Welcome to the Red Sargassum Dream. Follow it down... down... down.
Look around: this is what will be. We're dreaming it all together. Impressive, isn't it? You see, nothing has to change. It's all the same as they remember it.
Look around: this is what will be. We're dreaming it all together. Impressive, isn't it? You see, nothing has to change. It's all the same as they remember it.
— The Dreamers, The Secret World
A rotted reflection of the living world sits just beyond the barrier between the world of the living of the living and the world of the dead. This world resembles the living world... with some important differences.
— Mage: The Dark Ages - Core Rulebook (revised)
"This test will take place in an urban area that you may find familiar. Beware the darkness, for things may... emerge from it. To watch your step goes without saying, but please watch your head as well."
— C. Q. Cumber, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion
Worlebury-juxta-Mare has become a corpse. The run-down bones of its forgotten attractions swarm with bedraggled men and women, all armed with cleaning equipment. This is where the workers of Worlebury live and labour to create the gaudy frontage seen by tourists. The beach is now a decaying mess — visited only by the cultists who attend the chapel there.
"This whole town... it's being invaded by the Otherworld. By a world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life. Little by little the invasion is spreading... trying to swallow up everything in darkness."
— Harry Mason, Silent Hill
Constantine got up and looked around. The room was the same — and yet very different: The TV was there, turned on, showing what appeared to be a tape loop of Nazi footage from Dachau. The paintings were leering clowns, painted in prison by the child killer John Wayne Gacy. The plants were dead-white, and restlessly stretching, snuffling... The ottoman was what would happen if you could put a human being in a trash compactor and have something alive afterward. It wept and tried to creep away. The recliner was made of human skin... including living faces. The cat was gone now — but no, he could see its eyes, the entire orbs, floating in the air, blinking at him curiously. It wasn't in this place in the same way he was.
He felt a blast of hot air and turned a bit more to see that one wall had been mostly torn away, as if a bombshell had hit it. From beyond the gap came a sickly sepia glow...
He felt a blast of hot air and turned a bit more to see that one wall had been mostly torn away, as if a bombshell had hit it. From beyond the gap came a sickly sepia glow...
— Constantine: The Novelization
If I looked down, I was looking up through the puddles at the blue sky of Fillory. If I looked up, there was only darkness overhead. It was nighttime in the world under the Northern Marsh, and before me, across a flat plain of black mud and sun-filled puddles, was a fairy castle made of black stone. Its towers pointed down instead of up, but so did everything, including me. This was new. Martin had taken us somewhere truly strange. Fillory was a land of wonders, but this place had an uncanny quality that I can only describe as not correct. It was a place that shouldn't have been, somewhere off the edge of the board, where you weren't meant to put a playing piece down. This wasn't an ordinary adventure, another legend in the making. I knew already that Plover would never hear about it. This was happening off the books.
— Rupert Chatwin, The Magician's Land
"The Vale of Shadows is a dimension that is a dark reflection or echo of our world. It is a place of decay and death. A plane out of phase. A place of monsters. It is right next to you, and you don't even see it."
— Dustin Henderson (reading from a D&D manual), Stranger Things, "Chapter 5: The Flea and the Acrobat"
