Gen Z Discovers the Concept of Imagination

Today I learned about “reality shifting,” a trick of consciousness by which, as one Washington Post headline proclaims, “TikTokers claim they can enter the world of Harry Potter.”

This is how the Post describes the concept:

In other words, the theory goes, if you wanted to see what your life would be like if you had made different choices, or if you wanted to live in the Harry Potter world or visit the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars universe, all you have to do is “reality shift” — switch your consciousness to the right parallel universe.

Oookay. And now defined by a popular YouTube tutorial:

Reality shifting, or just shifting, is the act of moving your consciousness to a whole other reality that you’ve envisioned, which can be completely different from your current life, or very similar.

Sure! These are some methods for shifting realities, per i-D:

Well, there are two popular ways of doing this: “the raven method” involves lying down in a starfish position and counting down from 100 while imagining your desired reality, while the “the Alice in Wonderland method” requires the “shifter” to visualise themselves running after a person from their desired reality (for instance, Draco) and jumping down a rabbit hole with them.

Hmm. Here is an example of the phenomenon, one of the top videos under the TikTok hashtag #shiftingrealities:

Alrighty then! And another:

Quite. Maybe I’m showing my age here, but I used to know this not as reality shifting or a “transliminal experience” or “a form of self-hypnosis,” but simply as daydreaming. Little did I know that every time I was fantasizing about approaching whatever floppy-haired fictional character I was fixating on as a pre-teen, I was entering an entirely new dimension and potentially rearranging the universe on a molecular level. And my parents did not even think to help me nurture my latent talents. Add it to the list of the daily indignities of being a former gifted kid.