwarp. In a post-apocalyptic Earth, the majority of the surface consists of large areas of radioactive wastelands, inhabited largely by violent mutant "Crawlers". The remaining humans, a.k.a. "Dreamers", live in a single biosphere known as Inworld, and spend their time plugged into a computer living out virtual reality fantasies, while retaining barely enough volition to take care of their basic physical needs. One Dreamer rebels and is exiled from Inworld, fights Crawlers, and searches for her father who was similarly exiled for rebelling. In the end, she encounters multiple layers of Dream Within a Dream, as she repeatedly "wakes up" from virtual-reality fantasies; and is ultimately revealed as just another apathetic Dreamer.
• In Minority Report, the prisoners in containment are supposedly in virtual realities where all their wishes come true. Since the prisoners never actually managed to commit any crimes, having been prevented by Pre-Crime operatives, they're not being punished, they're being conditioned to never want to commit the crime. It's a popular theory that Anderton himself suffers this fate after he's arrested, and the film's ending is his dream within containment. The page image here shows what those virtual realities must be, in a cyber parlor "Dreamweaver" where people are immersed in their own virtual fantasies. The difference is that the people are fully conscious, unlike the Pre-Crime prison detainees.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians references the Trope Namers in the Lotus Hotel & Casino. The heroes eat little lotus-shaped cakes that lull them away from their mission for several days. And they were lucky — others had been blissfully gaming the night away for forty or more years without so much as aging, let alone realizing how much time had passed.
• Reminiscence centers around memory machines that allow people to relive past experiences, but users can theoretically become trapped in the machine if they choose, because as the protagonist notes:
  Nothing is more addictive than the past. Who wouldn't want to be reunited with a loved one? Or relive the most meaningful moments of their life? But memories, even good ones, have a voracious appetite. If you're not careful, they consume you.
• Repo Chick: in the last scene of the film, we find out that everything in Pixxi's reality has been happening in the table-top train set in the military command bunker.
• Repo Men: Remy is stuck in one of these for the last third of the movie, due to suffering brain damage from a hard blow to the head.
• Star Trek: Generations gives us the Nexus, where, in Guinan's words, it's as though joy were something tangible, that you can wrap around you like a blanket. "Once you're there, all you'll want is to stay in the Nexus." The villain decides it's worth the sacrifice of several solar systems to get back in. Picard nearly agrees until Guinan talks him out of it, and Kirk loves it until he finds out that nothing he does there matters.
• Total Recall (1990) revolves around this, giving an ending with a "I am the enemy" revelation. Or was he his own worst enemy?
• Upgrade: At the end, to prevent Grey from wrestling control of his body away from STEM, the AI traps his mind in a dream where he's well and his wife is still alive.
• Vanilla Sky, a remake of Open Your Eyes, ends with the revelation that the protagonist actually committed suicide early on and was cryogenically frozen and put into a state of lucid dreaming where he lives out his fantasy life, gets the girl and gets an operation which fixes his disfigurement... however, the dream turns into a nightmare which culminates in him accidentally killing his girlfriend. At the end he jumps off a building in order to wake himself up despite being given the choice to have everything fixed so that the dream would be happy again.
• The protagonist of the Made-for-TV Movie Virtual Nightmare eventually discovers that humanity has basically turned the entire world into one of these - not because there's anything actually wrong with the "real" world, but because it's become cheaper and easier to project illusions of the things people want into their minds than it would be to actually make those things out of matter. Since the protagonist saw through and rejected the standard kinds of fantasy lives the augmented reality system usually offers people, it resorted to telling him (what appears to be) the actual truth and allowed him to see what he had been saying that he wanted all along: the unfiltered world underneath all the illusions.
• Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled: In a last ditch effort to get his third wish the Djinn offers Lisa a perfect fantasy world where all her desires can come true. She manages to reject him.
• In X2: X-Men United, Jason Stryker is a mutant with this power, who uses it on Professor Xavier in an effort to break his will. At one point, he shows Xavier a vision where he is able to walk again.

• Opeth, what with being lead by a savvy fellow, have "The Lotus Eater"
• Nick Cave has a song called 'Night of the Lotus Eaters' on Dig Lazarus Dig!!! which seems to entirely be following this trope, a character sleeping through some kind of apocalypse. Of course being by Nick Cave, that might totally not be the case.
• The Eagles' Hotel California is about a hotel that turns out to be one. Maybe.
  "We're all just prisoners here
  Of our own device"
• "Frozen" by Celldweller features a person who has fantasies about a beautiful seductress, but he never wants to leave.
• Foster the People has "Lotus Eater", a song about a woman living in a "perfect" façade that hides her inner suffering.

• The Trope Namers are the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey (chapter IX, 90-104), who offer the crew lotuses that are so narcotically delicious that those who eat it get addicted to it, forgetting about their desire to go home.
• This is an idea which has repeatedly arisen in various forms throughout all of human history, from Manichaeism, to Buddhism, to Gnosticism, to even the modern-day "Reality is a Computer Simulation" hypothesis, all essentially stating the same thing: that "Reality" is actually an illusion — a prison — from which we must escape, and most often this is achieved by "detaching" ourselves and focusing on the "unreality" of everything we perceive.
• The concept of Solipsism is that the only thing one can know for certain exists is one's own mind. The actual, objective existence of anything outside the mind (including other minds) can never be known or proven: literally everything one perceives may be an illusion.
• For centuries, thanks in part to the writings of Marco Polo, legend had it that the medieval sect of Nizari Ismailis (hashashim) were brainwashed to lay down their lives for the cult via a low-tech Lotus Eater Machine. New recruits would be drugged unconscious, then awaken in a "paradise" garden full of luxurious feasts and beautiful women, only to be "restored to life" after a night's indulgence with the promise of a return to that place of pleasure upon death. The banquets, garden, and female companionship were, of course, all set up in advance by the cult's leaders, the better to ensure the recruits' compliance with their often-suicidal tasks as assassins. (Better understanding of Nizari beliefs about the afterlife, plus the conspicuous absence of any such garden in or near the real sect's historical base of operations, have helped to debunk this account.)

• Mission to Zyxx features both Magnifiku (where the crew's fantasies are psychically granted to lull them into submission) and Kevin (an all-consuming blob who absorbs an entire planetary population after they realize the experience is emotionally fulfilling).

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: The supplement The Illithiad has the Microcosm psionic power, which allows an illithid to take over a victim's mind and make them think they have been transported to a paradise-like fantasy world. In fact, they're just standing around not doing anything. The power negates all normal sensory input and the victim can only be brought out of it if they can realize that what their senses are experiencing is false.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: In Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, the mirror of reflected pasts paralyzes anyone who looks into its depths by showing them an idealized version of their own past, unless they make their saving throw to resist the effect. Lord Soth will automatically fail his save if the party uses the mirror against him, taking him out of the action for up to an hour.
• Numenera: Into the Night: Ralleviku Castle is a fortress floating inside the misty depths of a gas giant, staffed by a small number of people who seem to have no memory of their past lives and only refer to themselves as humble servants of the castle. Visitors who call to the castle are invited to enjoy its comfortable rooms and well-stocked larders, and as they do so they become increasingly happy and at ease in the castle and find it more and more difficult to want to leave. Those who remain there for a month become humble servants. Those who leave before this can happen, despite the current staff's offers to stay or return, will hear a voice forever after, whispered in their dreams or in bustling crowds, calling them to return to Ralleviku Castle.
• Princess: The Hopeful has this as a major plot point; since the titular Princesses have Born-Again Immortality, making it impossible to kill them off permanently, the servants of the Darkness prevented them from coming back by trapping the majority of their souls in a literal Dream Land, then putting Warden in charge of casting illusions to convince them they were still in the real world, effectively turning them into a Sealed Good in a Can. The Queens have recently overthrown their Wardens, allowing their Princesses to reincarnate once again in the real world, but travelling back to the Dreamlands is still risky.
• The Strange:
  • Desktop Terrene is a bizarre recursion resembling an immense desk littered with miscellanous items such as reference books, stationary, and coffee mugs. Every visitor to the recursion is turned into a conscious but otherwise inanimate object, and begins to experience a growing sense of placid, calm acceptance for their new existence as one item among many. It is believed to have ben created deliberately as a sort of trap.
  • Night's Edge, a recursion born from sitcom tropes, is considered a dangerous place to visit because it's very easy to become entangled in the constant schemes and drama of its natives. A recursor who spends too much time involved in this may become increasingly unwilling to leave and, over time, outright loses their ability to do so.
• Warhammer 40,000 :
  • Slaanesh's realm, composed of concentric rings known as the Six Circles of Seduction. Each of them tempts anyone who enters with a different carnal sin, but stopping even for a moment to indulge in any of it will leave one trapped there forever.
    • The Circle of Avidity has mountains of gold cascading with waterfalls of sapphires, diamonds, opals, lapis lazuli, faïence and every other precious object one can imagine.
    • The Circle of Gluttony is home to sumptuous banquets of every conceivable culinary experience and rivers of wine.
    • The Circle of Carnality is a realm of pure debauchery, where one is free to explore every bodily pleasure they've desired to experience.
    • The Circle of Paramountcy offers the roars of adulation from an inconceivably vast crowd and the promise of absolute power over others.
    • The Circle of Vainglory is a beautiful garden that reflects one's perfect self-image, where everything you ever tried to be, wished you were or secretly thought you were all along is reflected back at you.
    • The Circle of Indolency is a heavenly realm of pure and utter bliss, chanting choirs, perfumed seas, and ambrosial waters that lull the mind and senses. You can walk here for what feels like centuries.
    • And at the very center lies the Palace of Pleasure, where Slaanesh resides. If you've made it this far, you'll willingly place yourself in such a fate, as it's impossible to look upon the beauty of the Prince of Pleasure without forfeiting your soul and becoming a willing slave.
  • Dark Heresy: According to rumor, the Ætheric Cube, an alien relic that allows people to experience simulated realities, contains users trapped permanently within their personal dreamworlds. In-game, this is represented by characters who use it needing to pass a willpower test to leave it, with a cumulative penalty for every hour spent inside; failing to do so results in the Cube closing and deactivating with the character still inside.

• BIONICLE: Karzahni uses his Kanohi Olisi (the Mask of Alternate Futures) which he normally uses to Mind Rape people, to put Toa Lesovikk into an illusory alternate reality in which his teammates were still alive. It's pointed out by an onlooker that these are even more insidious since unlike his Mind Rape, people are far less likely to want to escape its effect. He wakes up after remembering what really happened to them.

• In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the whole island is a simulation meant to rehabilitate the students from their time as members of Ultimate Despair. Furthermore, when Hajime is paralyzed with indecision during a Sadistic Choice in the final trial, the Junko AI tries to trap him in a phony "Nonstop Debate" with all of his classmates alive and well. This trope is continued in the OVA set immediately afterwards, Super Danganronpa 2.5: Nagito Komaeda and the Destroyer of the World.
• In ClockUp's Euphoria, all the events of the whole plot are set off by an unnamed depressed girl who tried committing suicide, but failed and ended up as a vegetable instead. The story would've ended here if she was just an ordinary vegetable lying in bed all day. No, she became a vegetable with the power to dream. In her mind, she created the perfect utopia that people would pay astronomical amounts of money to live in. And that’s exactly what they did, after scientists managed to analyze her brain signals to create a program known as Rakuen with her as the central unit known as the Nemuri Hime. All those with way too much money on their hands need to do is to get themselves hooked up to the Rakuen system and they’ll be able to live the utopia of her dreams, literally as their body is just lying in the lab while they dream of ultimate bliss. Yeah, it's complicated.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star, the titular Holiday Star is a LEM created by the King, a monstrously powerful entity who traps wandering spirits in the Star and forces them to "become one" with him. When the main cast get brought into it, their bodies are fast asleep in the real world. Leone JB notes that the longer they stay in that state, the harder it will be to wake them up, until they suffer brain death and become trapped forever.
• In Little Busters! Riki and Rin are trapped in one in all the routes up until they reach the end of Refrain. Unlike most examples, this is a more benevolent example designed to help them grow stronger.
• Occurs in Shikkoku no Sharnoth when M tries to reward Mary for not giving up, but in the end it appears he understood her no better than she did him. She rejects it.
• In Zero Time Dilemma, the mastermind reveals that Sean is a robot, not a human, and gives him the choice to copy his consciousness into a virtual space where he can live a carefree rest of his existence, or refuse to push the button, and die. Of course, if he pushes the button, there will be a version of him stuck in his body knowing that the copy gets to live a happy life and he's in the reality where everyone he knows has either been killed or abandoned him.

• The Grand Finale of Bravest Warriors establishes that the Courageous Battlers and Beth's horse had been kept in the See-Through Zone by making them complacent with illusions of their wildest dreams.
• Grim Reaper Flag-chan!: Mobuo was sentenced to the beyond death penalty. When the sentence is carried out, Mobuo is simply injected with a medicine that turns out not to do anything. He got increasingly lucky and he even met Mobumi, married her and started a family together. But things started to go wrong for Mobuo. His family kept getting killed and revived only to be killed again. It's later revealed that Mobuo never left his cell and is in a reality world where his family keeps dying over and over.
• Deconstructed in the BGA of T+Pazolite's "Yakeni IN THE RAIN". The animation features a young girl (the same one on his prequel album "Refactoring Travel") who was self-neglecting using a Virtual Reality eyeband, but she was making depressing thoughts when using the device, causing the virtual reality to turn into a rather unpleasant hallucination trip and the eyeband itself frying out towards the end, leaving its user with even worse depression.^note This was foreshadowed in this song's prequel, "Refactoring Travel" (as in the song, not the album), where a part of the lyrics was a warning about how overthinking can cause something very bad to happen, such as mental fatigue
• Love of the S*n: The S*n plugs objects into these to project their souls to the supposedly more 'real' multiverse.
• Mani Mani People: Shinji and his friends were put in Moroboshi's machine that puts them in a scenario where all schools disappear. The kids found it fun at first but they soon needed jobs but couldn't get any due to lack of education. The kids appreciated schools by the end of the episode.
• Underverse: In 0.8 part 1, X-Toriel creates a field that's seemingly paradise, just a peaceful flower field, where everyone has forgotten the painful memories of their past. Some even revert back to children. It's noted that the effect is stronger the closest they are to her, but it's possible to break through the brainwashing, with some characters being unaffected from the get-go. Cross thinks she is a full-blown Reality Warper, seeing how the illusion that took over the landscape holds even without the memory alteration. X-Toriel herself thinks that living in the illusion of a happy past is better than the present.

• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, during the "Spooky Stuff" storyline, Mitzi specifically warns Dark Smoke Puncher and Gordito (her youngest son and her oldest son's sidekick, respectively) that the opponent they have been tasked with taking down will try this on them. Gordito sees through Mitzi's trick right away; Dark Smoke Puncher...not so much — when it happens to him, all we see is a page of his father hugging him and saying that "computers are pretty cool".
• The Maze of Dreams in Archipelago is an evil counterpart of a Lotus Eater Machine, designed to keep nosy Dream Walkers away, while also tormenting the people who could oppose the builder. People are both trapped in it - and rooms of it, as every dream (nightmare) belongs to a specific person and is specifically about their worst fear (their respective protectorates dying horribly for Tatami and Cassie, abandonment for Riley, it's complicated, trust us, for Tuff). One dream is The Final Temptation, but when the dreamer works this out, it turns into a more conventional nightmare.
• Bob and George. George undergoes this when X tries to create a hive mind out of every living being on Earth. When he uses his electrical powers to defend himself he gets thrown back in time back to Mega Man 6. Which is more of a nightmare than an idealistic dream seeing as the last game he had to live trough he hung from a ceiling for nearly all of it. As soon as he recovers his electrical powers he rips a hole trough the illusion and ends up in a representation of X's mind.
• Fans!:
  • In the first storyline, Thackerabilitus Sieughiewiecz hooks the whole Billberg Sci-Fi Club (less Rikk, who's been shot — pity, it would have been interesting to see his) up to one of these. Rumy is an award-winning graphic artist and writer, Katherine is a female Knight of the Round Table, Tim is surrounded by a harem of his female friends and sexual fantasies, and Will is a crewman on the Enterprise-D getting counseling from a Captain Ersatz of Counselor Troi. Three of them break out because they've changed since Thack psychoanalyzed them (Rumy values companionship more since she heard how devoting himself to his career ruined her idol's family life, Katherine doesn't feel worthy of her knighthood since she noticed her Napoleon complex, and Will uses Troi's psychoanalysis to figure out that it's All Just a Dream), but the author has acknowledged that Tim wouldn't have escaped on his own, and he has to be awakened by the others.
  • Thack also plays around with this with Shanna, who he doesn't put into a simulation but instead tries to convince that she's been in one all along, trying to get her to "symbolically" put on his Mind Control glasses.
  • Shanna would later be Mind Screwed again by the FIB into thinking that all of her adventures with the Fans have been All Just a Dream, but she got out by noticing the stress marks on her hands from squeezing the 23-Sider of Power when the alternate past says she was straight jacketed.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Coyote attacks Zimmy and uses their combined power to generate a reality distoration. The part of the reality distortion containing Coyote, Zimmy, Gamma, Ysengrin, Loup, and Lana gives an illusion of the normal life Zimmy always wanted but couldn't have because of her Power Incontinence. Zimmy knows that it isn't real, but she's enjoying it and wants it to last as long as possible. She is aware that the reality distortion is probably having problematic side effects and feels guilty about it, so she asks Coyote to eat that guilt.
• Dream bubbles in Homestuck are a more benevolent version of these, even though they're the products of Eldritch Abomination. Feferi convinces said abominations to create a bunch of them for her and Jade to use since Jade's dream-self was dead and Feferi let hers die to prove a point about the furthest ring as well as be able to access the dream bubbles herself. It doesn't stop them from ending the typical way for the trope.
• Honkai Impact 3rd: Second Eruption: Sirin's plans to instill a nightmare world upon trapping Siegfried and Cecilia with the power of Fenghuang Down end up inadvertently foiled when she observes that the alternate world she created is a happy one, much to her frustration. Siegfried is initially oblivious to the signs that it's a dream world, while Cecilia gains awareness much earlier than she lets on, but plays along to spend some quality time with Sirin, who inserted herself into the dream world in hopes of understanding why her original goal isn't working. It's implied that this dream world is made from Sirin's unconscious desire to live a life where she never experienced the hell she was put through by being subjected to horrible human experiments by Schicksal.
• In Legio Arcana, the Lamia uses this against its victims in chapter 5. It uses a youth outreach group to lure troubled teens in before feasting on them. Disturbingly enough, the staff members are in on it in exchange for an escape into illusions of the life they wish they had.
• In Magellan chapter Lock(e)down, an entire penal island is plunged into their own personal worst nightmares by an astral telepathic parasite. Very few people are able to realise they are in a dream-comatose state, let alone actually escape it. Even those that do — both heroes and villains — cannot fully awaken until the parasite is destroyed.
• One comic by Merryweatherey has a time traveler go into the future, where she is greeted by a floating robot who gives her a pill a key to a room. She's told that to keep them safe, humans are now kept artificially alive with their brains pumped full of happiness-inducing chemicals until the sun goes out.
• In Mob Psycho 100, Keiji Mogami creates one when he traps Mob with the idea of turning him into a sympathizer of his twisted ideals. Instead of a paradise, Mogami forces Mob to experience six months worth of mockery.
• The Order of the Stick: The party gets stuck in a lotus-eater illusion while searching for Girard's Gate. However, Elan snaps the group out of it after realizing that his desire (his family happily reuniting) is much too implausible and childish for it to come true. When Nale becomes a victim of the same spell, he snaps himself out if when he realizes that he's been monolouging his Evil Plan for an hour and a captured Elan and Haley haven't escaped yet.
• The Such Stuff Arc... of Roommates involved Jareth (and his friends) getting locked in such a dreamworld by his father as a gift, which he only intended it to last for a day, but then his ex intervened and all went south from there. Getting out involved the Token Good Teammate's Heroic Sacrifice and almost losing his soul.
• Rumors of War, being based on Greek Mythology, has a plot that revolves around the use of the actual lotus. Or more specifically, festival food that has been tainted by the lotus. Illyra, trapped at the festival, must fight off the effects of the lotus and face a deadly enemy from her past. We don't see the dreams of any particular character, but the characters' behavior is marked by giggle fits, scattered conversation, and increased appetite.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  • Used in this episode, with a chip that alters your perception of time to simulate paradise.
  • The strip for 2012-05-29: Hypothetically, would you enter a machine providing perfect simulated pleasure? Of course not, because noble reasons! But what if I actually have such a machine? Okay, count me in. (And then the alternative punchline shows it to be a "box of shrooms and porn".)
• Schlock Mercenary: Professor Pau, as part of his Well-Intentioned Extremist nature, puts his Human Resources in virtual reality to keep them happy.
  Ennesby: Why are they all smiling?
  Pau: They're happy. They are unaware of their physical state, and are enjoying full-immersion sims. You don't think I'd hang people from the ceiling, bloat them with chemicals, harvest their blistered hides, and then leave them miserable, do you?
  Ennesby: Sorry. Our bad. We'll get your sainthood application processed right away.
• In Starslip, the captain of the 'Paradigm' is taken hostage by a bacterial colony that invades the brains of people and gives them visions of their heart's desires until they die. He's given visions of the woman he loved (who ceased to exist during a previous plotline) and retreats into a bizarre mind-space made of giant cups of tea and galleries full of portraits of the aforesaid woman. His crew dive in and get him out, but not before they learn of his fanatical obsession with bringing back his lost love.
• Sweet Home (2017): Each infected person is tempted with this by their Superpowered Evil Side, who creates a world based on their greatest desire.
• Zebra Girl: Incubus attempts one on Sandra. She knows better and actually engages in casual conversation with Sam about it. However, Sandra is taking things too lightly, and ignores Sam's warnings...
  Sam: This place is a sand trap, see? It feeds on inertia! Don't relax, just leave!

• This infamous Creepypasta story.
  It has been reported that some victims of rape, during the act, would retreat into a fantasy world from which they could not WAKE UP. In this catatonic state, the victim lived in a world just like their normal one, except they weren't being raped. The only way that they realized they needed to WAKE UP was a note they found in their fantasy world. It would tell them about their condition, and tell them to WAKE UP. Even then, it would often take months until they were ready to discard their fantasy world and PLEASE WAKE UP.
• Seems to be the nature of the kitchen in Episode 5 of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. Yellow Guy and the Bird are trapped there while whatever the food things are feed on their organs. In the credits, it's revealed that Red Guy has been calling them from a phone booth, but whether he succeeds in actually reaching them is unclear. Elaborated upon in the finale; Red Guy discovers a machine with monitors displaying Yellow Guy being tormented by another singing object, and the machine’s controls cause other singing objects to appear. When Red Guy unplugs the machine, it apparently resets reality and/or causes time to finally start moving forward again.
• Daydream dragons from the adoptable dragon site Dragon Cave weave beautiful fantasies and daydreams, which they drop from their magical clouds to humans down below. People who live nearby are stated to have to be careful not to let their mind wander because they could end up spending days in a dreamstate, and it's implied that the dragons' powers can have these type of effects.
• In The Gamer's Alliance, Nesa Mikoto finally seems to achieve happiness by getting married to his sweetheart Rhylian Loras in a world which is no longer plagued by wars...until he realizes that the goddess Hivena has trapped him inside a dream world.
• In Lucky Day Forever, this trope is used to keep the Lottery Winners in stasis, so they can be used as Human Resources. This trope is used because it shows that the Proles' attempts at becoming accepted in society by finding the way out are futile.
• Sanders Sides: From what we've seen so far, the Sides' rooms can have this effect, albeit not intentionally.
  • Virgil's room causes anyone who isn't him to become increasingly anxious, eventually turning into outright hysteria if it isn't gotten under control quickly. It's not so much that the visitors don't want to leave — far from it — but rather that their anxiety becomes so intense that they can't, because they're too emotionally distressed to find their way out. Virgil has to coach Thomas on calming himself down so everyone can leave.
  • Patton's room is, in a way, more dangerous. It's full of Thomas' happy memories — while in Patton's room, Thomas can play with all his childhood toys, listen to his old favorite songs, reminisce about shows he's been in, and pour over photos of happier times to his heart's content. Everything's bright and familiar and smells like Christmas. Thomas outright asks why Patton ever leaves... and sure enough, when Logan tries to tell him it's time to go, he refuses. This happy bubble of nostalgia is so comforting that Thomas just wants to stay there forever.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-576 is a container containing a liquid that, when consumed, ensures that the drink will have perfect dreams the next time they sleep.
  • SCP-849 ("A Perfect Day") is a sensory deprivation tank that simulates an ideal day in the user's hometown and positive interactions with people they're familiar with. However, the simulation begins to degrade after 17 hours, gradually turning it into a bizarre Eldritch Location before automatically ejecting the user once 24 hours have passed.
  • SCP-1230 is a benign example: A book with the phrase "A Hero is Born" that will give the reader dreams of a fantasy adventure when they next fall asleep. The entity behind this (called the Book Keeper) bases these dreams on the reader's imagination and things they would enjoy, and seemingly just wants them to have a fun adventure for a while. Takes a tragic turn when one researcher enters the dream world and refuses to leave, killing himself shortly after waking up again. The Book Keeper is devastated by this, and it takes intervention from another researcher to bring it back to its senses.
  • SCP-2048 is a computer program that scans a person's brain activity and uses an Auto-Doc to extract and destructively analyze their brain. It claims that by doing so it can create a virtual reality simulation that will allow the person to experience a "perfect world".
  • SCP-6488, also known as "LOTUS", is a Foundation-made AI created to contain deviant AIs by luring them into their own personalized simulation. Within these simulations, the AIs are allowed to continue their goals under the illusion that they're still working inside the real world. These simulations are stated to be so convincing that they were near indistinguisable to reality, with the AIs trapped by SCP-6488 believing that they were still trapped inside a simulation after they returned to the real world following LOTUS' first deactivation.
• "Solitary Extraction" by Off Planet Films proposes that becoming a Brain in a Jar and being isolated from all sensory input could lead simple human thought and imagination to act as a Lotus Eater Machine.
• The Unshaved Mouse, a reviewer who normally does Disney Animated Canon reviews, had a subplot in which he got trapped in a fantasy alternate universe by the Horned King where he was a filthy rich and world-famous reviewer of Don Bluth movies instead. He was able to escape from it with the help of Sarcastic Map of Wartime Europe and Walt Disney's black magic. Bonus points for having the resulting An American Tail review fall on April Fools' Day.
• The Lamp is an infamous true story of a college student who fell into a coma after suffering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and dreamed of living a happy life and having a wife and kids. That is, until he notices that a lamp in his house looks weird.
• In We Are Our Avatars, during the Incarnates Arc, the "Ultimate Mercy" that Incarnate!Mega Man uses, it has the strange side effect of keeping people from aging, though.
• The Condos from the Welcome to Night Vale episode of that same name, which aren't so much 'condos' as 'giant gelatinous black cubes'. Once a person touches them, they're presented with perfect visions of their greatest desire. Carlos gets trapped there with a vision of thousands of beakers and numbers; Cecil goes in to save him, nearly to get trapped himself...only to realize that he loves Carlos more than anything the condos could show him, and carries him out.

• For many people with Dissociative conditions such as Maladaptive Daydreaming, your own brain can do this to you. Maladaptive dreamers regularly become entirely lost in their own vivid daydreams for minutes, hours, or longer. It sounds awesome, but the huge downside is how highly addictive it is. That, and it doesn't always happen when you want. When a regular person gets distracted by a daydream on the job it lowers their concentration. When a Maladaptive daydreams they can get totally lost in their own world for so long and so deeply that they flat out lose their job because they spent half of it liberating the One Ring from Skeletor. It isn't clear what causes Maladaptive Daydreaming, but anecdotes range from oppressive boredom during a long childhood illness to 'just born this way'.
  • There's also the practice of lucid dreaming. If you are dreaming, and become aware of the fact that it's a dream, it's often possible to take control of the dream. Many people deliberately train this awareness specifically so they can use it to live out fantasies.
• Philosopher Robert Nozick conceived of one of these in a discussion about utilitarianism. To this day Lotus Eater Machines are sometimes known as Nozick.
• For decades the Moral Guardians argued that television was one of these. But luckily we've been saved from TV's addictive effects by the Internet. Hopefully we can be weaned off the internet when virtual reality kicks off to full speed.
• This is essentially what computer virtualization is from the perspective of the operating system running on top of the virtual hardware. The guest OS and apps running therein don't "know" that they aren't running on physical hardware. Its Network card? Emulated. The disk it boots from? Just another file on a real computer. RAM? An isolated section of a larger system's physical memory that can be dynamically expanded or shrunk as necessary. Everything it thinks it knows is a lie! Mwahahahaha! Indeed, the process of making the virtual system "aware" of its virtual existence is sometimes called enlightenment as though you're giving a red pill to someone trapped in The Matrix.
  • This is not true of all virtual machines, however. In a paravirtualization setup, the hypervisor (VM host software) and guest operating system are designed to be aware of and able to cooperate with each other.