Essay: Psychodrama and Realitymashing
Mar. 31st, 2026 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leePsychodrama and Realitymashing (by Rogan)
Series: Essay
Summary: my favorite genre that doesn't exist.
Word Count: 3114
Notes: Winner of the March 2026 fan poll! This essay builds on my previous realitymashing essay, “All Narrators are Unreliable,” and you’d be best-served reading that first. This essay is dedicated to Sam Kieth, the original champion of comics realitymashing, who died March 15th. Sam Kieth’s work on Zero Girl and the Maxx are what originally inspired us to make comics, and our work as you know it wouldn’t exist if not for him. Rest well, titan.
What is psychodrama?
One of my favorite genres, though it doesn’t formally exist as far as I know, I call psychodrama: a person working through their own (or someone else’s) mind, memory, or imagination, made into “real” places or people. (“Real,” for the purposes of this essay, means, “must be dealt with and taken seriously.”) Examples include:
• Kikyama’s Yume Nikki (surreal computer game)
• Sam Kieth, William Messner-Loeb, and Liquid Television’s the Maxx (superhero comic and cartoon)
• the American McGee’s Alice series (horror/action computer games and stop-motion animation)
• Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (sci-fi animated movie)
• Harlan Ellison’s Mefisto in Onyx (telepathic crime novella)
• arguably George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (nostalgic novel)
• kouri’s Ib (adventure/horror game)
• Marv Wolfman’s the Oz Encounter (pulp novel)
• Piers Anthony and Julie Brady’s Dream a Little Dream (fantasy novel)
• Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein’s Nearly Roadkill (queer cyberpunk/romance novel)
Dream worlds/people are most common in psychodrama (Yume Nikki, Dream a Little Dream), but there are also realms/folks of madness (the Alice series), cyberspace (Nearly Roadkill), art (Ib, the Oz Encounter) or subconsciously archetypal (the Maxx). Some works even combine multiple types—Peter Ibbetson melds dream, memory, and time-travel, while Paprika throws everything into the pot: dreams, memory, cyberspace, film, madness, and death.
Psychodrama meshes well with other genres and transcends medium. Psychodrama stories range in tone from happy fun to ambiguous/bittersweet to tragic. All share a respect for the “unreal,” dignifying it with moral weight. It matters.
What is realitymashing?
If psychodrama is a genre, then realitymashing is a separate but complementary technique, that of purposely muddying the idea of what is “real” for both characters and audience. A common example is a character waking up from a terrible nightmare, expressing relief, only for the seemingly normal world around them to gradually distort, making everyone realize that the nightmare hasn’t ended.
I’ve already talked pretty thoroughly about realitymashing techniques in comics in “All Narrators are Unreliable.” Film, especially cartoons, use a lot of the same tricks, but I see it less often in live-action film, probably because it tends to treat the camera as a purely objective observer who can’t experience psychological distortion. There are of course exceptions, like the bending landscape of Inception, the diegetic (real to the characters) narration of Stranger than Fiction, the viscerally incorrect way that rooms link up in houses of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but they tend to be considered unusual for it. And video games can do everything film does, but interactive; one famous realitymashing trick from Eternal Darkness is when the game pretends to crash and delete your saves if your sanity gets too low.
In prose, realitymashing is doable, but it requires different tricks, most of them expensive or unfashionable. The 1996 version of Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure juggles its various realms of email, chat rooms, web diaries, and unplugged life with at least 6 body fonts. The 2025 edition sticks with only two, presumably for e-reader accessibility, but at the expense of making it way easier for the reader to get lost. Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, in some blessed editions, uses type in different colors: green for events in Fantastica, reddish-purple for the “real” world. The book within the book, also called the Neverending Story, is stated to be in the same colors, creating a literary Droste effect: the reader is reading a red and green book called the Neverending Story about a boy reading a red and green book called the Neverending Story, implying that the reader could be the next hero of Fantastica. Unfortunately, printing in color is expensive; most editions use plain black text in Roman and italic styles instead, much inferior.
For the poor writer of simple means, there’s taking the long way around. In Spider Robinson’s “Post Toast,” for example, Spider writes himself into his own Callahan series for a moment so he can talk to his doppelganger (and series protagonist) Jake, plus the rest of the cast, about how they all have been rewritten on alt.callahans on Usenet:
“As most of you know, I come from […] a different ‘ficton’—a different dimension, a different reality—than this one. […] I visit this ficton every few years, and get Jake there stoned, and transmute what he tells me about you into stories […]. So in my ficton there are a lot of people who have this preposterous idea that I invented all of you, that you are just figments and figwoments of my imagination. […] Well, I recently learned that, to humble me, God created yet another ficton […] called USENET—and in that ficton, some people seem to have the idea that Spider Robinson is a fictional character they invented. They’re apparently engaged in rewriting me as they speak…”
The story was written expressly to be posted on alt.callahans. Now there’s plain-text realitymashing for you! But it’s clunky and inelegant.
Realitymashing can be used for gags (see “All Narrators Are Unreliable,”) horror (the neverending nightmare), to show the subjectivity of memory (Alice’s house is always burning, in her mind), a sense of deep sensory richness (the blimp/whale scene of the Maxx)… even intimacy. Sullivan and Bornstein’s self-insert protagonists of Nearly Roadkill can be all their different selves with each other—fighting Star Trek lesbians or horny gay men or vicious vampiric crone and adoring cross-dressing girl/boy—but then they struggle with meeting offline, with being restricted to one self and the questions: what self/s are the real one/s, if any? (To add on to this, the original edition held a lot of their original chat logs, blurring distinction between fiction and nonfiction.)
Realitymashing and psychodrama go together like fine wine and fancy cheese, but they don’t require each other. Yume Nikki is high psychodrama but has hardly any realitymashing at all, while Eternal Darkness uses realitymashing sanity effects but has no psychodrama.
All that is preface. Now: how do psychodrama and realitymashing fail?
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
I daresay most people have felt cheated when a story ends with the main character waking up and declaring, “thank goodness, it was only a dream!” Such endings can undercut the entire point of the story, consigning them to the rubbish bin of amusing nonsense. There’s a reason we don’t own the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie anymore, but do own the far-less-famous, far-less-adored ‘80s pseudo-sequel, Return to Oz, where Dorothy escapes a mental institution into Oz, and Ozma remains in contact with her even after her return to Kansas.
If you’re going to make a psychodrama, embrace the bit. Take that reality by the horns. The whole power of psychodrama is “unreal” things having real consequences. Yume Nikki is a tragedy that ends with the protagonist’s suicide, leaving the player with nothing but surreal, seemingly nonsensical dreams to answer why. It’s unsettling, upsetting; players and fans must fend for themselves… not unlike how survivors are left after a suicide.
Yume Nikki has the most localized stakes and consequences: one person’s life. Paprika goes far broader, putting the whole of reality at stake as the villain works to merge life and death, dreaming and waking, self and other, all of reality into a singularity he controls. The heroes defeat him through temporary, more consensual mergings of self and other, waking and dreaming, allowing life its messy complexities. It even leads to a wedding, announced by the bride’s headmate via cyberspace: a shouting affirmation of the power and importance of a many-layered reality! A happier ending there never was, despite the deaths and property damage.
And in the middle, between happy and tragic, you have Alice: Madness Returns. After her own escape from a mental institution (though by conquering her Wonderland, rather than embracing it like Dorothy), Alice has been in therapy, trying to live a normal life, suppressing her Wonderland and forgetting her heartbreak…. which unbeknownst to her, her therapist had a terrible hand in. Alice realizes, excises his influence from her mind, defeats him in both worlds, and the game ends with her walking into a mishmash landscape, the brick and industry of grimy London encrusted with the giant fungus and toys of Wonderland. The soundtrack even calls the song for this sequence “Into Londerland.” Children are saved, and Alice is triumphant… at the cost of even the hope for a normal life. The last scene shows Alice wandering into the melded landscape, fading to black, while the Cheshire Cat narrates: “Ah, Alice, we can’t go home again. No surprise, really. […] Forgetting is convenient. Remembering[…], agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering. And our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory… for now.”
Tragic or happy, individual or epic, these psychodramas have consequences. They don’t disappear upon waking. The creators follow them through to the end, and their audiences with them.
Hate You, Hate Kansas, Taking the Dog: Escapism
Much psychodrama is (or accused of being) escapism, a pleasant consequence-free vacation from the hardship of life. Peter Ibbetson is at the extreme end of this—the titular protagonist states outright that his “outer” life, doing hard labor for life in prison, is nothing but “a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of each night” of his “inner life” (244). Indeed, in Peter Ibbetson, it is the “real” world that is the waking dream, while Peter’s joy and meaning, his true life, is all done in dreams, shared with his wife in a frozen-in-amber reconstruction of their childhood neighborhood, complete with family and neighbors they can never touch or interact with, endless replays from that idyllic time.
But even Peter Ibbetson has consequences! Peter acts as sounding board and co-planner for his wife’s many noble deeds in “outer life,” and her death causes him such bereavement that he goes mad and attempts suicide. And while his deceased wife does make it back to him a smattering of times, their idyll can never be rebuilt; Peter must find new purpose and meaning, which he does by recording everything she ever taught him.
More common escapism comes in the form of Dream A Little Dream, where the book ends with protagonist Nona revealing that she can make her two most beloved dream folk “real,” though the human Prince Mich will lose his title and Spirit the unicorn/pegasus his wings and horn. And, of course, there’s the common “hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog” route, where the dreary, gray, “real” world is abandoned wholesale for the superior fantasy one—though this happens comparatively rarely in psychodrama, oddly.
Escapism has its place. We devoured Dream a Little Dream as children, and I still find Peter Ibbetson enchanting. But as we’ve aged, I’ve grown more interested in stories where realities aren’t ranked hierarchically, avoiding the easy binaries of real/fantasy, magic/mundane, better/worse. American McGee’s Alice’s London and Wonderland are equally dangerous and equally unavoidable. Nearly Roadkill’s protagonists, Scratch and Wink, must learn to negotiate all their cyberspace and meatspace needs, selves, allies, and communities to escape the government and its charges of high treason. Paprika is all about embracing all layers of reality.
It is strangely difficult to find stories like that, though. Usually, one world must be denigrated or left behind. It’s like our society can’t bear the thought of that ambiguity, that equality. Why is that?
The Collective Mythic vs. the Idiosyncratic
When building another realm that acts as foil to the “real” one, there are a few ways it can go: freestanding world obeying its own strict rules, collective mythic, or the individual idiosyncratic. All three types can be mixed and matched.
A freestanding, rules-based world can be less a psychodrama than a portal fantasy or isekai. The story can get more focused on the mechanics of the world, rather than the psyches they reflect. Peter Ibbetson and his beloved Mary, for instance, spend many happy years and pages exploring things like dream-world time travel, psychogenetics, and the building of imaginary architecture. These things still build on the core emotional themes of nostalgia and ethnic dislocation, but a reader could ignore that fine.
A collective mythic world relies more on greater cultural symbols and archetypes: religion, folklore, art, any shared set of symbols will do, as long as the story transforms what it references. Messner-Loebs and Kieth really love using Jungian ideas in the Maxx, who is simultaneously superhero (a symbol of individual power), bum (supposedly a symbol of individual failure), and accident victim (a symbol of helplessness and victimization). Despite being the title character, he himself is formed by and trapped in the unconscious Outback of Julie/the Leopard Queen. Their symbols and others are constantly crashing against each other, blurring and melding until finally, their entire reality blows up and resets, hopefully to a better end. (The cartoon, in my opinion, ends more satisfyingly, with the Maxx leaving the story he is trapped in, freeing himself to hopefully a better life, rather than forever pining for Julie).
The Oz Encounter is a more accessible example of a collective mythic world, with a pulp hero super-psychologist diving into the comatose dreams of a little girl who’s an Oz fan, trying to find the reason for her state. Seeing how she reinterprets the characters (why is the Shaggy Man a villain? what happened to Glinda?) is a core part of the plot, rewarding fans of the Oz books while also giving them something new. And the computer game the Binding of Isaac is crammed to the rafters with twisted Christian symbolism as the protagonist wrestles with religious shame, abuse, and the problem of evil. They aren’t just Oz and Jesus repeated, but reinvented.
Finally, there are the psychodramas that rely on the individual quirks of the characters involved. Ib invents wholesale an artist and his works, the latter of which come to life and abduct the titular protagonist. There’s no ready-made cultural hook like Oz or the Bible; it’s up to the player to get acquainted with the paintings, dolls, and roses that populate the Fabricated World, trusting that the pay-off will be worth it. Paprika similarly spends no small amount of time with the cop character’s youthful foray into filmmaking, which still haunts his dreams at night. The audience is expected to know no more about these things than the other characters; they just have to trust it’s important enough to pay attention to.
If these sources—mythic or idiosyncratic—aren’t well-anchored to character, culture, or fleshed into a freestanding but consistent world, the psychodrama will likely fail, feeling like meaningless nonsense. (This was my problem with Jonathan Carroll’s Bones of the Moon.) A collective mythic world reaps the benefits of familiarity but easily becomes Ready Player One, endlessly mentioning and riding the coattails of better work. Idiosyncratic stories avoid that particular shortcoming, but at the risk of incomprehensible self-indulgence, only of interest to the writer.
Why Does This Matter?
Psychodrama can fail in many ways. But when it succeeds… oh, when it succeeds! No other genre can bind setting to character to plot so elegantly. In psychodrama, setting is character is plot. Stripped of psychodrama, the store of Alice: Madness Returns is: Alice realizes her shrink is evil, pushes him in front of a train, and leaves. Without psychodrama, the audience wonders, “what took her so long?” With psychodrama, the player needn’t ask, because they have helped Alice fight her way through the pretty distractions of the Wonderland Woods, the frozen wastes of cynical numbness, the endless rehashing of scars of the asylum and Queensland, the dawning horrible realization of the Doll House and factory. They have, with Alice, found secret memory fragments hidden all over Wonderland and defeated the Dollmaker. All of these steps had to happen before Alice could shove the good doctor in front of the train—itself the relentless symbol of British scientific progress that is also his vehicle in Wonderland, symbolizing his influence.
Character becomes setting becomes plot. Mind becomes matter and more mind. Inner mastery becomes external mastery becomes something more. Alice’s arc in the series goes from her being trapped inside her hostile Wonderland and an asylum (American McGee’s Alice), to escaping both only to become a bystander again to the exploitation of the children around her (Alice: Madness Returns), to triumphing over that and helping other people with their own Wonderlands (Alice: Otherlands). The hounded patient becomes the scarred healer. No other genre can deliver that kind of arc so viscerally and satisfyingly, because the business of inner exploration, mastery, and healing is no longer a purely abstract, intellectual exercise. It becomes concrete. It becomes real.
It is tempting, both in fiction and reality, to keep the inner and outer life, the “real” and the “imaginary,” strictly separate. There are many people out there who think a mental problem is best solved by refusing to dignify its existence, that inner mastery is nothing but navel-gazing time-wasting. Psychodrama at its most satisfying refutes this. Paprika and Astuko save Paprika’s world because being multi, they are the most adept at navigating the psyche-delic surreality around them—indeed, that’s Paprika’s home base! Scratch and Wink, by crashing through all the emotional messiness of cyberspace, don’t just deal with their own issues but deepen their own relationship and cause an Internet general strike. Alice would’ve stayed in denial, unable to see past her own pain to help those around her, if not for Wonderland.
I live at the crossroads of at least three different worlds, all of which enrich me, all but one of which are considered not real. When I read psychodrama, I see lives like mine, loves like mine, triumphs like mine. Even at its most tragic, like Yume Nikki, psychodrama is a warning: ignore the “unreal” at your own peril. Even the most terrifying of nightmares may be trying to say something important.
As I write this essay, there are cultural wars raging throughout my country, and a lot of it is fought in the realm of myth, mind, and symbol. The Trump of MAGA myth is completely divorced from the bloviating windbag, corrupt friend to Epstein, and rapist of the “real” world; a lot of people, on both sides of the political aisle, do not realize or understand that, and thus do not fight him effectively. Part of why we are in this horrifying mess, I think, is because we’ve neglected our inner worlds, leaving the perfect void for a tyrant to fill with a mythic idea of himself.
And so I think that psychodrama has an especially relevant lesson for Americans here and now: mind your Wonderlands before they consume you.
Series: Essay
Summary: my favorite genre that doesn't exist.
Word Count: 3114
Notes: Winner of the March 2026 fan poll! This essay builds on my previous realitymashing essay, “All Narrators are Unreliable,” and you’d be best-served reading that first. This essay is dedicated to Sam Kieth, the original champion of comics realitymashing, who died March 15th. Sam Kieth’s work on Zero Girl and the Maxx are what originally inspired us to make comics, and our work as you know it wouldn’t exist if not for him. Rest well, titan.
What is psychodrama?
One of my favorite genres, though it doesn’t formally exist as far as I know, I call psychodrama: a person working through their own (or someone else’s) mind, memory, or imagination, made into “real” places or people. (“Real,” for the purposes of this essay, means, “must be dealt with and taken seriously.”) Examples include:
• Kikyama’s Yume Nikki (surreal computer game)
• Sam Kieth, William Messner-Loeb, and Liquid Television’s the Maxx (superhero comic and cartoon)
• the American McGee’s Alice series (horror/action computer games and stop-motion animation)
• Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (sci-fi animated movie)
• Harlan Ellison’s Mefisto in Onyx (telepathic crime novella)
• arguably George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (nostalgic novel)
• kouri’s Ib (adventure/horror game)
• Marv Wolfman’s the Oz Encounter (pulp novel)
• Piers Anthony and Julie Brady’s Dream a Little Dream (fantasy novel)
• Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein’s Nearly Roadkill (queer cyberpunk/romance novel)
Dream worlds/people are most common in psychodrama (Yume Nikki, Dream a Little Dream), but there are also realms/folks of madness (the Alice series), cyberspace (Nearly Roadkill), art (Ib, the Oz Encounter) or subconsciously archetypal (the Maxx). Some works even combine multiple types—Peter Ibbetson melds dream, memory, and time-travel, while Paprika throws everything into the pot: dreams, memory, cyberspace, film, madness, and death.
Psychodrama meshes well with other genres and transcends medium. Psychodrama stories range in tone from happy fun to ambiguous/bittersweet to tragic. All share a respect for the “unreal,” dignifying it with moral weight. It matters.
What is realitymashing?
If psychodrama is a genre, then realitymashing is a separate but complementary technique, that of purposely muddying the idea of what is “real” for both characters and audience. A common example is a character waking up from a terrible nightmare, expressing relief, only for the seemingly normal world around them to gradually distort, making everyone realize that the nightmare hasn’t ended.
I’ve already talked pretty thoroughly about realitymashing techniques in comics in “All Narrators are Unreliable.” Film, especially cartoons, use a lot of the same tricks, but I see it less often in live-action film, probably because it tends to treat the camera as a purely objective observer who can’t experience psychological distortion. There are of course exceptions, like the bending landscape of Inception, the diegetic (real to the characters) narration of Stranger than Fiction, the viscerally incorrect way that rooms link up in houses of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but they tend to be considered unusual for it. And video games can do everything film does, but interactive; one famous realitymashing trick from Eternal Darkness is when the game pretends to crash and delete your saves if your sanity gets too low.
In prose, realitymashing is doable, but it requires different tricks, most of them expensive or unfashionable. The 1996 version of Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure juggles its various realms of email, chat rooms, web diaries, and unplugged life with at least 6 body fonts. The 2025 edition sticks with only two, presumably for e-reader accessibility, but at the expense of making it way easier for the reader to get lost. Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, in some blessed editions, uses type in different colors: green for events in Fantastica, reddish-purple for the “real” world. The book within the book, also called the Neverending Story, is stated to be in the same colors, creating a literary Droste effect: the reader is reading a red and green book called the Neverending Story about a boy reading a red and green book called the Neverending Story, implying that the reader could be the next hero of Fantastica. Unfortunately, printing in color is expensive; most editions use plain black text in Roman and italic styles instead, much inferior.
For the poor writer of simple means, there’s taking the long way around. In Spider Robinson’s “Post Toast,” for example, Spider writes himself into his own Callahan series for a moment so he can talk to his doppelganger (and series protagonist) Jake, plus the rest of the cast, about how they all have been rewritten on alt.callahans on Usenet:
“As most of you know, I come from […] a different ‘ficton’—a different dimension, a different reality—than this one. […] I visit this ficton every few years, and get Jake there stoned, and transmute what he tells me about you into stories […]. So in my ficton there are a lot of people who have this preposterous idea that I invented all of you, that you are just figments and figwoments of my imagination. […] Well, I recently learned that, to humble me, God created yet another ficton […] called USENET—and in that ficton, some people seem to have the idea that Spider Robinson is a fictional character they invented. They’re apparently engaged in rewriting me as they speak…”
The story was written expressly to be posted on alt.callahans. Now there’s plain-text realitymashing for you! But it’s clunky and inelegant.
Realitymashing can be used for gags (see “All Narrators Are Unreliable,”) horror (the neverending nightmare), to show the subjectivity of memory (Alice’s house is always burning, in her mind), a sense of deep sensory richness (the blimp/whale scene of the Maxx)… even intimacy. Sullivan and Bornstein’s self-insert protagonists of Nearly Roadkill can be all their different selves with each other—fighting Star Trek lesbians or horny gay men or vicious vampiric crone and adoring cross-dressing girl/boy—but then they struggle with meeting offline, with being restricted to one self and the questions: what self/s are the real one/s, if any? (To add on to this, the original edition held a lot of their original chat logs, blurring distinction between fiction and nonfiction.)
Realitymashing and psychodrama go together like fine wine and fancy cheese, but they don’t require each other. Yume Nikki is high psychodrama but has hardly any realitymashing at all, while Eternal Darkness uses realitymashing sanity effects but has no psychodrama.
All that is preface. Now: how do psychodrama and realitymashing fail?
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
I daresay most people have felt cheated when a story ends with the main character waking up and declaring, “thank goodness, it was only a dream!” Such endings can undercut the entire point of the story, consigning them to the rubbish bin of amusing nonsense. There’s a reason we don’t own the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie anymore, but do own the far-less-famous, far-less-adored ‘80s pseudo-sequel, Return to Oz, where Dorothy escapes a mental institution into Oz, and Ozma remains in contact with her even after her return to Kansas.
If you’re going to make a psychodrama, embrace the bit. Take that reality by the horns. The whole power of psychodrama is “unreal” things having real consequences. Yume Nikki is a tragedy that ends with the protagonist’s suicide, leaving the player with nothing but surreal, seemingly nonsensical dreams to answer why. It’s unsettling, upsetting; players and fans must fend for themselves… not unlike how survivors are left after a suicide.
Yume Nikki has the most localized stakes and consequences: one person’s life. Paprika goes far broader, putting the whole of reality at stake as the villain works to merge life and death, dreaming and waking, self and other, all of reality into a singularity he controls. The heroes defeat him through temporary, more consensual mergings of self and other, waking and dreaming, allowing life its messy complexities. It even leads to a wedding, announced by the bride’s headmate via cyberspace: a shouting affirmation of the power and importance of a many-layered reality! A happier ending there never was, despite the deaths and property damage.
And in the middle, between happy and tragic, you have Alice: Madness Returns. After her own escape from a mental institution (though by conquering her Wonderland, rather than embracing it like Dorothy), Alice has been in therapy, trying to live a normal life, suppressing her Wonderland and forgetting her heartbreak…. which unbeknownst to her, her therapist had a terrible hand in. Alice realizes, excises his influence from her mind, defeats him in both worlds, and the game ends with her walking into a mishmash landscape, the brick and industry of grimy London encrusted with the giant fungus and toys of Wonderland. The soundtrack even calls the song for this sequence “Into Londerland.” Children are saved, and Alice is triumphant… at the cost of even the hope for a normal life. The last scene shows Alice wandering into the melded landscape, fading to black, while the Cheshire Cat narrates: “Ah, Alice, we can’t go home again. No surprise, really. […] Forgetting is convenient. Remembering[…], agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering. And our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory… for now.”
Tragic or happy, individual or epic, these psychodramas have consequences. They don’t disappear upon waking. The creators follow them through to the end, and their audiences with them.
Hate You, Hate Kansas, Taking the Dog: Escapism
Much psychodrama is (or accused of being) escapism, a pleasant consequence-free vacation from the hardship of life. Peter Ibbetson is at the extreme end of this—the titular protagonist states outright that his “outer” life, doing hard labor for life in prison, is nothing but “a much-needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of each night” of his “inner life” (244). Indeed, in Peter Ibbetson, it is the “real” world that is the waking dream, while Peter’s joy and meaning, his true life, is all done in dreams, shared with his wife in a frozen-in-amber reconstruction of their childhood neighborhood, complete with family and neighbors they can never touch or interact with, endless replays from that idyllic time.
But even Peter Ibbetson has consequences! Peter acts as sounding board and co-planner for his wife’s many noble deeds in “outer life,” and her death causes him such bereavement that he goes mad and attempts suicide. And while his deceased wife does make it back to him a smattering of times, their idyll can never be rebuilt; Peter must find new purpose and meaning, which he does by recording everything she ever taught him.
More common escapism comes in the form of Dream A Little Dream, where the book ends with protagonist Nona revealing that she can make her two most beloved dream folk “real,” though the human Prince Mich will lose his title and Spirit the unicorn/pegasus his wings and horn. And, of course, there’s the common “hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog” route, where the dreary, gray, “real” world is abandoned wholesale for the superior fantasy one—though this happens comparatively rarely in psychodrama, oddly.
Escapism has its place. We devoured Dream a Little Dream as children, and I still find Peter Ibbetson enchanting. But as we’ve aged, I’ve grown more interested in stories where realities aren’t ranked hierarchically, avoiding the easy binaries of real/fantasy, magic/mundane, better/worse. American McGee’s Alice’s London and Wonderland are equally dangerous and equally unavoidable. Nearly Roadkill’s protagonists, Scratch and Wink, must learn to negotiate all their cyberspace and meatspace needs, selves, allies, and communities to escape the government and its charges of high treason. Paprika is all about embracing all layers of reality.
It is strangely difficult to find stories like that, though. Usually, one world must be denigrated or left behind. It’s like our society can’t bear the thought of that ambiguity, that equality. Why is that?
The Collective Mythic vs. the Idiosyncratic
When building another realm that acts as foil to the “real” one, there are a few ways it can go: freestanding world obeying its own strict rules, collective mythic, or the individual idiosyncratic. All three types can be mixed and matched.
A freestanding, rules-based world can be less a psychodrama than a portal fantasy or isekai. The story can get more focused on the mechanics of the world, rather than the psyches they reflect. Peter Ibbetson and his beloved Mary, for instance, spend many happy years and pages exploring things like dream-world time travel, psychogenetics, and the building of imaginary architecture. These things still build on the core emotional themes of nostalgia and ethnic dislocation, but a reader could ignore that fine.
A collective mythic world relies more on greater cultural symbols and archetypes: religion, folklore, art, any shared set of symbols will do, as long as the story transforms what it references. Messner-Loebs and Kieth really love using Jungian ideas in the Maxx, who is simultaneously superhero (a symbol of individual power), bum (supposedly a symbol of individual failure), and accident victim (a symbol of helplessness and victimization). Despite being the title character, he himself is formed by and trapped in the unconscious Outback of Julie/the Leopard Queen. Their symbols and others are constantly crashing against each other, blurring and melding until finally, their entire reality blows up and resets, hopefully to a better end. (The cartoon, in my opinion, ends more satisfyingly, with the Maxx leaving the story he is trapped in, freeing himself to hopefully a better life, rather than forever pining for Julie).
The Oz Encounter is a more accessible example of a collective mythic world, with a pulp hero super-psychologist diving into the comatose dreams of a little girl who’s an Oz fan, trying to find the reason for her state. Seeing how she reinterprets the characters (why is the Shaggy Man a villain? what happened to Glinda?) is a core part of the plot, rewarding fans of the Oz books while also giving them something new. And the computer game the Binding of Isaac is crammed to the rafters with twisted Christian symbolism as the protagonist wrestles with religious shame, abuse, and the problem of evil. They aren’t just Oz and Jesus repeated, but reinvented.
Finally, there are the psychodramas that rely on the individual quirks of the characters involved. Ib invents wholesale an artist and his works, the latter of which come to life and abduct the titular protagonist. There’s no ready-made cultural hook like Oz or the Bible; it’s up to the player to get acquainted with the paintings, dolls, and roses that populate the Fabricated World, trusting that the pay-off will be worth it. Paprika similarly spends no small amount of time with the cop character’s youthful foray into filmmaking, which still haunts his dreams at night. The audience is expected to know no more about these things than the other characters; they just have to trust it’s important enough to pay attention to.
If these sources—mythic or idiosyncratic—aren’t well-anchored to character, culture, or fleshed into a freestanding but consistent world, the psychodrama will likely fail, feeling like meaningless nonsense. (This was my problem with Jonathan Carroll’s Bones of the Moon.) A collective mythic world reaps the benefits of familiarity but easily becomes Ready Player One, endlessly mentioning and riding the coattails of better work. Idiosyncratic stories avoid that particular shortcoming, but at the risk of incomprehensible self-indulgence, only of interest to the writer.
Why Does This Matter?
Psychodrama can fail in many ways. But when it succeeds… oh, when it succeeds! No other genre can bind setting to character to plot so elegantly. In psychodrama, setting is character is plot. Stripped of psychodrama, the store of Alice: Madness Returns is: Alice realizes her shrink is evil, pushes him in front of a train, and leaves. Without psychodrama, the audience wonders, “what took her so long?” With psychodrama, the player needn’t ask, because they have helped Alice fight her way through the pretty distractions of the Wonderland Woods, the frozen wastes of cynical numbness, the endless rehashing of scars of the asylum and Queensland, the dawning horrible realization of the Doll House and factory. They have, with Alice, found secret memory fragments hidden all over Wonderland and defeated the Dollmaker. All of these steps had to happen before Alice could shove the good doctor in front of the train—itself the relentless symbol of British scientific progress that is also his vehicle in Wonderland, symbolizing his influence.
Character becomes setting becomes plot. Mind becomes matter and more mind. Inner mastery becomes external mastery becomes something more. Alice’s arc in the series goes from her being trapped inside her hostile Wonderland and an asylum (American McGee’s Alice), to escaping both only to become a bystander again to the exploitation of the children around her (Alice: Madness Returns), to triumphing over that and helping other people with their own Wonderlands (Alice: Otherlands). The hounded patient becomes the scarred healer. No other genre can deliver that kind of arc so viscerally and satisfyingly, because the business of inner exploration, mastery, and healing is no longer a purely abstract, intellectual exercise. It becomes concrete. It becomes real.
It is tempting, both in fiction and reality, to keep the inner and outer life, the “real” and the “imaginary,” strictly separate. There are many people out there who think a mental problem is best solved by refusing to dignify its existence, that inner mastery is nothing but navel-gazing time-wasting. Psychodrama at its most satisfying refutes this. Paprika and Astuko save Paprika’s world because being multi, they are the most adept at navigating the psyche-delic surreality around them—indeed, that’s Paprika’s home base! Scratch and Wink, by crashing through all the emotional messiness of cyberspace, don’t just deal with their own issues but deepen their own relationship and cause an Internet general strike. Alice would’ve stayed in denial, unable to see past her own pain to help those around her, if not for Wonderland.
I live at the crossroads of at least three different worlds, all of which enrich me, all but one of which are considered not real. When I read psychodrama, I see lives like mine, loves like mine, triumphs like mine. Even at its most tragic, like Yume Nikki, psychodrama is a warning: ignore the “unreal” at your own peril. Even the most terrifying of nightmares may be trying to say something important.
As I write this essay, there are cultural wars raging throughout my country, and a lot of it is fought in the realm of myth, mind, and symbol. The Trump of MAGA myth is completely divorced from the bloviating windbag, corrupt friend to Epstein, and rapist of the “real” world; a lot of people, on both sides of the political aisle, do not realize or understand that, and thus do not fight him effectively. Part of why we are in this horrifying mess, I think, is because we’ve neglected our inner worlds, leaving the perfect void for a tyrant to fill with a mythic idea of himself.
And so I think that psychodrama has an especially relevant lesson for Americans here and now: mind your Wonderlands before they consume you.
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Date: 2026-03-31 11:43 pm (UTC)I was thinking of the difference between "It was all a dream" cop-out endings and stories where things like dreams, visions, and worlds with an unclear relationship to consensus reality are satisfying, and I think you've captured it. I like stories like Waking Life where what's in the dream matters.
This is a really good essay!
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Date: 2026-04-01 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-01 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-01 07:19 am (UTC)As for the list - I'd add MCU's Moon Knight (and presumably other versions, though I don't know them to say). Though sadly it barely scratches the surface of its potential.
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Date: 2026-04-01 03:31 pm (UTC)