Do you ever feel like you don’t belong here? Maybe you feel like there’s something missing, perhaps an alternative reality detached from our mundane present – of boring nine-to-five jobs, commuting, paying rent. You carry on your day as normal. Sip your morning coffee and engage in entry-level banter with your co-workers, dreaming up a distant universe where you’re the main character of your own destiny. Then you play some subliminals in your headphones and count to 100. Suddenly the world around you begins to look different – feel different. Something’s off. A tingling sensation takes over your body, and there’s a sense that reality is glitching.

This year, your FYP has likely been populated with videos of teens and young adults engaging in a viral phenomenon known as reality shifting. From Reddit threads and hyper-dedicated online forums, videos featuring first-person accounts of users who claim to jump between parallel worlds are garnering billions of views across every social platform, transcending the anxieties of urban living with angel numbers and cosmic manifestations designed to help you step into your dream reality – also known as shifting.

Most shifters centre their desired reality, also known as their DR, on a pop culture franchise. The trend initially took off on TikTok in 2019 because Harry Potter stans wanted to meet their SO in Hogwarts. Some shifters claim to have spent years, decades even, in their DR only to wake up to their boring lives once again, while others prefer to mini-shift closer to home, playing into the ongoing trend of DIY subliminals to harness the divine power of the universe – to bless them with a not-so-distant reality with clearer skin or unlimited money. The laws of shifting tell us that all of this is possible so long as you stop scrolling and start scripting – a version of manifestation where you essentially script your own narrative all the way from your physical appearance to your relationships and interactions. Then it’s time to let the angels guide you to your destiny 111, 222, 333...

Transporting your soul into another dimension was hugely popular during the pandemic when everyone was locked into an inescapable and boring reality, where the internet acted as a portal to an alternative world beyond the borders of the ‘real’. Recently, however, shifting has returned to algorithmic favour on TikTok, where users share shifting routines, swap stories about how they became besties with Luna Lovegood, or post DR mood boards like ‘female face claims with dark hair and light eyes’ to the cosmic hum of theta frequencies. There’s YouTube playlists with names like “ethereal daydream subliminals” that promise to reprogram your subconscious mind, while numerograms neatly laid out on the Notes app with angel numbers and love letter emojis tell you things like ‘big changes are coming’ and ‘trust the universe’. These consciousness-raising methods are meant to help cast our mind to vivid visual worlds, to reach a transliminal state, where the real trip begins.

Reality shifting has also shifted its way into Hollywood. In A24’s latest surreal film I Saw the TV Glow, a pair of suburban teens escape the crushing angst of their surroundings by obsessing over a fictional TV show. Blurring the line between fantasy and reality, one of the characters Maddy claims she has abandoned her ‘real’ life in exchange for the dreamlike world of The Pink Opaque, leaving the character of Owen alone in the ‘real’ world to grapple with his own unrealised potential. The director Jane Schoenbrun uses hyperreal cinematography and bright neon lights to highlight this, transforming most scenes into something out of a liminal TikTok video complete with uncanny 90s children’s leisure centre aesthetics that evoke feelings of nostalgia and lostness. Schoenbrun notes in a recent interview: “Reality feels insufficient to them.” As though shot through the fuzzy and imperfect lens of a VHS tape, the derealisation is felt most profoundly in the closing scenes of the film, where Owen literally rips out of his material body, glancing out towards an ethereal transmission from an alternative future.

To step out of one’s own skin is an alluring prospect when late capitalism and commodity fetisism has made life so oppressive. There’s plenty of ‘millennial cringe’ clips online of people crushed from societal pressures, rising costs and relentless working hours, which are as relatable as they are tragic. While there’s some that double down on the grind, others exit reality altogether, believing themselves to be starseeds sent from some distant intergalactic universe. These ‘freethinkers’ are of course part of a bigger ecosystem of cosmic spiritualists on social media, whose positive vibes encourage users to ‘step into your dream reality’ with five simple steps (read: join an MLM), the most exaggerated of the bunch losing touch with reality altogether – see: hippy barbie.

Situated in this digital sphere of networked mysticism, reality shifting isn’t immune to these spells and potions – ‘shifting oil’ is the latest fad sold to young believers, adding yet another market product to help on your personal healing journey. As an ascendant form of zoomer spiritualism, reality shifting channels the same high energy vibrations that brought us things such as astral projection, lucid dreams and quantum jumping – all derived from 1970s West Coast spiritualism and founded in ideas of high-focus meditation and visualisation designed to reach an altered state. Heightened by the kind of hyper-online disaffection that has teens romanticising the hallowed corridors of the Backrooms, shifting takes earthly detachment to the nth degree – choosing to rearrange their lives like a fanfiction or a Pinterest board, complete with an extended cast of side characters and NPCs.

On the surface, the shifting community might appear like some cringe Gen-Z delusion – I remember someone on X referring to it as a “TikTok-induced schizophrenia”. But the idea that our thoughts create our reality is hardwired into the internet’s DNA – think the widely circulated image ‘Remote login is a lot like astral projection’. It wasn’t so long ago that lain-pilled zoomers on TikTok were posting surreal videos about uploading their consciousness into the virtual world, an extreme response to our ongoing digitisation. Our identities are fragmented across the internet – social media platforms, personal and professional accounts, shitposting aliases – ‘shifting’ in and out of digital skins like a shifter might hop realities. Putting on an Apple headset or playing a video game is also to enter another multiverse. “We all shifting realities as you said many times a day anyway but most of us are shifting to realities that are so similar that we never notice.” So goes the cosmic believer, and it’s true to an extent, only softer-coded, less fantastical.

Our identities are shaped by the media we consume, by fandoms, internet channels and the likes. It’s been suggested in recent months that fandom is the new religion – just look at the ritual dedication surrounding Taylor Swift and K-pop groups, or franchises such as Harry Potter and Marvel. Filling the gap that religion once occupied in society, fandoms offer community in an otherwise lonely online existence, where parasocial relationships have replaced real connection. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined. Online, there’s no distinct difference between a celebrity on the feed and a character on a TV show, both are mediated through screens, which is to say, just because something isn’t real doesn’t make it feel any less real.

From here, it’s no quantum leap to imagine that reality is malleable, and that the mental maps we draw for ourselves are a product of our experiences and desires. Less gateway process, more Gen Z DIY brain hack, shifting itself is, at its core, a watered-down version of transcendental meditation practices, the effects of which are said to transport you to a transliminal state of being. There is of course a lot to be said about when you should use these techniques, and how. When paired with the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with your life, shifting runs into trouble – if the problem is at its root feelings of loneliness, surely mentally barricading yourself into a fiction of your own making will only exacerbate this further? At its most extreme, shifters can choose to ‘respawn’, which is to perma-shift their soul to their DR by while essentially unaliving themselves in reality. Spiralling through the space-time continuum can have its benefits, but it’s no stand-in for human connection. Now that’s a reality check.

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