Reality shifting
Reality shifting is a practice, spread through online communities from mid-2020, in which practitioners called shifters attempt to move their awareness out of the "current reality" and into a "desired reality", most often an existing fictional universe, by means of meditation, visualization and a prepared script. Its characteristic reported feature is the sensation of being fully present in the destination, with all five senses intact, which shifters set against the "distorted" senses of astral experience. Somer and colleagues define it as "the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes", van Rijn and van Rijn as "a popular spiritual practice centered around the wish to shift one's consciousness to other realities", and the beginners' site shifting101 as "the act of shifting your consciousness from the reality you are currently in to another." It sits beside the Multiverse and the Mandela Effect in the cluster of ideas about coexisting realities, and it is the volitional, personal-scale counterpart of the technological traversal covered under Inter-reality travel; it differs from Alternate timelines in that shifters describe moving to a place that already exists rather than altering a history.
Shifters trace the practice's descent, which runs apart from the contactee and channelled-extraterrestrial literature, to two sources. The first is Robert Monroe's Gateway Process: a Wattpad shifting guide states that "The science behind shifting is very complex, it has been studied by the CIA before but those programs were shut down in the early 90s, this was called The Gateway Experience." The shifting101 site links "the CIA's gateway process document", and Hyperallergic reported practitioners citing "declassified CIA documents from the 1980s as concrete proof". The second is Neville Goddard's law of assumption, treated below. The Washington Post reported on the community in July 2021, as did Bustle, Mashable, Business Insider and i-D.
Where the practice gets its cosmology is contested inside the community and in the literature. Some shifters ground it in the multiverse: "The whole concept of shifting is based on the multiverse theory. The theory, that every time you make a choice or decision the universe splits and creates a whole new parallel universe in which you chose the alternative option." Somer and colleagues report that some practitioners ground it in the many-worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett III (Many-worlds interpretation), and add that the theory "does not posit, however, that individuals can create their own realities". The Wattpad guide, by contrast, rests its whole appeal to authority on Monroe and the CIA and contains no quantum or multiverse language. Nobody has set out to test the claim that consciousness literally transfers; from a scientific standpoint it is regarded as not possible.[citation needed]
The practice
Shifters prepare a script: "Scripting is when you write out the specifics of your desired reality." An induction method then makes the shift. Named methods include the Raven method, in which the practitioner lies down and counts to one hundred while holding an intention, the Alice in Wonderland method, which visualizes falling down a rabbit hole, and the Elevator method, which imagines ascending floors while raising an "energy level".[citation needed] Practitioners also listen to audio described as "subliminals", and the community is organized on Reddit and TikTok, chiefly among teenagers and young adults.[citation needed] A minority practice called "respawning" aims at permanent transfer.[citation needed]
The community's working vocabulary is "current reality" (CR) and "desired reality" (DR). Some shifters use "4D" for the state in which desires already exist.
The destination already exists
The doctrinal position stated in shifter communities is that the desired reality is already there and that the shifter is only relocating awareness to it. Shifter Alexa Valentino told Mashable "you're literally shifting your subconscious and your awareness to another reality in which you already exist", and shifter Mavi Jucah told Bustle "You already exist in that universe, and you're just moving in consciousness there." This is the practice's difference from manifestation teachings, in which one creates an outcome (Consciousness-created reality). Its Goddardian source is stated in a shifting post: "every time you manifest a desire with the law of assumption, you simply shift to a reality where you already have said desire." Somer and colleagues note that many-worlds does not itself posit that individuals create their own realities.
The boundary with astral projection
Shifters draw a line between shifting and astral projection (travel to the Astral plane), which a Wattpad comparison chapter defines as "the act of projecting your soul/consciousness out of your body and into the astral plane in our current reality", attached by a "silver cord". On the three points the chapter draws, shifting has full five-sense fidelity where astral experience is distorted; the astral traveller leaves the body within this reality, whereas the shifter occupies a different body in a different reality; and shifting is done awake.
Real or imagined
Within the community the shift is described both as literal transfer to another reality and as a vivid, controlled form of imagination, and shifters on each side argue the point.[citation needed] The academic literature treats it as a spiritual practice with its own cosmology (van Rijn and van Rijn) and as an emergent online daydreaming culture with psychological correlates (Somer et al.). Necpál and Šoltýsová report a case series in which functional movement disorders in adolescents were triggered by reality shifting and by online Backrooms content. A clinical psychologist quoted in the press holds that the practice is not in itself a problem, but becomes one when used increasingly to escape present life.[citation needed]
Lineage
The community's own account, as stated in its guides, runs from Neville Goddard's law of assumption and Monroe's Gateway Process to shifting; "quantum jumping" is named in the community as an intermediate step.[citation needed] The deleted 2023 Wikipedia version of the article opened its description on Monroe's research into how sound patterns affect consciousness and the CIA's interest in the Gateway Process, and the current article describes the practice as inspired by the New Thought movement. Outside writers assign it another ancestor: Dazed asserts a descent from "1970s West Coast spiritualism".
Health and reception
The practice trended in mid-2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and press coverage followed from 2021. The peer-reviewed literature on it is small.
Open questions
References
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This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Reality shifting", as of 2026-09-29, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.