Rabbit hole

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A rabbit hole is the entrance to a rabbit's burrow or warren.

In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows a mysterious white rabbit into a rabbit hole to enter 'Wonderland', an absurd and improbable world inhabited by many strange characters. This usage has helped make the phrase refer more generally to any portal into a different or strange world, such as:

• The character Morpheus in the movie The Matrix uses this metaphor when he offers the character Neo the opportunity to enter "the real world".

• In the film What the bleep do we know!?

• The term is used in alternate reality games to describe the initial page or clue that brings the player into the fictional world of the game.

By extension, the term has also come to signify any event which triggers a completely unexpected, bizarre situation or paradigm.