CURRENTS

written by GABRIELA PORTUGAL photo by JULIA SMITH

It seems like a normal day as Kaylee wakes up from a deep sleep. She finds her bearings in her dormitory room— then, suddenly, someone barges right into her space. It’s Draco Malfoy, coming to wake her up for breakfast in the Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, she’s dreaming, right?”

Wrong. She is actually conscious in a different reality. I stumbled across this phenomenon, as @kayleesnapee narrates in her TikTok video, this was her first experience with shifting realities. In this case, she and Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter Universe are friends. It may not seem like reality, but her experience was very real.

It’s called “shifting” or “shifting realities”: the process during which a person’s subconscious steps into another reality. Synergy (@ missubliminals on Instagram), a YouTuber who runs an account about shifting, uses her expertise to explain shifting. Her channel focuses on how to use shifting techniques and “subliminals”— a practice that trains your subconscious to change yourself physically. Synergy states, “It’s the complete transfer of your consciousness to another body of yours in another reality.” In order to shift, you must be present in your mind.

A common misconception is that shifting is the same as lucid dreaming. The difference is that you are not quite asleep when you shift realities. Cee states that lucid dreaming “is simply being aware of your dreams and being able to control them,” whereas when shifting, your consciousness is still awake, and it just shifts to another place.

Similarly, @shiftingflower, who runs a social media page about shifting, explains that lucid dreaming takes place in your head while shifting is “placing your mind/subconscious in an [entirely] different reality… instead of the reality being in your mind, it’s your mind that is in the reality.” Shifting takes you to a whole different world.

I have to admit, when I first discovered shifting, it seemed super easy. But there is actually a lot of planning, research, and effort that goes into it.

One of the critical components of a successful shift is a script. A script is a type of prompt or pre-planned outline of how you want the reality to be. Based on what online shifting communities say, you can make your script about anything you want. And if you can’t think of anything, there are whole scripts and templates online that anyone can use.

Another critical part of the shifting experience is the research. But what does research look like for shifters? Arlette, who goes by @s.h.i.f.t.i.n.g_ realities on Instagram, says they read about other shifters’ experiences from online communities on Instagram, YouTube, and Amino. They claim that those sources are the most reliable: “I consider people who have shifted to be shifting experts,” says Arlette.

Another source for Arlette is government documents released by the C.I.A. Similarly, Synergy and @shiftingflower rely on scientific information for their research. Cee says, “I usually only study books on physics/quantum mechanics.” For @ shiftingflower, it is important to find the right information, so referencing the documents released by the C.I.A. will help avoid misinformation. According to an article by Adrian Cho, quantum physics relates to shifting. Cho explains with scientific terms and summaries of past experiments how “an odd space experiment has confirmed that, as quantum mechanics says, reality is what you choose it to be.”

Even though there is science and hard evidence behind the shifting practices, the process can also be very natural. According to Cee, “We have been shifting since we [were] born, we don’t try shifting, shifting is always constantly happening. You shift realities every single millisecond that goes by, no exception.” In essence, shifting is an ever-occurring and natural process; it takes effort to get your desired reality, but it is inherently organic.

On a similar note, @ shiftingflower emphasizes having faith in your abilities. She states that for beginner shifters, you must “have faith and educate yourself properly… without faith it’ll be much harder.”

Sure, dreams are a great distraction from the current reality. But why bother dreaming if you can just be in another reality? As Cho says, reality is a space in which you choose to be, so just choose reality, not a far-fetched dream.

*try it yourself*

My name is ____ And my friends call me ____ I am ____ years old I am ____ feet tall and have ____ hair and ____ eyes I was walking through the garden til a large white rabbit in a waistcoat brushed past me how odd it then turned towards me and said hurry! you’re late it dashed ahead into the hedges I followed until I lost sight of it confused I took a step forward and plummeted into the dark abyss colors flew past my face strange sounds rushed through my ears until it all went quiet I woke up to find an array of creatures waiting for me they are all my friends they all are here to have tea with me they will never hurt me and I can never be harmed or die nothing I face will traumatize me no one will question who I really am I will know I have successfully shifted when I smoke from a familiar, blue caterpillar blows into my face I must finish my cup of tea to return to my current reality my desired reality will pause when I leave I can never get stuck in my desired reality