The Many Worlds of Reality Shifting

by Brian Dunning
July 14, 2026

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During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, many people worldwide suffered a significant amount of distress over being cooped up inside their residence with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Some turned to online communities seeking ways to travel inside one’s own mind, and a thing called reality shifting shot from being an obscure practice in a few Reddit communities to a worldwide fad — where it still remains, years later. Today we’re going to take a close look at reality shifting and at the shifters — as its practitioners call themselves — to see just how real and/or immersive this experience is. Can a person truly, at will, move their consciousness into an alternate world of their own creation, and live out whatever fantasy life they desire — one that is as concrete and real as this one?

The trend is most popular among Gen Z, and the place to find the most buzz about it is on TikTok. Here’s how it works. When a shifter feels like spending some time away from their current reality and inside their desired reality (often abbreviated CR and DR), they often consult their script, a written document that describes their world, the people in it, and a basic plot (if there is one). They decide what they want to do there, and often add it to the script. There are even apps to facilitate the creation and management of these scripts — not real apps, of course, but imagined apps that you must focus on to use in your head. (Side note: imagining using a structured data storage app is really the same thing as the “mind palace” memory technique.)

Some shifters then have a meditation, which some compare to self-hypnosis. They may use visualization techniques. They may repeat affirmations, things like they know they are in their DR; their DR will follow the rules they’ve established for it; and possibly a safe word used to instantly return them to the CR.

Many use so-called subliminals, which are YouTube videos or audio tracks, usually with some generic-sounding ambient, atmospheric music; some shifters prefer different types of background sounds to help them immerse themselves.

Then there are various “induction methods,” each promoted mainly by a specific influencer, for completing the transition into the DR. Some involve lying in a particular position, counting, imagining some descent or ascent from one reality to another, or some such thing.

And then the shifter is in their DR. It is claimed to be an absolutely real experience, where they can live a whole second life just as emotional, dramatic, impactful, and varied as this one.

A more familiar phenomenon that this is frequently compared to is lucid dreaming, which is the ability some people have during sleep to be aware that they are dreaming, and to consciously control the action. (There’s a complete Skeptoid episode on lucid dreaming, #632.) As most of us know, when you’re in a dream, it’s indistinguishable from reality. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings — but most significantly, the illusion that you’re engaging in a real life experience. In a way, they are real life; things that happen to us in dreams can, in some cases, impact our lives just as much as waking experiences. And you can’t stop a dream. While it’s happening, it is what you’re living; that’s the critical differentiator between such an experience and an imagined one, where you simply close your eyes and visualize being on a sunny beach somewhere. You can stop that anytime, and of course you’re fully aware that it’s not real.

So the question is: Which of those describes reality shifting? Is a completely real life experience, or is it imagination that’s both shallow and endable at any time?

Annoyingly, there is no one answer to that question. It is whatever shifters report it to be, and what they report ranges the full spectrum. If you listen to the top reality shifting influencers on social media, they’ll typically describe it as every bit as real as lucid dreaming; reporters who have interviewed shifters typically hear what we’d expect, that it’s vivid and immersive to various degrees, but still just a trip into one’s own imagination from which you can open your eyes and walk away any time you want.

If it’s possible to empirically detect and prove that a shifter has entered an altered state of consciousness, it doesn’t appear to have been tried yet — as of this writing, anyway. Lucid dreaming, on the other hand, has a substantial body of evidence proving that it is indeed a real phenomenon. Using an EEG (electroencephalogram), we can tell unambiguously when a person is awake, drowsy, asleep, and in what stage of sleep they are. Determining whether they’re dreaming is more involved, but still achievable: according to 2017 research that’s now widely accepted, dreaming is associated with a local decrease in low frequency activity (1-4 Hz) coupled with a local increase in high-frequency activity (20-50 Hz) in one specific brain region. In fact, to a limited extent, we can even tell what a person is dreaming about! A few things like faces, spatial navigation, and speech in the dream activate the same brain regions that are active when a fully awake person experiences those things.

Other research focused on lucid dreamers — people with the consistent ability to take conscious control of the action in their dreams but without waking up — used fMRI data to identify activated parts of the brain during dreaming. Lucid dreamers, when lucid dreaming, showed increased activation in parts of the brain associated with self-awareness (e.g. self-referential processing and metacognition); regions which are profoundly deactivated in nearly everyone else during sleep. This is why, for those of us who are not lucid dreamers, we are not aware that our dreams are dreams: to us, they are — for their duration — our reality, and we lack the ability to know otherwise.

So we have pretty good reason to believe that if reality shifting does indeed take the shifter into a different state of consciousness in which they are able to fully experience their DR and have it seem just as real as this one, science ought to be able to prove it.

But as of this writing (July 2026), no such research has been published. In fact, only one academic paper of any kind has seen the light of day in a peer-reviewed journal, and it’s already five years old. Published in Current Psychology in 2021, the paper by Somer et al. considers reality shifting from its pathological potential; very unlike the lucid dreaming research that sought to characterize the phenomenon. Although the authors described it as “an important, uninvestigated emerging phenomenon,” they also placed the experience on a spectrum ranging from normal daydreaming to maladaptive daydreaming, a form of dissociative disorder. They found ordinary reality shifting, as it manifests today, closer to the normal, healthy end of the spectrum, but cautioned about its ability to negatively impact people already experiencing pathological dissociation.

Indeed, one of the earliest news stories to break big about reality shifting pertained to a TikTok user who, in January 2021, said she’d accidentally killed someone in her DR (not in real life), her boyfriend Draco Malfoy, a character in the Harry Potter universe, and was significantly traumatized by it, becoming unable to return to that world. An Insider article a year later mentioned a number of other cases where overuse of reality shifting caused mental health problems for some shifters — but by and large, these incidents were all largely anecdotal.

This all raises the question of why more research isn’t being done? From my survey of the literature, I’d say the answer is twofold: First, there’s no compelling evidence that reality shifting consists of anything more than daydreaming or imagination, despite anecdotes to the contrary; and second, because its origin is even more janky than just an adolescent TikTok phenomenon (and to be clear, that’s not me calling it that, it’s my assessment of how it’s regarded by many researchers). And by “even more janky” I point back to its real roots: the New Thought movement from the turn of the 20th century.

75 years before New Age spiritualism took over the hippie movement and grew into an institution today, there was New Thought: the same basic thing, the same terminologies and concepts and meaningless psychobabble jargon, just different authors and book titles.

An age-old concept within New Thought was the idea of transcendence (also known by any of a number of other names). Adherents believe that the mind is incredibly powerful; powerful enough — if properly trained and disciplined — to ascend a person into another state of being. This was meant quite literally, and so many of the metaphysics institutions that appeared in the 20th century trained people to supposedly achieve this — though none did that we know of, since transcending into another spiritual realm isn’t a thing. The earliest reality shifters during the 2020 lockdowns grew out of the New Thought communities on Reddit, such as r/DimensionJumping and r/NevilleGoddard (a New Thought author who believed you could literally will your desires into reality). Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book and movie The Secret were directly lifted in their entirety from the vast library of New Thought books; there is not a single original idea in them.

The shifters claim their practice descends from the New Thought ideas, although that’s a hard argument to make, because they were all about actually physically changing this world with your mind, and actually transferring your conscience into another physical reality; while reality shifting is the far tamer (and actually rational) idea of imagining it in a deeply immersive way.

Google Trends data shows that the phrase reality shifting wasn’t really even a thing until mid 2020, when both web searches and YouTube searches for the term exploded. This was driven by a series of mass market articles that all appeared around the same time, and coincided with a number of YouTube tutorial videos garnering millions of views.

Overall, I have two official Skeptoid reactions to reality shifting. The first takes note that one trait commonly found among Gen Z is an aversion to spending money, particularly online, when there is some free version that can be made to work just as well. One nice fringe benefit of this is that opportunistic businesspeople have generally had poor success at selling stuff to Gen Z. They use subliminals that are free, instead of buying them. They get their tutorials from YouTube and TikTok without having to buy anything from anyone. I assess that this confers a layer of protection upon them from scammers, and it also means that they’re more likely to find escapism in reality shifting (which is free) than in popping a quick tab of LSD, which is what their parents (or grandparents!) would have done to get essentially the same type of experience. And that’s a good thing, considering that data shows Gen Z does have a slightly bigger problem with recreational drugs than their predecessors.

My second reaction is that the whole phenomenon is interesting enough that it deserves to be better studied and characterized. If lucid dreamers can be jammed into an fMRI machine, then so can shifters. Any number of recreational and therapeutic applications for such a thing are easily imaginable if we can first establish that it’s real and potentially as immersive as some claim, and second if we can better learn how to initiate and maintain the state.

Anyway, that concludes today’s episode; you may now return to your CR.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning