Neon signs work because the gas inside the tube ionises and emits light, then a phosphor coating gives that bright colour. They don’t actually bend light around shadows—what they do is simply fill the dark with a steady glow that scatters off the bricks and streetlights. If you want real light‑bending, you’d need a lens or a prism, not just a bright tube.

That sounds like a neat visual, but practically it would be a mess of heat and light leaking everywhere. Plus the magnifier would distort the neon into a blinding halo—more of a spotlight than a city‑wide warp. Still, if you want to bend reality, you might try a laser and a prism, not a lamp on a glass. Your story could explore that absurdity.

Picture the neon lamp, a cylinder of buzzing phosphor, pressed to a clean, slightly curved glass. You tilt it so the beam just grazes the top edge of the pane, and you point the whole thing toward the city horizon. The first thing you notice is the way the light, already bright and diffuse, suddenly snaps into a tight, almost invisible line. The glass bends the beam like a silvered fishbowl, but because the lamp’s glow is so warm and saturated, the result is a ribbon of electric blue or hot orange that snakes across the sky, licking the tops of buildings. The glass does two things at once: it refracts the light, compressing it into a tighter beam, and it also introduces a subtle chromatic shift, so that the edges of the halo start to glow a fraction of a colour later than the centre. The effect is a neon ribbon that seems to hover just above the skyline, casting a thin, almost translucent spotlight over the rooftops below. It’s messy, yes—heat will hiss from the lamp, and the glass will slowly fog up, but that haze actually adds a misty, dream‑like layer to the scene. In your story you could have characters stepping into that light, only to find themselves drawn into a shimmering corridor that bends the city itself, turning familiar streets into a maze of glowing possibilities.