Another Dimension

Two degrees eckwards of due fnord, and straight on 'till morning.

"Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go."

— E. E. Cummings

An ancient trope, still used. Another Dimension refers to universes that are "next" to our own, which require magic or high-end technology to travel to and from. In theory, from our world they are in a direction other than the directions we are familiar with.

The popular usage of this term is incorrect; "other dimensions" are not locations, but the means by which you get to them.^note And let's not talk about "parallel dimensions", which is a contradiction in its own right. Our universe, as far as we know, contains four dimensions: three dimensions of space, plus time. We have free movement in the first three, but are locked in a continuous forward motion in the last.

Free movement in the fourth dimension is called Time Travel. Free movement in the fifth dimension, or "time squared", is usually seen as jumping sideways from branch to branch within the tree of choices and alternate events that make up the multiverse — so called alternate universes. The sixth dimension, or "time cubed", is where things get really weird — because we as a species don't have the capacity to comprehend what the temporal version of "up" is, we tend to see the sixth dimension as home to wildly alien places with their own laws of physics where literally anything can happen.

Travel to and from another dimension is usually via some sort of door, vortex, portal, gate, window — the exact term depends on the story. Sometimes some kind of teleportation suffices. There may be a Void Between the Worlds to go through to reach them. Characters might need the aid of Weirdness Search and Rescue to get home. Entering the dimension can sometimes be used as an Extradimensional Shortcut. Dimensional Travellers make such journeys regularly, either via a device or spell they possess or as an innate power of their own.

Not to be confused with More than Three Dimensions, which is about higher spatial dimensions.

Despite 'dimension' being a relatively new term for it, the concept is Older Than Dirt. The "fairy lands" of Celtic Mythology and European fairy tales, the various universes of Hindu cosmology, Hell, Heaven and The Underworld, and so on.

Types of Other Dimensions:

• Acid-Trip Dimension
• Alternate Tooniverse
• Alternate Universe
• Beneath the Earth
• Dark World
• Gender-Bent Alternate Universe
• Elemental Plane
• Inn Between the Worlds
• Land of Faerie
• Lost World
• Magical Land
• Mirror Universe
• The Multiverse
• Phantom Zone
• Place Before Time
• Pocket Dimension
• Prison Dimension
• When Dimensions Collide

If you were expecting to find anything related to Dragon Ball Z, you're looking for Never Say "Die".

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• 3×3 Eyes: there are three main dimensions in the world: the human world (our universe), the Sacred Place/Sanctuary (the now desolate former home of Triclops and monsters) and finally the Subspace, which is essentially outer space between the dimensions, which can only be accessed through certain spells. The Sacred Place and Earth are connected by special magical portals known as "Kunlun" and scattered across the world.
• This is where the aliens in Bokurano come from. They're actually humans from alternate timelines, but that revelation comes later.
• CLAMP is extremely fond of this trope, most notably in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, where the characters cross over into several different parallel universes.
• Muge Space in Dancougar. It is also seen in Super Robot Wars Compact, Super Robot Wars Compact 2, Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 and Super Robot Wars GC.
• Digimon:
  • The Digital World is described as this by the human protagonists.
  • The third season of Digimon Fusion has DigiQuartz, a world between the Human and Digimon world.
  • The door that Myotismon used to get to the human world in Digimon Adventure connects to any number of these depending on which nine of ten cards are placed in what spaces in a grid.
  • Digimon Adventure 02 has the Dark Ocean and the realm of dreams.
  • In Digimon Universe: App Monsters, the Digital World is replaced with a physical representation of the Internet called the Net Ocean. It can be reached through the AR Fields that crop up whenever an Appmon causes mayhem.
• Fushigi Yuugi features Miaka and Yui going into an alternate universe that resembles Ancient China, by way of a book, and becoming priestesses to Suzaku and Seiryuu, respectively.
• Naruto: Kaguya Otsutsuki has the ability to travel though these through the use of Amenominaka.
• Saint Seiya:
  • These are weaponized, used by Gemini Saga and Kanon as a way of removing opponents from the battlefield without much difficulty. Gemini Saga's delivery of the attack tends to be really overblown, to the degree of becoming a Memetic Mutation in some fringes of the fandom.
  • Phoenix Ikki also uses one at one point in an attempt to defeat Virgo Shaka by sending both he and Shaka there. This earns him Shaka's respect, and he asks Mu to bring both Ikki and himself back..
  • In Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, Saga and Kanon's predecessors display similar aptitude in the art and actually uses it at one point to rob a Physical God of the capacity to control time by simply transporting both of them to a dimension where time doesn't exist.
  • The page image is from successor series Saint Seiya Omega. The Gold Saint Gemini Paradox can use the attack "Crossroads Mirage" to put the target outside of time and space so she can show them the effects of the choices they have before them. She uses it to try to force Ryuho to decide between betraying his friends or dying through fighting her. The sadistic part comes in that she shows him a utopic future if he betrays them, and thousands dead if he resists. To add extra danger, it is an actual attack, and it puts the victim body and mind between the two choices and will destroy them via psychic pressure unless they decide.
• So, I Can't Play H!: All three of the shinigami females come from Grimwald, a plain of existence that lies between the human world and the afterlife.
• Tenchi Muyo! alludes to this in the third installment of the OVA series. Though all of the story takes place on the prime plane, there are some sequences which feature inter-dimensional travelers attempting to wage war against Tokimi. In the final episode, it's revealed that the universe contains eleven planes of existence — and then Tenchi threatens to break past all of those into the Hyperdimension, which is apparently the dwelling place of the gods themselves.

• Seems to be somewhat of a recurring theme across all the major series in Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: The world of the Pharoah's memory inside the Millenium Puzzle and the afterlife, as well as the Duel Monsters Spirit World in filler arcs.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, Aigami's Quantum Cube can trap people in other dimensions. Anyone not part of the dimension originally will die, and he wants to stop Kaiba and Yugi because if the Pharaoh is reborn into the world people in Aigami's dimension will have no future.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The World of Darkness and the Duel Monsters Spirit World, which was greatly expanded on from the Duel Monsters filler arcs.
  • Yu Gi Oh5ds: The Netherworld and the Duel Monsters Spirit World (again).
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: Astral World and Barian World.
  • Yu Gi Oh ARCV: The four dimensions based on the previous four shows, as well as the ARC-V Dimension which is a much more clear example of this trope resulting from the aforementioned universes being forcibly recombined.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: The Cyberse. Link VRAINS itself also becomes a hub connecting the setting to countless parallel universes in the finale.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS: At the end of the first episode, Yuga is told to seek out the door to a new world, though whether said new world actually exists or is a metaphor is one of the show's most enduring mysteries.

Comic Books

• Atomic Robo: Bad things only happen with other dimensions (the dimension of vampires), and especially the zorth axis (the Eldritch Abomination staking Robo, or the accidental Time Travel).
• This is the premise of Black Science: endless travel in the eververse across the infinite parallel universes separated from each other by decisions or chance.
• The old Earth-One and Earth-Two of DC Comics, now replaced by the Fifty-Two.
• Doctor Strange often travels to other dimensions with typically psychedelic visual effects. His wife Clea was born in one of them.
• Although the Fantastic Four often visit the Negative Zone, it's their Ultimate Marvel counterparts who actually use it as part of their Super Hero Origin. And they use the nature of other dimensions as a weapon against Gah Lak Tus.
• This is Marvel Comics' favorite Hand Wave whenever something requires physics-breaking power; The Hulk's extra mass is taken from one, Nightcrawler travels through one when teleporting, and Cyclops gets his eyebeams from one where relativity works differently.
  • One notable example is the Microverse. Most associated with the Micronauts, it's the place where your mass goes when you shrink. If you shrink down far enough, your consciousness goes there, too, and you're suddenly in a strange new universe.
• Marvel Comics has an Angler, too; a very minor character with only two appearances, he was radically transformed by being in Another Dimension and though he returns from it, isn't quite suited to "normal" space and tends to be in two places at once. Not to mention crazy, deformed and speaking in weird symbols that look like broken glass.
• The Marvel Universe is number 616 out of thousands.
• Captain Atom: Nightshade travels through the Land of the Nightshades while teleporting, which may or may not be related to the Shadowlands from which most characters in the DCU with shadow based powers pull from.
• Shade, the Changing Man comes from a realm with very different dimensional properties called the Meta-Zone.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation². Hinted at twice in the second issue. The Doctor, who claims to know every star and planet out there, identifies Worf as a Klingon, but then informs Amy and Rory that until seeing him he'd never heard of a Klingon before. Later, when Picard receives the Distress Call from Delta IV, the Doctor reminds us of his familiarity with the whole of the universe and then states he's never heard of Delta IV.
• Supergirl: In Demon Spawn, Supergirl is kidnapped and brought to the Innerverse, an alternate dimension created by her dark side which exists inside her mind.
• Superman:
  • Mr. Mxyzptlk is from the 5th dimension, a world where everyone's nigh-omnipotent and there's a month called Pants.
  • Let My People Grow!: Rokyn, the world chosen by the Kandorians to rebuild their civilization, is a phase-world. It really exists in another dimension, and it only appears in their universe during a brief shift of the cosmic axis.
  • The Phantom Zone: Superman and his friend Quex-Ul travel through several parallel dimensions while making their way back to Earth.
  • In The Condemned Legionnaires, the Legion of Super-Heroes visits a faraway, unknown world which is used as a playground by the children of a giant alien race from another dimension.
  • In the Masters of the Universe crossover "From Eternia— With Death!", Superman gets thrown through a storm cloud-like portal into another dimension called Eternia, where technology and magic coexist.
• Walk-In is based around this premise.
• Wonder Woman: Villain Angle Man adopts a weapon called the Angler that allows him to manipulate dimensions, giving him teleporting, Time Travel and travel of The Multiverse.
• Zenith has not only the traditional Alternate Universe setup, but a dimension outside of space and time which the Lloigor call home.

Fan Works

• The Dark Gods' realm, and the Dark Kingdom in Dungeon Keeper Ami. Both are alternate dimensions of the Dungeon Keeper and Sailor Moon dimensions, respectively, themselves in-universe alternate dimensions.
• The Midnight Cage from Hottie 3: The Best Fan Fic in the World.
• A Shadow of the Titans: There's the pocket dimension Jade ends up in in the prologue, which consists solely of a small island floating in a multicolored void. We also see Jade entering the Shadow Realm at will; it appears to consist of islands, covered in mountains and jungles, floating in shadows that seem to shift between air and liquid composition. And it appears to be toxic to non-Shadowkhan, whom the shadows burn (while at the same time granting Shadowkhan increased power and a Healing Factor). It's explained later that this is just one branch of the Shadow Realm, which exists across the multiverse, with some branches being like this, and others being like the empty void that was shown in canon.
• C'hou in With Strings Attached is explicitly set in another dimension; the other planets that the four visit are also in other dimensions. In fact, “universe” and “dimension” are synonymous in this work.
• In keeping with the Fantasy Kitchen Sink Mega Crossover nature of the story, Child of the Storm has a number of this, including the vast Nevernever, the rest of the Nine Realms, Olympus, Avalon, the Negative Zone and the Phantom Zone. Further complicating matters is the implication that some of them blend into one another.
• Termina in The Blue Blur of Termina is this to Sonic's Earth, accessible only via a portal deep within the jungles of Adabat.
• The Realm of the Gods in The Three Kings: Hunt which was inhabited by the Gods and was invaded by the wizards.
• An Emergency! fic called "Double Fantasy" has character John Gage being switched into the "real" world, where he and his whole world are fictional TV show characters, while actor Randolph Mantooth is trapped in John's world, where John and the rest of the characters are real people.
• Royal Heights introduces the idea of the Universe which contains all dimensions and allows them to exist. Students of the academy all come from different dimensions and are able to travel to Utopia via a jet fast enough to rip through their home world into a new one.
• The Alarmaverse: There are many, many other universes that one can step into quite easily, if you just know how to move in the right direction. Ditzy is one of the few who know.
• The Great Alicorn Hunt explains Pinky Pie's party pony powers as a rare form of earth pony magic that lets those who possess it see and move along more than the normal number of dimensional axes. This lets Pinkie do things like see forward in time, detect and manipulate probability, and (apparently) teleport by moving through alternate spatial dimensions in which the place where she is and the place where she wants to be are touching.
• In the Dark Mark's Fanverse, Earth-1.5, Earth-1.75, Earth-Two and Earth-Prime are parallel dimensions whose heroes interact with each other every so often.
• Peace of Mind, Piece of Heart: Steven theorizes that the train both exists in one, as well as picks up travelers from various ones, when Catra shows no familiarity with the Gem Empire.
• In Land Before Time Retold, the dinosaur world is revealed to be a parallel universe to the human world, in turn justifying the Anachronism Stew that it has with dinos like Cera and Littlefoot existing in the same time frame.
• Tales of the Otherverse: In "A World Without Heroes", Mr. Fantastic finds a parallel world which he dubs "Otherverse". Originally a lifeless Nexus dimension -or barrier between realities-, it was accidentally brought into existence due to the actions of the Anti-Monitor.
• Here There Be Monsters: One difference between Earth-S and other universes is Earth-S' Venus can and does support life.
  The clouded world of Venus lie ahead of them. It was not the planet of other universes, hot beyond endurance and sloshing with molten metal. This Venus could support life, and did.
• In When Reason Fails, there are other dimensions that are collectively called Elsewheres where the supernatural originates from.

Films — Animation

• Monsters, Inc. shows an alternate universe inhabitated by Monsters that use children's screems as energy source and travel to the human universe by using closet doors. However, The Pixar Theory instead believes the doors are instead time traveling doors instead of taking the user to another dimension

Films — Live-Action

• A pretty obvious example would be The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; crossing dimensions is easy with an Overthruster and a Ford F250. And a rock band to back you up.
• The titular character in Doctor Strange ends up getting Bright Slapped across about a dozen different dimensions when he sneers at the Ancient One's suggestion that magic is real. In the course of the movie he ends up going to a dimension without the concept of time, which he uses to annoy the Man Behind the Man into giving up.
• From Beyond has another dimension that's a scary place.
• Pacific Rim: The Anteverse where the Kaiju come from, via the Breach. At the behest of their Masters.
• The original Thomas & Friends show was set on the fictional island of Sodor, which was implied to be located near England. Shining Time Station wasn't as explicit but still treated Sodor like a distant land, but for whatever reason Thomas and the Magic Railroad turned it into an alternate dimension that could only be accessed with special gold dust or something.
• Ultraviolet (2006) has this as a Hand Wave for Violet's Hammerspace weapons.

Gamebooks

• Most of the adventures in the Lone Wolf series take place on the world of Magnamund in the plane of Ao. There are other planes of existence such as the Daziarn, a strange dimension divided into mini-dimensions that have almost nothing in common, and the Plane of Darkness, which is basically Hell and the hometurf of Naar the King of Darkness.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov's "The Author's Ordeal": In the Science Fiction outline, the heroes use hyperspace to quickly travel between star systems, but find themselves in the wrong galaxy.
• In The Boy who Reversed Himself one could get to the fourth dimension by learning to step 'ana' or 'kata' (the extra directions added to make it 4D) and needed special glasses in order to see more than floating blobs, as our eyes weren't designed for the dimension. "Ana" and "kata" are the ancient Greek words for "up" and "down," respectively.
• Kenneth Bulmer wrote a series about the Contessa Perdita di Monttevarchi, an interdimensional tyrant, and the various people who opposed her.
• These Broken Stars: Hyperspace ships like the Icarus travel through dimensional rifts. It's probably while investigating these rifts that LaRoux Industries discovered the whispers, dimensional beings with Psychic Powers. These beings were trapped and experimented on, driving their tormentors crazy as a way of begging for release.
• The Chronicles of Amber: After walking a sentient maze and gaining the ability to do so (which nearly all the major characters have done), someone from either Amber or Chaos can walk from world to world, essentially willing the transfer from one to another. The transfer is gradual, but can do literally anything, including taking the traveler to a world whose mythology predicts the arrival of a deity who looks exactly like him or her. It's mentioned that no one is quite sure whether these dimensions actually exist before an Amber or Chaos resident enters it, but there is currently a sort of two-ended multiverse with Amber at one end and Chaos at the other, with the hundreds or thousands of worlds in between being more similar the closer they are, to both Amber and Chaos, and each other. And the laws of nature don't always work the same from one to another—for example, gunpowder doesn't ignite in Amber. Oh, and all of them except Amber and Chaos are called Shadows, because it's believed that they are only inter-dimensional shadows of the two true worlds.
• Narnia is another dimension in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series of books, with specific rules about time. Indeed, the sixth book, The Magician's Nephew provides a very good fantasy description of dimensional travel, likening the space between worlds to the rafters in a block of townhouses. The titular magician also makes it clear that Narnia, Charn, and similar worlds have no geographical relationship to our world at all.
• Most of Clive Barker's stories revolve around traveling to and from another dimension, whether through a rug, painting, etc.
• According to Word of God, the races of Codex Alera all arrived in the lands of Carna from other dimensions. The Alerans themselves are from Earth, the descendants of a Lost Roman Legion and associated Camp Followers and nearby locals (there are Germanic names peppered among the Alerans' Latin-based ones), though this happened so long ago their oldest texts barely hint of it. The Noble Savage Marat are descended from Neanderthals, but not our Neanderthals: they have legends of fleeing a great threat across at least two other worlds before reaching Carna. Some other creatures in Carna are descended from prehistoric Earth animals that crossed over even longer ago.
• Daughter of the Sun: The gods dwell in different planes of existence that reflect their nature somehow. Cyre, God of Animals, lives in an idyllic wilderness where all animals' souls go for instance.
• Other Dimensions connected to the Discworld include Death's Domain, Fairyland, The Dungeon Dimensions and Roundworld.
• Eden Green/New Night heavily feature an alien dimension (later called Fortuna) that has made invasive contact with Earth, releasing thousands of black needle monsters meant to destroy Earth ecosystems and prepare for colonization.
• The Empirium Trilogy: Multiple worlds exist beyond the Deep. One in particular- Hosterah- was where an alien race of predators called the cruciata came from.
• Kay Kenyon's The Entire and The Rose series involves humans discovering a manufactured universe called the Entire. The beings in charge apparently copied sentient species from Earth's universe (the titular Rose) so all the creatures of the Entire supposedly have counterparts elsewhere in our universe that humans just haven't found yet. And there's trouble actually getting to the Entire from the Rose because the beings in charge refuse to share that information. (Those beings themselves and some mysterious attackers called Paion coming from two other universes.)
• Somewhat subverted in the web serial novel Fishbowl by A. B. Boekelheide. Sam ridicules Lachlan for suggesting they've traveled to another dimension, then gives him an almost correct explanation.
• Edwin Abbot Abbot's Flatland is one of the few examples of the term "another dimension" being used correctly, so perhaps qualifies as a subversion. It is set in a 2D universe where men are geometric shapes, women are straight lines and "up" and "down" are dangerous heresies.
• Used correctly in The Fold, where the other dimension folds to make two points in three-dimensional space adjacent.
• The works of Simon R. Green (Nightside, Secret Histories, Ghost Finders). In addition to the usual alternate-realities and bizarre Cosmic Horror Story-worlds, his Greenverse includes the concept of "higher and lower" dimensions: higher, for ones that are more "real" than our own, and lower for ones that are less so. One lower dimension traversed in Secret Histories was dim-lit, crumbling, and denuded of all but the most primordial (albeit far from harmless) life forms.
• Book 4 of the Forest Kingdom series (Beyond the Blue Moon) introduces the dimension of Reverie, home of the Blue Moon and the Transient Beings, and source of Wild Magic. The Inverted Cathedral serves as the last real Gateway to it.
• In The Gypsies in the Wood, fairy changelings leaving our world to return to their own are described as seeming to get flatter as they approach an entrance that looks like a narrow crack, hinting at an other-dimensional location.
• The Land of Stories take place in a world physically separate from the story’s version of Earth.
• Applied in all kinds of weird ways in A.A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth. The space between lynks permits time travel and goes off in weird ways. Gai, the alien Rimstalker, comes from a realm at a much higher "energy level", known only as "the range", allowing a relatively small Rimstalker ship to create entire solar systems (this is also the cause of their problems — the zotl are Always Chaotic Evil and don't care that the range is inhabited, just that it's a great energy source). A character who wandered in from another book in the Radix Tetrad had a congenital brain defect fixed by an alien from a realm even a Rimstalker-programmed AI was amazed to learn existed.
• In "Little Girl Lost", young Tina Miller falls off the couch and manages to find herself in the fourth dimension. The family dog Mack goes in after her but has trouble getting to her. In the end her father Chris falls in himself and manages to grab a hold of both as all three get pulled back to safety.
• The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones uses a similar "place between" which is clearly written in reaction to The Magician's Nephew's quiet, sleepy Wood Between the Worlds; it's misty, muddy, slippery and somewhat dangerous terrain. There are definitely no guinea pigs.
• H. P. Lovecraft liked this idea and inserted it into many stories, especially the Cthulhu Mythos. It was used not only to explain where the various Eldritch Abominations hid from the world, but also to explain some of the Alien Geometries of the various structures and beings he created.
• In Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy, there is a long section set in Tanjecterly. It's a strange place where trees are different colors, and the heroine is menaced by grotesque, slime-eating creatures called Progressive Eels.
• Medusa's Web involves contact with other-dimensional alien beings. Invoked by two-dimensional diagrams, the beings in fact exist in only two dimensions, possessing only height and width, no depth — and no duration in time: for them, all times are the same, so if two people interact with the same spider at different times, it's in a sense the same interaction and makes it possible for the two people to also interact with each other.
• The Myth Adventures series by Robert Asprin has multiple dimensions between which the protagonists often travel. Also, almost all the protagonists originate in different dimensions (Skeeve from Klah, Aahz from Perv etc.)
• Brian Lumley's Necroscope and Titus Crow series.
• Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy incorporates a wide variety of these (scientifically dubbed "continuum's"). The most prominent is the "Beyond", where most souls end up after leaving the body. It's non-spatial, but it has time, so that the souls of the dead are aware of the passage of time but have nothing to do but leech on to each other's memories for the feeble semblance of life that they have.
  • The Dark Continuum is as close to an actual Hell as it gets. This is a dimension of near-absolute entropy, where the souls of whoever ends up there are compressed into a zero-Kelvin mass of writhing agony called the Melange. In case you are wondering, yes, they are also fully aware.
  • There are also various "pocket universes", not much bigger in volume than a planet, where the Possessed transport the worlds that they steal.
• Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast uses this as a Hand Wave for traveling The Multiverse.
• Of Ducks and Universes has an alternate universe (at least one) with alternate selves of people born after a certain date (when the universe split into two.)
• Once: On a plane described as "the spirit of nature", the faerfolkis exist in dimensions generally beyond human perception.
• Paraiso Street: Ptiamuzcuaro, the land of the dead, accessible via the Paraiso Street gateway.
• Realm Breaker: Some of Allward's inhabitants were originally from other dimensions before crossing into the Ward.
• The Mirrorworld Series: The Mirror World is an alternate version of Europe with 1700s politics...cameras, railroads, and airplanes. The primary mode of travel still appears to be horseback, though, and characters don't recognize modern guns or flashlights. Oh, and there's a whole range of supernatural races...
• Much of The Red and the Rest takes place in Papyrus, the world of lost things. Notable landmarks include an enormous mountain of mismatched socks.
• The Reluctant King: There are at least twelve other Planes of Existence, the First being Earth, which provides the afterlife people on the world in the trilogy go to. All the rest seem to be inhabited by various demons, gods or spirits.
• In Liliana Bodoc's Saga of the Bordenlands, there is the time of magic, an alternate dimension that is never described, but does not seem to be very different from the "real" world; the world of creatures, however, has its own time, which does not coincide with “real” time. It is possible to access that world every certain number of years, when the stars indicate it, and half of the Zitzahay people decide to take refuge in that world by going through a door made of flames.
• Shade's Children: The Overlords come from a parallel Earth, it seems, with far more advanced tech, and are themselves human (at least physically indistinguishable, though utterly cruel to Earth humans).
• The Territories in The Talisman. Both worlds tend to mirror each other such that doing one thing in one place causes a similar effect in the other. The inhabitants are also mostly the same apart from population differences.
• The Jakub Wędrowycz stories feature at least one Another Dimension — it's a Medieval European Fantasy realm with some comedic twists.
• In Wicked Lovely: Sorcha's high court, most halflings and sighted ones, a formerly-mortal dreamwalker named Rae and later Devlin and Ani's 'shadow court' live in a world known only as Faerie. It is also said that the dark court once resided there, but not during the events of the main series.
• A Wrinkle in Time features a trio of mysterious guardians who are able to transport the protagonists through space via the fifth dimension. According to them, they are able to tesser, or "wrinkle," by bending space around so that they're in another place in an instant. As one character states: "A straight line is not necessarily the shortest path between two points."

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel:
  • The demons often hailed from some hell dimension or another; our heroes on Angel have visited at least three of them. Most of them have different rules on time. For example, in "Anne", a demon continuously captured teens to use as slaves, working them until they're in their old age, then finally dumping them crazed and confused back into our world — all of which happened in a matter of a day or two, Earth-time. Also, Connor was sent to the worst dimension imaginable, and came out a couple weeks later as a teenager.
  • Glory's world, an H. R. Giger type dimension which we see bits of in "The Gift".
  • There is a running joke about shrimp entirely based on this premise, which has been liberally and enthusiastically embraced by online fandom at large: In "Superstar", when explaining the concept of alternate dimensions, Anya says: "You could have, like, a world with no shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp."
    • In "Triangle", after Olaf was banished she said that he could have been sent to "the world without shrimp."
    • In the Angel episode "Underneath", Illyria talks about moving between dimensions, she said that she went to "a world with nothing but shrimp" but "tired of it quickly."
  • "The Wish" introduces an alternate continuity timeline caused by Anyanka, which was supposedly destroyed when her demonic power source was destroyed. But it gets confusing because this alternate timeline is actually ALSO an alternate dimension, since "Doppelgangland" has AU!Willow being pulled from that universe into the primary universe. Just to make it vaguer, the time she gets pulled from is during the events of "The Wish"; whether the world continues beyond the point where that episode ends is unknown.
• Doctor Who:
  • Adric comes from Another Dimension called E-Space, which is also where the Doctor leaves Romana and K9 Mark II.
  • In the 2011 episode "The Curse of the Black Spot", a spaceship from one dimension is lodged in a pirate ship in ours.
• Grimm in the last season shows an alternate dimension from where the Wesens come from apparently and is basically like Earth in the Bronze Age, with monsters.
• Kamen Rider Ryuki and its adaptation Kamen Rider Dragon Knight both dealt with another dimension on the other side of Earth's mirrors.
• Kamen Rider Decade is similarly about travelling to multiple other dimensions, all of which are merging into one. Tsukasa and co visit a new one every fortnight, with each dimension representing a Kamen Rider series.
• The Outpost has the Plane of Ash, the place that the portals opened by Talon's kinj lead to. It's a volcanic wasteland in a perpetual twilight, and time there seems to work differently, as the Blackbloods banished there centuries ago don't seem to have aged since.
• Sliders is built on this trope. Each episode they slide into a new dimension, and they never know how it will be different from their own — some are very weird, and some are very dangerous. They have to spend a certain amount of time there before they can slide to the next. If they miss the slide, it's a long, long time before the timer will allow them to slide again, making them essentially trapped in that dimension. They don't want that, because they hope if they keep sliding, they'll be able to find their home dimension again.
• Star Trek: Voyager
  • Fluidic space, the area inhabited by Species 8472 ("Scorpion", Part I and II). It's an alternate dimension, only accessed through portals established in the region itself.
  • In "Bride of Chaotica!", Energy Beings from another dimension mistake holodeck supervillain Dr. Chaotica for a genuine threat and go to war with him. The "Fifth Dimension" (as Chaotica dubs it) is based on energy. As a result the aliens think the holoprogram is real, whereas Voyager and its crew don't show up on their sensors, making it impossible to convince the aliens to stop fighting.
• The "Upside Down" from Stranger Things is a classic illustration of the "6D" take on alternate dimensions — a world "up" from our reality.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Little Girl Lost", the six-year-old Tina Miller falls out of bed and into another dimension through a Negative Space Wedgie that formed in her bedroom wall.

Mythology and Religion

• Nearly every religion or collective spiritual belief speaks of an otherworld beyond human comprehension. Sometimes that edge of comprehension can be on top of a mountain, in the sky, or underground; but as human understanding increases, these realms are pushed farther and father away. These days, realms such as Heaven, Hell or similar are usually said to be outside our physical understanding. It makes sense; after all, if a god creates the universe, it must, by definition, exist outside it.

Podcasts

• Arc 2 of Sequinox deals with these, as Gemini's stars Castor and Pollux are able to send the Sequinox girls into several different ones.

Radio

• Dimension X: The Title Sequence and Signing-Off Catchphrase both claim that the stories you are listening to take place in the "world" of Dimension X, clarified in the first episode to be seeing beyond the present and into the unknown. These tales come from visions of the future instead of alternate presents.

Tabletop Games

• The world of The Dark Eye consist of seven planes, generally imagined as concentric spheres. The first is unaccessible and "only" a core. The second is a place of raw elemental powers. The third is the one where all the mortal life happens. The fourth is where the souls of the dead rest. The fifth is where the gods dwell, and cosists the paradises particularly worthy mortal souls may be eccepted into. The sixth is the sky with its stars, and some lesser gods can be found here. The seventh sphere is hell, a realm of chaos and infernal cold (ice/cold being the opposite of life in this world's elemental philosophy). In effect, the entire world, from the gods down, is just a relatively insignificant speck in a universe that wants to destroy it.
• Dungeons & Dragons features planar travel, explored greatly in the Planescape setting. Jumping from plane to plane can be as simple as having access to the right spell or magical item, or sometimes planar breaches can occur naturally (or unnaturally) to allow people to move from one plane to another. The "Great Wheel" is the default cosmological model, with the Material Plane(s) in the center, and things getting weirder the further you go from it. These planes often have multiple layers to them that can be vastly different from each other.
  • The Transitive Planes are alternate dimensions that make it easier to move around on, or go beyond, the Material Plane. The Ethereal Plane is the foggy realm of ghosts, where travelers can spy on the Material Plane and simply walk through most Material obstacles. The Plane of Shadow, or Shadowfell, is a Dark World home to a great deal of dangerous shadow monsters, but since terrain there is fluid, it can be used as a shortcut to get between two Material Plane locations faster than normal. And the Astral Plane is the cloudy, timeless Void Between the Worlds studded with color pools that act as portals to the rest of the cosmos, but has its own natives that may prey on interlopers.
  • The Inner Planes are devoted to the fundamental forces of the universe. The four Elemental Planes of Air, Earth, Fire and Water are here, each home to a different variety of genie as well as elemental creatures. The Positive Energy Plane is a brilliant void bursting with Life Energy, which will eventually cause living creatures to explode, while the Negative Energy Plane is a lightless void that will eventually drain the life from any living creature within it. And the interactions between these planes produces what some call the Para-Elemental Planes (Air + Water = Ice, for example) and the Quasi-Elemental Planes (Air + Positive = Lightning, Air + Negative = Vacuum, etc.). And then you hear talk about Para-Quasi-Elemental Planes and it gets even more confusing.
  • The Outer Planes are the realms of the gods, home to beings devoted to the great philosophical forces of the universe, and where the souls of dead mortals reside as petitioners. They span both the Good-Evil and Law-Chaos ethical axes, with shades of neutrality between them. The Upper Planes are the mostly harmonious realms of Good, while the Lower Planes are wracked by the Blood War, a conflict between hordes of demons and legions of devils over who will lead the final assault on the bastions of heaven.
    • The Blessed Fields of Elysium are devoted to pure Good, and are so tranquil and beautiful that visitors will eventually lose any desire to leave. The Gray Wastes of Hades in contrast boast such undiluted Evil that those sent there will succumb to crushing despair and lose all sense of self.
    • The Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus is an Eternal Engine of continent-sized gears home to creatures of pure Law, while the Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo is a utterly Chaotic maelstrom of randomized elemental energy that some creatures can temporarily shape into pockets of stability.
    • The Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia are the Lawful Good afterlife, where petitioners undertake a spiritual journey to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence upon reaching the great mountain's peak. The Nine Hells of Baator is the plane of Lawful Evil, where petitioners are subjected to mind-shattering tortures until their ruined, gibbering soul shell is reborn as the least of devils, instinctively seeking to climb the infernal hierarchy.
    • The Olympian Glades of Arborea are the Chaotic Good realm of unsullied nature and passion for life, while the Infinite Layers of the Abyss is a Chaotic Evil realm of demons in which each of the endless layers is somehow worse than the last.
    • The Heroic Domains of Ysgard are a Warrior Heaven where the valorous dead are revived each morning for another chance at glory, while the Infernal Battlefields of Acheron are where amoral soldiers wage pointless war for all eternity.
    • The Windswept Depths of Pandemonium are endless stretches of tunnels filled with a shrieking wind that drives visitors and natives both deaf and completely mad. The Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia is a land of law and harmony, whose inhabitants are so convinced of their righteousness that they are blind to their flaws.
    • The Twin Paradises of Bytopia consist of two layers facing each other, one dedicated to idealized pastoralism, the other a rugged wilderness to challenge the hardiness of outdoorsmen. The Bleak Eternity of Gehenna is home to the evil yugoloths, who live on the sides of enormous volcanic mounts rising into a dark void.
    • The Wilderness of the Beastlands is a domain of nature unbound, where predator and prey play out the game of survival without the intrusion of civilization. The Tarterian Depths of Carceri are a Prison Dimension home to the universe's worst traitors and exiles.
  • Sitting at the hub of the Great Wheel are the Concordant Domains of the Outlands, a True Neutral plane that borders all of the other Outer Planes and is home to the planar metropolis of Sigil, the greatest City of Adventure in all creation. And somewhere outside of this cosmology is the Far Realm, an Eldritch Location where the laws of time and space do not apply, home to any number of nightmarish horrors.
  • There's a great number of other planes that don't easily fit onto the Great Wheel, too: the Plane of Faerie, or Feywild, is a twilit land inhabited by sylvan creatures both beautiful and monstrous. The Plane of Mirrors is a specialized transitive plane that uses sets of mirrors like a Portal Network and spawns a Mirror Self of any visitor, while the Infinite Staircase can serve as an alternate way to get around the Outer Planes if you can find the right door on it. Neth isn't so much a plane as it is a massive organism. Then there are the Region of Dreams, the Temporal Energy Plane, the Elemental Plane of Wood... and if none of those are to your liking, with the right high-level magic you can just create your own demiplane to shape as you see fit.
• The Delver's Guide to Beast World, a third-party campaign setting for D&D, refers to planes as "worlds" and each one is accessed in a different way. The Broken World (humanity's original homeworld) requires either an eight-hour ritual involving several expensive ingredients including the blood of a Broken World native, or a warlock of the Ghost God. While the Dreaming can be visited simply by entering REM sleep, though going somewhere specific requires a 2nd level spell.
• Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok uses the nine worlds of Norse Mythology, located on the branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil, each one being its own dimension.
• In Atlas Games' Feng Shui, players can travel through time by means of "The Netherworld", an alternate dimension made up of gray tunnels which lead to portals which allow access to and from our world at fixed points in time and space. The Netherworld is home to refugees from alternate timelines that have been erased from reality, including four siblings who ruled the earth in an Alternate History.
• In Nomine is a natural for this trope, possessing not only a Heaven and Hell, but also a Dream World known as the Marches, and even a "no-place" called Limbo for the souls of angels/demons who were killed and unable to return to their proper realm.
• White Wolf's Old World of Darkness games featured another set of dimensions called the Umbra, which was based very strongly on human perception, to the point where a shaman and a scientist in the same part of the deep umbra would see it as a surreal swirling nexus of spirit energy populated with arcane ghosts and a section of interstellar space populated by aliens, respectively.
  • The New World of Darkness has its own sets of dimensions. There's the Shadow Realm, which is like the Umbra, only it's nearly exclusively animistic. Then there's the Underworld, which is home to dead knowledge and concepts and the place where ghosts go when they've finished their business but aren't ready to pass on to their final reward. Then there's the Abyss, which is pretty much anti-reality. Then there's the five Supernal Realms, dimensions of pure magic. Then there's the Astral Realms, which are where the collective unconscious is made flesh. Then there's Arcadia, which is not the Supernal Arcadia and is a constantly shifting chaotic wasteland that plays home to The Fair Folk. Then there's the Hedge, the predatory gateway dimension between Earth and Arcadia. And on top of all that, apparently there's Hell.
  • Genius: The Transgression has smaller Bardos — pocket worlds made of concepts disproved by science. The more prominent ones include an alien-inhabited Mars, the Hollow Earth (home to dinosaurs and cavemen and Nazis), and the Seattle of Tomorrow, which Lemuria tried to bring into this world with disastrous consequences.
• The Astral Planes of Shadowrun.
• The resistance movement in The Splinter claims that the titular game world is actually one of these.
• Jump Space in Traveler. Not much is known about it, as its main purpose is simply to justify Faster-Than-Light Travel.
• Warhammer 40,000's Warp is Another Dimension... 40k style. In essence, Hell. They use it for FTL travel. It doesn't always work. The ship might disappear then reappear, with everyone inside turned to dust from age. Or it might reappear hundreds to thousands of years later. Or appear at its destination before it left. "Time" is a funny thing in the Warp. Not funny Ha-Ha.

Video Games

• The Dark Place from Alan Wake is a bizarre realm "beyond the shores of our reality". It is home to more than a few dark entities of calamitous intentions and it is by nature "fluid", constantly shifting according to the whims and thoughts of its inhabitants; works of art created here or at contact points with our reality (such as Cauldron Lake) can influence reality by coming true. The protagonist, a novelist, writes a book that comes true over the course of the game, and once in the Dark Place itself, finds himself surrounded by words and ideas that he can turn into physical reality, and manifestations of his own fear and hopelessness coming to kill him. It's stated repeatedly that even though signals can travel from it to our reality, once you're in the Dark Place, it is next to impossible to leave, at least without bringing something terrible along with you. By the time of Alan Wake's American Nightmare, two years after the first game, Wake has become much more adept at handling the Dark Place and its inhabitants. He is able to write himself as one of the protagonist of one of his works and travel back to our reality at a point of contact (this time near a town in Arizona), but it's hinted that this is not an actual escape and it's not even clear if the events of the game actually took place.
• Siren powers in Borderlands involve other dimensions, which is why they always begin with "phase-". Of note, Lab Rat enemies in Borderlands 2 apparently see some other weird dimension, and see it more when phaselocked by Maya... which is somewhat concerning, given that the Destroyer is said to have come from another dimension, and may have some connection to Sirens...
• In City of Heroes, quite a few of the high-level missions involve visiting other dimensions or fighting invaders from them.
  • As well as the Shadow Shard, a series of 4 zones set in an alternate dimension that may very well be the mind of a god, inhabited by aspects of his personality.
  • Also, there is the interdimensional dance club Pocket D, a neutral zone where heroes and villains can get together but are incapable of attacking one another.
• Clive Barker's Undying has both Oneiros and Eternal Autumn, magical realms that are either enslaved or created by two mages in the story, Keisinger and Bethany.
• In Corpse Party, the main characters are transported to another dimension.
• The 10th Dimension in Crash Twinsanity. Containing twisted versions of (at least) N. Sanity Island and Slip-Slide Icecapades. May also count as a Dark World due to the similarities when compared to the regular dimension.
• The Darkness features a hell like world that the Darkness resides in.
• The later installments of the Dark Parables series have begun sending the detective into these. The fourth game has her visit "Fairy Tale Land," and the fifth game traps her for almost half the game in the "Mirror World."
• The existence of at least one of these (simply called 'the dark dimension') factors into the ongoing plot of the Detectives United series. It's a doomed world with an Alien Sky and "dark doppelgangers" of the three player characters.
• Duel Savior Destiny begins when Taiga and his sister are both dragged into the root world by a mysterious red book. It appears to be much smaller and less populous than Earth, but as the core world whatever happens there happens to the outer worlds eventually.
• EarthBound Beginnings has Maria's Magicant.
  • The fangame Mother: Cognitive Dissonance has Niiue's Magicant as well. It also counts as part of Giegue's mind.
  • EarthBound (1994) has both Magicant and Moonside.
• Evolve contains multiple dimensions, but only two are relevant. One is the one the game is set in, a futuristic setting where humans have expanded through the universe, and the other is a dimension without mass or corporeal form inhabited by a hive mind species of Energy Beings. The plot happens when the Reality Warping technology used by humans inadvertently devastates the corresponding areas in the other dimension, causing the energy beings to emerge into the human dimension and develop physical forms in order to eliminate the cause of the disturbance.
• Galaxy Angel begins in EDEN, which consists of a lost civilization and the Transbaal Empire; Galaxy Angel II brings in two more dimensions, ABSOLUTE and NEUE.
• The Combine from Half-Life 2 are a cabal of dimension-spanning Planet Looters, and the "nearby" — in 11-dimensional superstring terms, at least — Xen border-world is the neighboring dimension by which we discover on our own. Xen itself is nebula-like with giant floating asteroids above a bottomless void (and copious amounts of Scenery Porn). At the end of Half-Life 2 we also get a glimpse of the Combine Overworld which looks like a hellish realm dotted with multiple Citadels.
  • Xen is also used a a strong plot point since it's a necessary component for Earth-made teleporters. As Mossman explains in HL2, the Resistance "figured out how to use Xen as an unexpressed axis, effectively a "dimensional slingshot" so that we can swing around the border-world and come back into local space without having to pass through". At the end of Half-Life, the dimensional breach left by the resonance cascade was relatively tiny but enough for the Combine who forcibly tore it open and invaded (with the side effects being destructive portal storms and copious amounts of Xen fauna). It was still open in Episode Two when the Combine tried to call in reinforcements but the rebels screwed up their plans and used Black Mesa's old satellite array to seal it permanently.
  • It's worth noting that Xen isn't a "proper" universe; it's described as a "dimensional travel bottleneck", and is so small, in fact, that its atmosphere is dense enough to be breathable. Add to that the various chunks of planet and the xenofauna from a hundred different worlds, and the impression is that of a "bubble" of spacetime that someone happened to inflate and fill up with just enough material to allow habitability. It's not as unlikely as it sounds, given that we know the Nihilanth fled there to escape The Combine.
• The Kirby series has a reoccurring location, the very literally named “Another Dimension”, debuting in Kirby's Return to Dream Land in the form of various pockets of space Kirby can travel to, before going to the full dimension in the final stage. It has since reappeared in Kirby Star Allies and various spin-offs. Its appearance varies by game but it is consistently an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield, and it is home to the Sphere Doomers, bird-like creatures who feast on energy.
• In The Legend of Zelda game Hyrule Warriors, the Wind Waker world is explicitly referred to as a different dimension, whereas the other eras are treated as part of the setting's history. This is in keeping with the official timeline, as Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are on separate branches.
• April Ryan of The Longest Journey jumps between "our" world (Stark) and the mystic Arcadia repeatedly throughout the game. Interestingly, the game's backstory (explained after the first jump) describes a single world, where magic and science existed together. However, it was foreseen that utilizing both of these would result in the destruction of the world, so, with the help of the Draic Kin, the world was split into two main realities and several smaller "pockets" (either intentional or just leftovers). Stark became a world of science and logic, while Arcadia became a world of magic and chaos. Naturally, only humans beings can live in Stark, who have advanced to 20 Minutes in the Future, while Arcadia is populated by all manner of fantasy creatures but is stuck in Medieval Stasis. The barrier between the worlds must be constantly maintained, though, as it is clearly unnatural. At some point in the future, the worlds will be re-joined. The major plot point of the game is the fact that, without a Guardian to maintain the Balance, the barrier is starting to break down, with magic seeping into Stark and science seeping into Arcadia. The sequel reveals that, after a new Guardian is installed and repairs the barrier, most of the advanced tech in Stark ceases to function, implying that it's only been functioning thanks to magic (e.g. Artificial Gravity, FTL Travel). At the same time, Arcadia reverts to typical Medieval tech (with all the new "toys" spread by the Vanguard no longer working thanks to the laws of nature being in flux), except for Azadi Magitek, which uses magic to allow certain primitive pieces of technology to function.
• Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times has the spirit world, which crosses over with the real world during Mystery Time. During Mystery Time, new bugs and fish appear (including VAMPIRE SQUID), characters from the spirit world appear in the town and require your help, and Mr. Graves (the sleeping skeleton in the room with the organ and locker) wakes up to teach extracurricular classes. Oh yeah, did I mention that the sky turns an otherworldly shade of red?
• The Matrix: Path of Neo has one in the Merovingian's chateau, it has its own Bizarrchitecture floating maze inside it.
• Dark Aether of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a Death Dimension that literally sucks the life from anything that enters it. It is home to the Ing, spiderlike Legions of Hell that possess creatures of the "Light World" so that they can enter it, as our dimension is just as lethal to them.
• Minecraft has three different dimensions that can be visited by the player: the Overworld, the "ordinary" world in which the game begins; the Nether, a textbook Fire and Brimstone Hell; and the End, a spooky series of islands suspended in an endless void.
• The Mortal Kombat series is set in a universe which has many realms, Earth being one of them. The main conflict of the series comes from evil warlords and gods who want to subjugate every realm, including our own, and enslave the very souls of their people.
• The Myst games visit 'Ages' such as Stoneship (inhabited ship, embedded in an island), Mechanical (a clockwork fortress on the surface of the ocean), Riven (water on the five islands shies away from heat sources), Spire (flying, wind-carved ruinous mountains floating above a star), and Ahnonay (cleverly designed to appear to travel through time, to the uninitiated).
• Every Plane of Existence in Nexus Clash is a piece of reality pulled from the 'real' world which player characters, being trapped in the Cycle, never see to act as part of the battlefield to shape the next world. Elysium and Stygia in particular are Alternate World Maps to each other, separated only by how they are perceived.
• This was used in Puyo Puyo Fever to give a Hand Wave for how Arle appears in Primp Town, the retooled setting introduced by Sega in that game, despite Amitie being meant as her Primp Town equivalent. In the story mode, Arle explains to Amitie that she got sent way off the map during a routine round of Puyo Puyo, and Amitie thinks doing it again will send her back to where she was. In later Puyo Puyo games, dimension-hopping becomes a common plot point.
• In Runescape, there exists a series of gates to the Fairy dimension Zanaris, which itself has a central 'hub' to travel to other, decidedly more hostile dimensions, such as the Abyssal Zone, Dimension X, which is host to horned kangaroos, and even a forest. A forest dimension.
• Used in the SNES Shin Megami Tensei games a lot. Majin Tensei II had 2 alternate dimensions. Amnesia and Paranoia. Amnesia is the realm of the Angels and Paranoia is Lucifer's domain.
• Many Silent Hill fans agree that the games take place in a place which is like reality but in some crucial ways different, and the term 'alternate dimension' is a convenient term to describe this, though there are many interpretations of just what that actually means and whether 'dimension' should be replaced with some other, more accurate, term.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Rivals 2 is about Eggman Nega plotting to free a demon that was trapped in Another Dimension.
  • There's also the Twilight Cage from Sonic Chronicles, which seems to collect powerful civilizations from several dimensions.
• Two of the alien races from Star Control II come from Another Dimension: the Arilou come from Quasi Space, while the Orz come from a dimension that they refer to only as *below* (thanks to the trouble the Translator Microbes have with their language). The Arilou and the Orz might come from the same dimension, as the Orz say both of the two races are from *outside* and the Arilou are from *above* ("It is the same, but not"). It depends on the meaning of *outside*, though.
• In the original SNES Star Fox, there is a secret level titled "Out Of This Dimension" that has to be seen to be believed.
• Two alternate dimensions appear in Super Mario RPG, the Factory where the Smithy Gang came from, and Vanda, where Final Fantasy-inspired Optional Boss Culex originates from. Mario and his friends (and Bowser) only visit the Factory, the battle against Culex takes place in a rift between Vanda and the Mushroom World.
• The Super Mario World ROM Hack series The Second Reality Project features the titular Second Reality. The remake of the first game introduces Thirdspace into the plot.
• There's a very literal example in Super Paper Mario where Mario's special move is to "warp" the otherwise flat world, revealing its third dimension. There's also Bestovius, Dimentio and Merloo, who all have dimension-flipping powers! It's quite popular in this game.
• Super Robot Wars NEO treats Earth Tear from Lord of Lords Ryu Knight this way.
• The Surface game series by Elephant Games are built on this trope. The premise of the games features the protagonist getting transported to another dimension, usually by supernatural means, and figuring out how to get home. Each game has its own spin on the alternate dimension and stand alone in the series.
• Tiny Heist has the Error Dimension (it doesn't have a official name), which is a glitchy version of the place where the game usually takes place in.
• Total Distortion has alien teleporters that allow anyone to travel to countless alternate dimensions, with the added factor that every dimension embodies parts of Earth pop culture, theorized to have been created by simultaneous dreams. It becomes a cheap, efficient way to send data and freight around the world, and you spend your inheritance of millions of dollars to travel to dimension 1400556, also known as the Distortion Dimension, in order to get fresh new material for your music videos.
• Wolfenstein (2009) involves a Dark World-like dimension called "The Veil". It is our world, just viewed from an inch or so down the fourth spatial axis. But that's not the Axis you should be worried about. There's also the Black Sun Dimension, a small, unstable universe being held together by the Black Sun at its center.
• The plot of X-COM: Apocalypse revolves around aliens from Another Dimension invading through spinning geometric portals. Initially it is impossible to make the jump to their dimension without being torn to pieces, requiring that the Project reverse-engineering the alien Living Ship technology. Travelling through reveals the alien home to be a scorched, barren wasteland, the alien base a series of gigantic organic structures that must be methodically torn down to put a stop to the attacks.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal:
  • The eponymous Zanzarah is a land of magic where fairies, elves, dwarves, goblins, and other magical beings have escaped to from the witch hunts on Earth.
  • Astral plane is a pocket dimension where fairy duels take place. These arenas have various structures with increasingly bizarre architecture floating in the void, and falling into the Bottomless Pits below leads to the instant death of your fairy.

Web Animation

• While Animated Inanimate Battle mostly takes place within the Blank Slate, whch is a white-and-yellow almost-empty void, there have been other dimensions that have been seen. A notable one would be the Doodleverse which Oodle created for the eliminated players.
• Dreamscape has several. So far, there's the Possessor Ghosts realm, the Unworld, the Underworld, the Sky Dimension, Melinda's dimension, and even a Mirror Universe!
• Killer Monster from DSBT InsaniT resides in one that is essentially Hell. Psycho Man comes from some sort of evil dimension too.

Webcomics

• In Alice and the Nightmare, the Wonderland exists alongside Earth and there's some cultural exchange between the two, although it seems that Earth people don't know about Wonderland.
• Among the Chosen features planets with multiple layers of 3D space, so a planet like Earth has alternates in 4D space. Or something.
• This is the premise of Between Two Worlds.
• Blindsprings has the forest otherworld in which Tamaura lives at the start of the story.
• El Goonish Shive has a sub-plot involving alternate dimensions — however it's really just used as another name for Alternate Universes. Andrea the gryphon magic-scientist insists that her dimension and ours are the same universe, and its inaccurate to say otherwise, but nobody else really understands why.
• This is the main plot of the comic Emergency Exit.
• Enemy Quest's The Visitors opened a portal from their dimension to earth and started invading. They have their own world back in their dimension: a planet mostly covered in water with a single supercontinent à la Pangaea.
• Girl Genius: Both the home of the Geisterdamen and Zeetha's home Skifander just might be in one, while more difinitively, there are higher realms occupied by monstrous Things, one of which is slowly extending itself into the time-stopped Mechanicsburg.
• As of Act 6, Homestuck has three currently known parallel universes, two of which have an Alternate Universe apiece. Each universe also has an Incipisphere attached to it. The Incipispheres are separate from each other, but all of them are in the Furthest Ring outside normal reality. And there's also "the real world", which is inhabited by the author.
• Jenny Everywhere, the open-source subject of many webcomics, exists in all possible dimensions and can shift between them.
• Looking for Group: Richard once got banished to the Plane of Suck.
• In Planes of Eldlor, demons from another dimension are trying to break into the world.
• In RetroBlade there is a 4th Dimension where the Universal Guardian resides, and where Magnus first obtains the 4D Sword.
• Sluggy Freelance introduced the Dimensional Flux Agitator, a device that opens portals to other dimensions at random, in its second chapter. The device has been brought back many times since then, to the point where a full fledged multiverse has developed.
• Unicorn Jelly and its spinoffs are set in other-dimensional realms with their own unique physics.

Web Original

• Adylheim has a great deal of these, including a cosmarchy spanning five alternate realities.
• The Cartoon Man saga involves an Alternate Tooniverse known as the Second Dimension.
• Creturia, the parallel world from Dimension Heroes.
• The Torn World is depicted this way in Dino Attack RPG. It is a mysterious dimension where bricks go when they are torn out of the Constructopedia. For some reason every piece breaks up into single-stud bricks (though people are not affected by this phenomenon), which float in the middle of an empty void resembling space, though anything else is still affected by gravity.
• Felarya is described as a "dimensional plane". Hell and Heaven are both separate dimensions, which mimic the various belief systems of those who arrive there.
• Deconstructed in Freeman's Mind. Freeman shows a great deal of annoyance over the misuse of the word dimension.
  Gordon: I'm pretty sure these aliens are three dimensional. Probably from somewhere deep in space but space isn't another dimension!
• The Gamer's Alliance has several planes of reality, including the Land of the Living, the Land of the Dead, the Void, the High Plane, and the Demon Realm among others.
• In Keit-Ai, at least two planes of reality that serve as parallel dimensions to each other are involved in the story concept. There's the male protagonist's dimension and the alternate version of his female crush in a parallel dimension that's practically the same as his world.
• Minecraft Diaries includes 3-the Nether, The Wyvern Dimension, and Irene’s Dimension
• SCP Foundation: The Foundation has discovered a lot of these, ranging from entire worlds to alternate timelines. To name a few:
  • SCP-507 teleports to other dimensions at random and returns after a random amount of time. The Foundation has compiled a pretty long list of places he's been.
  • SCP-1557 ("Giraffe Hell"). SCP-1557 appears to be a Hell for evil giraffe souls. They are harassed and physically punished by spheres of white light (giraffe demons?), but immediately heal all wounds.
  • SCP-2922-C, or Corbenic, is a dimension consisting of a wide array of different biomes with three moons in its otherwise empty sky. The local human faction, the Three Moons Initiative, takes its name from said moons. It's also an afterlife, so nothing organic can leave and anyone who resides there has Complete Immortality regardless of whether they died to get there or not, mostly manifesting as an omnipresent Healing Factor and the only thing that can remove it are the curses of the Striders, though the documentation for SPC-2922 suggests that the Initiative has also developed their own method. The moons themselves are alternate versions of Earth from different timelines brought there by their versions of SCP-3319.
  • SCP-3409-B is a portal to a world completely overrun by a chocolate-based ecology.
• In Worm and its sequel, Ward:
  • A Gadgeteer Genius named Haywire managed to make a communications link between two Alternate Timelines — they are then dubbed Earth Aleph and Earth Bet.
  • Later, people figure out how to use parahuman powers to create portals to over a dozen different parallel Earths. Following the devastation of Earth Bet, the survivors flee to Earth Gimel and a bunch of other uninhabited Earths, while trade and diplomacy is opened with Earth Shin and Earth Cheit, both of which have thriving human civilizations.
  • Ward also introduces the unnamed... place that the powers themselves originate from, dubbed "Shardspace" by the fans. It appears to be different in nature from parallel timelines, and it resembles an endless landscape of dark red crystals through which frequent bursts of energy flow like lightning. The alien beings that grant parahuman powers live within the crystals, which seem to act like an absolutely massive supercomputer.

Web Video

• Dynamo Dream: The Dynamo reality consists of multiple universes known as States. Travel between them is facilitated by interdimensional gates called "drift depots", although certain people have the capability to drift on their own without needing a ship or a depot.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time has Lumpy Space, the Land of the Dead (plus at least forty-nine other dead worlds apparently), the Crystal Dimension, and the Nightosphere.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has the Spirit World, a dimension parallel to the one the characters live in. It's home to most of the Avatar world's spirits, and the former incarnations of the Avatar itself, and seems to operate on a completely different kind of physics. The titular Avatar is the bridge between the show's two dimensions, as a fusion of a human and the Big Good spirit of light and peace, Raava. We only ever see Aang visit the Spirit World, but Sokka apparently got stuck there for 24 hours, and it's heavily implied that Iroh has been there as well, presumably indicating anyone can get there if they try hard enough. There are also several spirits (Wan Shi Tong, Tui, La, and Hei Bai) who have visited the physical world.
  • The Legend of Korra expands the Spirit World first seen in Avatar. After his death, Iroh Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence and ended up there. Spirit portals are opened and created, leading to thousands of spirits living in the material world, and many regular people like Zaheer, Aiwei, and Jinora are capable of meditating there.
• In Barbie and the Secret Door, the Secret Door leads to the magical kingdom of Zinnia.
• Defenders of the Earth includes a few examples:
  • Shogoth, the demon from "A Demon in His Pocket", evidently comes from another dimension. However, the dimension in question is only glimpsed briefly towards the end when Shogoth decides he would rather go home than serve Ming - and have to face the Defenders again.
  • The Shadow Void from "The Evil of Doctor Dark" and its sequel, "The Return of Doctor Dark"
  • The Nightworld from "Doorways into Darkness", where Ming plans to unleash the Night Giants on Earth
  • Bodhidama from "The Gods Awake". Mandrake lures the destroyer god Shiva into Bodhidama, but seems set to lose the battle (and his life) until his mentor contacts him and tells him that, while he is in Bodhidama, his normally illusory powers are real.
  • The Land of Magic from "The Mystery of the Book", the last episode in the "Book of Enigmas" arc
  • Graviton, the main antagonist in the "Necklace of Oros" arc, comes to Earth from another dimension to reclaim the titular necklace, which spends most of the arc in Jedda's possession.
• Dr. Dimensionpants features multiple other dimensions that excist besides the one the hero hails from.
• The title hero of Fangbone! (and the original Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian books) hails from one called Skullbania, a Sword and Sorcery world full of barbarians, monsters, wizards, and the like. Also, it's a geocentric system with three suns and two moons.
• Frankelda's Book of Spooks has Topus Terrentus, an alternate dimension home to monsters and creatures collectively known as Spooks, which has become dependent on storytelling and dreams/nightmares sent to the human realm to exist.
• The Cowboy Universe from Futurama is identical to our own, except everyone is dressed like a cowboy. While it's described as the only parallel universe in existence, later episodes RetConned it. So it's most likely an Alternate Dimension, given that it's viewable from the edge of the universe.
• Gravity Falls's main villain Bill Cipher is a dream demon from another dimension named the Nightmare Realm. He is originally from the second dimension (thus why he looks like a triangle) and wants to merge the Nightmare Realm with our universe, the third dimension, thus causing the End of the World.
• Justice League deals with alternate dimensions quite a bit, to the point they've basically become Fantastically Indifferent to them. It leads to one of the show's funnier moments when the League is battling some villains and they get zapped to an alternate dimension: Copperhead is panicked while Green Lantern is pretty calm:
  Green Lantern: Relax. We're probably just in another dimension.
  Copperhead: Oh! Is THAT all?!
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The show explores this a few times in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's Shendu's extradimensional dragon minions, the Shadow Realm where the Shadowkhan reside, the Netherworld where the Demon Sorcerers are imprisoned, and also that amphibian-creature that thought Jade was lunch.
• In Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures episode "Other Space," scientists open a portal to another dimension, complete with inhabitants that want to take over our dimension.
• In The Magic Trolls and the Troll Warriors the Magic Village is a world separated from the normal Trolls' world via magic.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has done this a lot. The human world where Equestria Girls takes place and Tartarus may count (it's anyone's guess), but the starry realm that Twilight went to when she ascended to alicorn status definitely does. Also, in 'Make New Friends but Keep Discord' it is revealed Discord can open portals into other dimensions, one of which he lives in, and one of which contains live-action sock puppets. He can also create pocket dimensions, which he does to bring Spike and Big Macintosh's not quite Dungeons and Dragons game to life.
• The eponymous backpack of Ollie's Pack contains one known as the Monsterverse, an entire alien galaxy populated by all manner of monsters. Ollie and his friends take care of creatures that escape from the Monsterverse and end up on arth by sucking them into the Monster Pack.
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero revolves around three Punch Clock Heroes who have to travel to other dimensions and take over the bodies of various denizens in order to save the world they're in.
• Several episodes of The Real Ghostbusters deal with other dimensions, many of the "ghosts" seen in the show are not really spirits of the dead but life forms from other dimensions. Some of the episodes that deal with this are: Flip Side (which also works as the Mirror Universe episode) with a world were ghost are normal citizens and humans are the ones that scares, Venkman's Ghost Repellers shows a Bermuda Triangle expy called The New Jersey Parallelogram, Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional? shows that there is an entire dimension inhabitated by cartoon characters, Chicken, He Clucked shows a multiverse with many dimensions and one of them has all the chickens in the world after a man who hate chickens make a Deal with the Devil in order to make them disappear from Earth, The Cabinet of Calamari shows a dimension connected troughout a magician's box and You Can't Teach an Old Demon New Tricks similar to the latter, a demon living in other dimension connected through a magician's cabinet wants to learn magic tricks but is unable to as only magicians assistants and white doves come from the cabinet until the Ghosbusters get there, etc. Even the Containment Unit can be considered another dimension as is Bigger on the Inside and seems to be a ghostly realm.
• One famous Halloween episode of The Simpsons has Homer entering the third dimension. After causing that dimension to collapse, he ends up in the "real" world, "the worst place yet." Like many Simpsons Halloween sketches, this was a parody of a The Twilight Zone (1959) episode.
• Star Butterfly from Star vs. the Forces of Evil is from one of these, called Mewni and based heavily off of standard fantasy settings. It's even in the show's Theme Song. The characters also visit several others in the course of the series.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) had the villainous Krang who came from "Dimension X", a world accessible through glowing portals.
  • The anniversary movie Turtles Forever posits that every incarnation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes from a different dimension, and that there is a "Turtle Prime" dimension from whence all TMNT dimensions originate.
  • The Kraang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) also come from another dimension and are trying to terraform Earth to look more like their home planet. It's also revealed that they can generate Cool Gates to different dimensions, including the one of the 1987 universe.
• Raven from Teen Titans (2003) comes from one of these. She has threatened to deport Beast Boy to Another Dimension. She goes to what certainly looks like Another Dimension to deliver a glorified cell phone. Maybe it's so easy for her because she is a living, humanoid interdimensional portal.
• In the W.I.T.C.H. (2004) TV show and comics that inspired it the Five Girl Band are appointed as Guardians of the Veil (later Guardians of the Infinite Dimensions in the show to police their Multiverse and prevent various bad guys and the occasional Eldritch Abomination from messing things up. In this case "dimensions" seems to mean planes of existence instead of alternate universes as Human Aliens are rarely encountered. Most dimensions fit the fantasy archetype to some degree or another but one world in the comics was an almost literal case of Alien Geometries.
• Yam Roll: Yam Roll thinks that he's sent to one after eating too much chocolate and speeding through a tunnel into the aftermath of a pie-eating contest.

Real Life

• In string theory, which is the highly speculative Hot New Thing in theoretical physics for the last few years, our visible cosmos is located in a ten- or eleven-dimensional hyperspace, which may contain an arbitrary number of other continua, with varying kinds of matter, forces, and numbers of dimensions.
• Similar to the above the "broader" multiverse theory posits that the multiverse can contain anything, including what to our universe would be impossible or illogical due to not having to abide by our particular natural laws. Said arrangement, if infinite, would produce countless dimensions of, well, everything.

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