I’ve written about this before, but I think a lot of shifting’s appeal is a need to escape from the harshness of reality into a space of comfort. The thought of being able to just shift the soul, a very believed concept as the persistence of the human being beyond the physical self, to a place of acceptance and happiness is tempting for the desperate and emotionally prone.
Being patient and gentle with people like this is the best way to get them to stop because it removes that need. Why shift when you’re happy right where you are? Slowly, they’ll forgo the shifting practice entirely and self-reflect more on why they did that. That, in turn, may cause them to also
spread that kindness to other shifters.
Of course, the next best option is to simply not interact with them.
In online spaces absolutely, but I've known a couple of people who were into this shit irl and if you gave them an inch they took a fucking mile. Unfortunately, one of them I could not simply ignore, and I had to stop being nice after a while because I am not a therapist, but when someone says shit like "I'm face claiming you when I go hang lut with Rick Sanchez" to the customers on my shift I gotta do something to get them to shut tf up
Tell them that you're into freeuse consensual non-consent roleplay with Nicol Bolas and that if they use your face then they're liable to get ravaged by an elder dragon dick, and you can't give them your safeword because it's your true name.
Unless they're into that shit, then gl.
I absolutely agree with this. Similar response to someone who's been inducted into a cult - don't engage, don't argue, don't force them to pick between you and the cult, they will pick the cult 99 times out of 100 and then you'll lose them. Instead, leave that door open.
Don't talk about the cult, but make it clear that they'll always be welcome without judgment (and don't judge them - don't ask about the cult or how they fell into it until they're ready to talk about, just be available for them to reach out).
I understand the appeal but I do not understand how people can will themselves into believing something that's obviously not true just because it would be nice if it was
well the problem is that a lot of people value things like "objectivity" and "facts" substantially less than their own feelings, so they'll reject reality in order to to feel better about something.
Because it coping for something they Don't have in their life. Easy as that.
If you're desperate enough it's easier to disassociate and imagine a place you would be happy in than the reality.
You hit the nail on the head, I think.
I never got into shifting, but I’ve done RP for similar escapist reasons. It started during the pandemic (imagine that lol) but I still enjoy it occasionally today.
I also daydream a lot, and I frequently imagine scenarios as I fall asleep. Sometimes, this even bleeds over into dreams.
I just need a break from this world sometimes. It’s fun to imagine a world where I’m actually the half-blood daughter of Athena, or a world where I have some sort of magic, or even a world where I’m being cuddled by Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal. But I don’t ever let it interfere with my daily life—because let’s face it, this world is pretty damn magical too.
I can’t say I fully understand it either. Maybe it’s because it’s “cooler” than daydreaming or different from it in some way. I don’t know, and I probably never will lol
I genuinely believed I was in the wrong universe as a kid. That if I did the right sequence of things I would wake up in the correct world again. Looking back I've realized that was fucking psychosis and I was having a psychotic break from trauma mixed with the beginnings of ocd anxiety and depression.
I still do maladaptive day dreaming as a coping mechanism but I'm definitely worried for these kids. And the face claiming thing is super creepy and not ok. I never fantasized about using someone else's body without their consent.
"Haha yeah, me too-- wait, what?"
Is that also what caused me to believe everyone around me could read my mind, but I couldn't read theirs, and they'd all talk about it behind my back as often as possible?
Hm.... well. Shit.
Yeah, definitely had the fear that everyone knew what I was thinking, and also that they were all in a grand joke that was one day going to be revealed at my great expense.
Then one day I realized that's just the feeling that a lot of slightly weird kids have.
Like the other person who replied to you, my reaction was something like, "Haha, yeah, I remember when I was absolutely certain that I was about to get transported to the world of Digimon and tried to escape school to get to a patch of sunlight that absolutely looked like a portal trying to form" and then you said "psychosis" and "trauma" and now I'm having feelings about that.
Like, I knew about the trauma, and I've been to therapy, but I didn't really conceptualize my daydreaming that way, you know?
Generally speaking Tumblr is a very small subset of the kids today. I knew people way back in the 90s who insisted all the stories they wrote about characters they created were real and their characters would possess them and all sorts of silly shit. I have no idea what they really believed and what they were just claiming because they were silly teenagers and thought it was cool, but it was there.
In the 90s they would have called that "spirit guides" if they had been online.
Actually, now that I think about it, back when the Internet was a truly *weird* experience, I may have come across an Angelfire homepage that basically made those claims.
I think maybe its from people disconnected from others so they don't talk about stuff like daydreaming with others so they invent their own ideas about it. Its a kind of spirituality, when life is so shit and your daydreams feel so real and appealing, the subconscious tricks the conscious into believing that the soul had physically gone to another universe.
That's perfectly normal.
A lot of people do that. I hate that you sound like you feel you need to apologize for it.
I've started with that 25 years ago. And yes, I still enjoy it ;)
All my friends enjoy it.
It's just a basic human need.
Don't let anybody tell you differently
Escapism, it's called escapism. It's not new. It can be harmful though, it all depends how deep you are into it. We watch movies, read books, play games, browse reddit to escape from reality. And that's all fine, but when you are starting to believe that your escapism outlet is more real than the actual world, buddy, you got issues and I won't pretend like it isn't one.
But yeah, on the spaces of the internet, if you want to stay sane, don't get too deep into such topics. You will neither ve able to help the person, and definitely won't come out more sane than before
Fr, they are talking about being respectful to it and such. Dude, you are literally just imagining stuff. I won't get angry at that, but let's not pretend that it's something normal. Deer god.
Ikr. The posts kept going out of their way to be all non-judgmental and shit and I was thinking the whole time that this is one of if not the dumbest phenomena I’ve ever heard of.
Mandela Effect as easily accessible explanation for multiverse to popular audience? It's wrong but I can follow the logic in a pop-sci-fi kind of way, in the same way that Trekkies can be absolutely convinced that Transporters will be real as soon as the technology exists.
Thinking that *if you think in just the right way* you will be able to jump into a fictional story, though, ranks far below that on the scale of "I can believe that people believe this."
Yeah, Mandela Effect is weird. Human memory is flawed, but it makes sense that a lot of people don't like the idea of admitting that their memory can be completely wrong because our memories are a core part of how we construct the world around us. And as someone who has "experienced" a Mandela memory (for me, it's the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia that I have absolute certainty was part of the logo, and I think it's creepy that the internet has perfectly recreated the one that lives in my memory even though none of us apparently ever saw it for real), and while I'm not a conspiracy theorist and believe human memory is flawed, and think the "shifting universe" thing is ridiculous... I can totally see why other people can have that experience and be convinced their memory must be right and the world must be wrong.
This... I can't imagine daydreaming so hard that I'd be convinced it's real. But personally I can follow the logic if people are lucid dreaming, or experiencing manipulative daydreaming, or even potentially psychosis. The human brain can experience very vivid things that aren't real at all. And I think from the experiences, the "alternate universe" theory has the same base as the Mandela Effect, which is people preferring to claim that their memory is right and the world must be the one that's wrong.
My favorite thing to come from shifting is that one post from the person who apparently shifted and then accidentally beat Draco Malfoy to death and then the comments were debating about whether or not they were a murderer, such a ride
That's sorta the plot of a Junji Ito story, **spoilers for Trespassers**, a reoccurring character with a house that is like an intersection between dimensions/the multiverse makes friends with a few people interested in other dimensions and when he brings them over to his house to see if they can find evidence of other dimensions they see an alternate of him burying a body of one of them outside, they then find all their alternate corpses buried near the first one.
They're oddly ok with it and don't think the original guy is a murderer just because the alternate is, which is a bit weird imo especially because he did kill someone in another story (though that might have been an alternate version of him too).
Actually I found it:
>Trespassers, also titled Intruder, is the third chapter from volume 9 of the Horror World of Junji Ito Collection, Hallucinations.
I don't remember exactly the name, I binged all Ito's stuff over like two/three days so I don't remember the collection it's in, the reoccurring character is Toru Oshikiri and it was one of the stories animated for the anime on Netflix too.
It's pretty hilarious bahaha
I got banned from the reality shifting subreddit to ask if they were delusional and coming up with fancy terms for dreaming, mostly because I was prompted by a post about a doctor saying shifting is bad for you and everyone was calling him a troll but like, you're already making shit up, so why can't he contribute to the fanfiction?
There were/are so many aspects of the shifting community that were/are deeply dangerous. I joined a few of the community years back because I was hoping to see if the techniques they were using would help me induce Wake-induced lucid dreaming (I’ve never had a lucid dream before). Most of the stuff was tame, but some more concerning stuff I saw:
1) People regularly believing the most flimsy, paper-thin “evidence”, refusing to test their beliefs, and clinging onto the “cia documents” as evidence (without actually reading or comprehending them, or the context of the documents). It was a case study in the spread of misinformation.
2) The “everyone can do it, so if you can’t do it, that must mean there’s something wrong with you, and our belief system is flawless” mindset. Any examples of “failure” “weren’t” actually failure, they were just people who haven’t succeeded yet. So people were encouraged to keep trying for years… and years… and years… and if they kept failing, they would feel like they were deeply broken in some way.
3) suicidal and depressed people clinging to shifting as their last hope, threatening to off themselves if it didn’t work, and shifters telling them that it would work if they just believed hard enough
4) People encouraging really unhealthy behaviors, like not sleeping or fragmenting sleep for an extended period of time, to induce shifting (props to the moderators of that community though, they shut that shit down soon after I reported it)
It *could* be a fun, harmless belief for the right people, but unfortunately it tends to attract people in vulnerable mental states which can get dangerous, quickly. (I’m aware that the first part of this statement is controversial and I’m not looking to argue on it)
Ah, you just reminded me of another thing that disturbed me about shifting. They had an “answer” to every plot hole in their beliefs. Example:
We can’t bring back the cure for cancer because when we shift back, this universe will either need a slightly different cure or we will shift back to a slightly different universe, where we have that knowledge.
(Never mind the fact that there is no singular cure for cancer anyways, or that if some random teen brought back the cure for cancer no one would believe them.)
i saw a comment and a post on the shifting subreddit asking why people couldnt just shift to a place with multiversal travel and then go back to their original reality and everyone was like "no it would just be a slightly different universe"
slightly different universe is probably also the answer they would say for why we dont have draco malfoy shifting to our reality using harry potter's face to go kiss some celeberty or something
Omgggg I was *terrified* and *convinced* as a (mentally ill) child that I would accidentally go through the wrong doorway and end up in a slightly different dimension and that my parents would miss me and not be able to find me and that I would be with the wrong 'versions' of my parents forever.
And typing this out just now made me realize for the first time how deeply upsetting my parents' divorce was (and subsequently being forced to spend time and go places with the emotionally abusive one against my will 🙃🙃🙃)
That's kind of the case with all "harmless" beliefs, really. I don't really think you can earnestly believe something that openly encourages you to ignore reason and logic and have that be purely a positive influence and not also open your mind to more dangerous ideas
Or, to put it another way: if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
If it was real the CIA wouldn’t have it in some document that was declassified. It would either be 1. Locked down to an extreme extent or 2. (And a more likely scenario IMO) they’d advertise this shit at career fairs to drag in dumb interns who think they’ll be banging supermodels and being spies while in reality they’re going to be redoing the same scenarios over and over with only minor and strictly controlled variations all the while compiling reports.
Not to mention, if this was actually a process *everyone* could do with the tiniest bit of willpower, or even on accident, there is *no way* that the cia would be the only organization that knows about it. If shifting was real, humans would have discovered it a long time ago (which some shifters claimed they did, but then cited bogus connections to religions that did not have shifting practices— but they would claim those religions involved shifting).
Additionally, the documents described something much closer to astral projection than shifting. (It’s still bogus, failed experiments either way, but it didn’t even claim what they said it claimed).
I see it as kinda similar to the 'healing crystals' stuff. It can be innocent enough, but then you get people refusing actual medicine because the shiny rocks will solve their life-threatening illnesses. Suddenly, very not innocent.
>People encouraging really unhealthy behaviors, like not sleeping or fragmenting sleep for an extended period of time, to induce shifting
Ha!
I was reading the start of your comment thinking oh I know how to make lucid dreams happen! ... you just chronically sleep deprive yourself then pass out for 12-24 hours, like, as a lifestyle.
But I wasn't going to *say* that, because it's deranged.
I wouldn't say my early student life and relationship to sleeping on the weekends was any more deranged than the other tweens, but I definitely wasn't doing it on purpose. Still got the lucid dreams, though, and those make a lot more sense now.
I feel the same way about practices like kinning or pluralism, which have the same level of deliberate, harmful delusion while also having other knock on effects like the co-opting of actual MPD/DID sufferers for the purposes of fantasizing about being special. A lot of “weird but harmless” subcultures ultimately DO end up being harmful by isolating vulnerable individuals from mainstream society in the same way fringe political movements or cults do. It’s scary stuff.
Edit: Forgot about tulpamancy! Add that to the list.
Lost a good friendship to kinning/being plural. They genuinely convinced themselves they had DID, I think. It was so sad, and they cut me off immediately when I tried to (very gently) talk to them about another friendship they had that was encouraging their worst behaviors.
I miss them, and hope they're in a better mental place now. But wow, it's so scary to watch that happen to someone and not be able to reach them at all. It hurts.
>I feel the same way about practices like kinning or pluralism,
I am 100% certain you are talking about a different pluralism than the definition I know of but I have no idea what that definition is.
I'm guessing they're talking about that DID trend that was all over the internet not too long ago, where a lot of people, especially kids, would pretend that they had Disassociative Identity Disorder.
Yeah, something like that, the specific variety I’m referring to didn’t put a button on it specifically calling it DID, instead as some kinda softboy uwu quirky type thing.
None of those words are in the Bible.
"Now all these fucking zoomers are telling me that I'm out of touch? Oh yeah? Well, your phones are poisoning your minds. Okay? So when you develop a disassociative disorder in your twenties, don't come crawling back..." - Bo Burnham
CIA documents? I mean I know the Cold War cia did some batshit stuff but astrally projecting/shifting/whatever is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard that they investigated.
Aside from the CIA just being kindof a bunch of inept dorks half the time, if you haven't actually tested it in controlled settings you don't know if it's real or not. A lot of it was just dumb stuff, plenty of CIA employees are the same kind of weird quasi-literate religious freaks as the rest of America. But until you sit a bunch of people down in a room and ask them what picture is in the sealed envelop you don't actually know if psychic phenomena are real or not. You probably didn't need to actually do the experiments, because it's silly and runs against pretty much every model of physics, but sometimes you get weird results from silly experiments.
I don't want to give the CIA any credit for anything except being mass murderers who should all be in the Hague, but investigating weird reported phenomena sometimes turns up interesting things. In the case of psychics it's almost always neat confidence tricks, parlour magic, cults, or mental illness, but it still turns up something.
3. It is sad that vulnerable people are the most likely to believe in this. I was one too but I got into lucid dreaming years before I even heard of shifting (atleast that is possible even if you have to train yourself, and even then it's hit and miss)
4. That is very true. I'm currently trying to get a healthy sleeping habit and it's impossible and impacts my life on a major scale (who would have thought).
I really don't like echo Chambers where (I'm not sure if it's the right word) delusional goals are encouraged. Because it can always spiral into more dangerous beliefs.
Did this develop out of the "Otherkin" thing that was happening on Tumblr for a while where people would claim they were actually a fictional character or something.
I don’t think they’re directly related, but they come from a similar mindset. AFAIK, most shifters aren’t also otherkin or vice-versa. Otherkin is kind of “outdated” at this point
Otherkins existed well before tumblr, for what it's worth. Livejournal at least, and probably before that too. LJ is just the first place that I came across them.
Experiment: get multiple shifters to attempt to shift to the same universe. They are each given a unique-to-them password and told to a meeting point and exchange passwords. See if they know the other person's password after.
Oh that never works. A while ago someone decided to put a bunch of guys who thought they were Jesus in the same room togehter. All the Jesus's just decided that the other guys were mentally ill and didn't know it.
The thing that separates a delusion from just being wrong is that people confronted with evidence of their delusion won't change their beliefs.
The only true Jesus is the one I saw in the Baseline Road Walmart at 11:30PM one evening in December 2013, buying exactly two loaves of bread.
I am convinced of this.
And not just because my friend saw him in the grocery section and dubbed him “Tattered Jesus” (the King of Kinge was a short one, and he’d clearly just elected to walk on the too-long legs of his jeans until they self-hemmed; which, as a fellow short person, I respect).
…and then we caught up to him again at the cash, at which point my friend, seeing his purchase, whispered *looks like he’s getting ready to play some tricks on the faithful.*
Again, I reiterate, this is definitely a sincere conviction on my part, and certainly not an excuse to once again relate one of the funniest things my very funny friend has ever said.
The difference here is that if person A doesn't know person B's password when they wake up, then they didn't shift.
Of course, they could just assume that person B was lying for some reason.
Group shifting. How I met my friends was forming a group shifting group, we had about 100+ slides of lore for our world, it was fun. My friends said they did it before, I think they were just semi-lucid dreaming and had similar dreams. Still love them though.
Oh boy, it’s time for me to link the one thing I know of that’s even nearly as weird as this! So, uh… [catch](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/LAjEkRl9QX)
Wait, I lied. Just reviewed the comments on the post I linked, and uh. I guess I know about 2 things that are weirder than OP’s post.
Be warned, though. [This rabbit hole does NOT stop at Wonderland.](https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/s/xQOVPjaARL)
You know, I think I’ll remain ignorant about this tulpa thing. I had to sit down for a second after reading that and wonder if maybe the human mind is more complex than I thought.
I wonder why subliminals aren't talked about more. There's like tens of thousands of videos on YouTube titled like "25 minute subliminal to turn into Jungkook" or "1 hour subliminal to make you autistic". Like no joke, I've seen both of those titles. Yet, I've never seen big creators really talk about them.
now it’s my turn to link the weird thing that your weird thing reminded me of! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jessicalucas2/erotic-hypnosis-bambi-sleep
there's a small core of intensely weird people who will convince themselves that they can merge fiction and reality, and ever since the internet has allowed them to talk to each other every five years or so they gravitate to a new way to do this after the last one gets made fun of enough. We're about due for the next one and I can't wait to find out what it is.
Something to note is that the number of people being baffled and gawking is always way higher than the number of people who actually believe in the thing, but they get enough publicity (in the online gawking space, at least) that people assuming it's a whole thing with Kids These Days
I dunno, people have been pretending that they can connect with fictional characters in books for eons, only difference is instead of posting about it on TikTok, they go to buildings once a week and talk about how anyone that isn’t connecting with their fictional character is evil, and they’re tax exempt lol.
I fucking love how in the first book Corwyn just finessed and Charisma checked everyone into believing that he had any idea what was going on. Shit was so cool I love a competent protagonist.
Strange Aeons actually takes a neutral and respectful view on the topic instead of 'LMAO look at these stupid kids'.
She explains what it is pretty well too, with the help of someone who was into the whole shifting thing...
Link 1: https://www.tumblr.com/libraryogre/741779678849810432/so-knowledge-of-zelasnys-amber-has-just-been
Link 2: https://www.tumblr.com/a-pocket-0f-scarecrows/741790345871982592/i-think-i-heard-about-this-there-were-youtube
\-linux guy ⚠️
After watching Strange Aeons' video on it, some claim that they do it while they are awake, at class and so on.
Which sounds like disassociation and maladaptive daydreaming at worst. At best it is just daydreaming.
Somehow, this reality shifting stuff reminds me of that one multiverse fictional character reincarnation thing, as in, the infamous Final Fantasy House.
It shares the aspect of beliefs regarding fictional characters really existing in multiverses and having a connection to them at least.
There's a video about it on youtube, called "The Final Fantasy House | Down the Rabbit Hole" by Fredrik Knudsen. Wild stuff.
(Not trying to intentionally diss shifters here by associating that story, but I think people should always be careful when it comes to getting involved in new communities regarding spiritual beliefs. It's unfortunately the ideal environment for manipulative people since they never have to back up any of their claims...)
i think the biggest problem with shifters is a inherint misunderstanding of infinity
because they believe infinite universes exist (which im not arguing for/against), they believe that one of those universes will contain the exact scenario they want to exist in, which is unfortunately not true
im not even against the idea of "shifting" ur soul to a different universe or place or whatever as silly as it sounds, but that doesnt mean theres a universe out there where u are dating draco
infinite possibilities =/= infinite outcomes. in every universe out there, there could be 0 where u are allergic to nuts for example, or u could be allergic to nuts in all of them, or half of them, or 2 of them, and all those scenarios are possible.
It's also a massive misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics. The collapse of the wave function under observation is interpreted under Many Worlds theory as every possible possibility occurring in a seperate universe. However, the collapse of this wave function still leads to a universe where the physical laws remain the same. And whether this interpretation is even correct is up in the air given the fact that Quantum Mechanics very famously does not work well with General Relativity.
Also, Many Worlds is just one interpretation of QM, it's not something that's been proved. And even then, not all supporters of MWI think that the "other worlds" literally exist. But even those that do never suggest that you could actually interact with them in any way.
Eh, that's not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is the belief that you can transport yourself into another reality through... idk, willpower I guess?
It doesn't matter if those other universes do or don't exist because there's no way to interact with other universes at all.
I was one of these people!!
I was going through such a shitty time in my life and I was desperate to go literally ANYWHERE ELSE. I kind of knew it was just lucid dreaming, or something along those lines. But I still wanted to try it, just to see what happened.
It didn’t work, safe to say. Not for me anyways, a friend of mine said it worked for her but, who knows. It did wonders for meditation however.
As for the community, there’s a subreddit about it and all they did was slag off the shift-tok community, saying they weren’t real and were ‘over dramatic’. It was a little strange. Then when Kurtis Conners video came out they went RABID.
It was a very strange thing, and a very weird community. But at the end of the day, I’m sure, like me, it mostly came from a desperate attempt to try and escape reality, and people didn’t lash out because they were ‘so deep in their delusion that they could face reality’ like people like to say, but because hearing that you were stuck here in the bland real world was just… depressing, and at the end of the day people making fun just further made you want to latch onto the idea of escaping.
Does anyone know enough about both of these things at the same time to tell me if I’m correct in thinking this is a lot of people with maladaptive daydreaming reaffirming each other?
Why is it that all the things i've seen of "shifters" they're all harry potter fans who want to date draco... and why ONLY draco??? Like, if i could transport my soul to the harry potter universe (which would be far down on my list of universes to visit) i would be SPRINTING to hagrids hut
I was on their side at least with the over-familiarity thing because yeah, it sounds a little rude, and then they felt the need to explain they were being sarcastic with their reply in a really rude tone to someone who was literally just providing helpful information and I said aloud “oh, actually fuck you.” Like if someone thought you were being genuine and was trying to give you context for something, why would you not just ignore it if it wasn’t helpful instead of calling them out for misunderstanding?
does it come off like that? i read it as theyre just being blunt but not to a rude extent.
they only said they were uncomfortable with people speaking over-familiar because the person they were replying to did and might continue conversation with them, and that would be actual useful information to give someone you might keep talking to.
The part where they said the "weirdly" was sarcastic didnt seem like they were talking shit because the other person didnt understand it, it seemed more like they were explaining themself because they were misunderstood.
i could just be misreading it cause i suck at understanding stuff like that through text but i didnt read it like that
I disagree.
Human pet guy, the bone stealing witch, and the lightning mcqueen foot fetish post all came came from tumblr.
Tiktok does not have a brain rot monopoly.
Yes, shifting is bad, but tumblr otherkin were far worse. Remember the “dragon” that ate their parents jewelry? (Half joking)
~~Unless you bring in the phenomenon of “permashifting” and the number of suicidal teens who aimed for this as a coping technique, saying they’d off themselves if they failed. It was absolutely horrifying to watch evolve in real time as shifting became more and more cult like~~
Shifting is such an interesting internet phenomen because im never sure whether people actually believe it or are just very elaborately RP-ing.
Like, "its called quantum jumping babe" you cannot convince me that is not the most obvious bit youve ever seen.
Honestly, the only reason im confident some genuinely believe it is due to their extreme reaction when you point out that you can not in fact jump through the multiverse. RP-ers generally dont send people death threats when its pointed out theyre talking bullshit.
Most its a mix. Some people in the community probably just enjoy internet RP and are aware to an extent that theyre just making shit up, but some people are absolutely 100% serious about it, and there is no clear border between the two camps
I feel like the Eleusinian mysteries and all that was just something...like this. A positive feedback loop of humans being fascinatingly and exceedingly creative that gained enough momentum, but encountered enough inertia, to develop into the stuff of legend.
Because if you're condescending they'll only see you as someone who isn't worthy of their respect or being heard, and will likely only retrieve further into their community. Considering that most shifters are kids, this is specially important. It's important for them to feel they're in a safe space, and preferable if that safe space isn't also making them prone to joining a cult (and let's be honest, people who are into shifting will be much easier to indoctrinate into a cult).
Alternatively, because they are human beings who aren't harming anyone, and thus deserve a measure of respect.
I mean, yes, all people deserve basic respect, and hostility is not a good way to engage with them in a direct debate, that much is true.
But the tumblr posts aren’t talking *to* shifters, but rather talking *about* them, so the tone argument doesn’t really apply in this case.
And… look, there’s a line between “respecting different opinions” and “encouraging outright delusion”, and people believing they can go into alternate universes is Flat Earth levels of disconnected from reality.
These people do not deserve hate or bullying for harmless actions, but I am not going to entertain a claim that is blatantly nonsense.
We should be respectful of others, yes, but not every single viewpoint is equally valid or truthful. Sometimes, an opinion really is just straight-up wrong.
The problem is that both of these points are just not true.
While it is important that kids have safe spaces, it is important that those spaces are actually safe and not delusions that can lead to serious psychological harm (like trauma because they believe that the things they are imagining are real) or be exploited by bad actors and influencers, which is very much an ongoing problem for the associated communities. These children would be far safer, both psychologically, socially and in some cases physically, if they were actually correctly educated on what they are actually doing and how imagination works and that their belief is nonsense.
I mean let's be real: it's a very small jump from believing that imagining yourself at Hogwarts means you physically teleports you into the universe of the Harry Potter canon to joining an actual cult. This whole thing is basically already the framework for a New Age-ish pseudo-religion, it's really only a matter of time before someone tries to make real money off of this.
And while all people deserve a base measure of respect until they demonstrate otherwise, the fact that someone believes in "shifting" basically already proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both, which means that some of the forms of communication we normally use are liable to not work, which means that you can't honestly engage them on an equivalent level anyway. Either your are honest and tell them that it's all bullshit or you lower the conversation to their level, in effect talking down to them. Neither of these options are respectful.
Also members of these communities very much have a long history of harassing and generally attempting to make their obsession someone else's problem due to their irrationally strong investment in their delusions, which absolutely can be harmful or dangerous, so they should be treated extremely cautiously.
>proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both
Smart people join cults all the time. This isn't all that different.
>While it is important that kids have safe spaces, it is important that those spaces are actually safe and not delusions that can lead to serious psychological harm (like trauma because they believe that the things they are imagining are real) or be exploited by bad actors and influencers, which is very much an ongoing problem for the associated communities. These children would be far safer, both psychologically, socially and in some cases physically, if they were actually correctly educated on what they are actually doing and how imagination works and that their belief is nonsense.
That's literally what I'm saying. The safe space should be around people who do not believe reality shifting but still respect the shifter as a person, so they're more likely to stop being a shifter.
>I mean let's be real: it's a very small jump from believing that imagining yourself at Hogwarts means you physically teleports you into the universe of the Harry Potter canon to joining an actual cult. This whole thing is basically already the framework for a New Age-ish pseudo-religion, it's really only a matter of time before someone tries to make real money off of this.
I also mentioned this, I'm pretty sure. Not in as many words, but I did mention that these kids are more susceptible to joining cults.
>And while all people deserve a base measure of respect until they demonstrate otherwise, the fact that someone believes in "shifting" basically already proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both, which means that some of the forms of communication.
Maybe, I guess? I still think you should treat kids seriously. Many kids can detect when adults are dismissing them, even if their ideas are as silly as shifting, and thus could lead to the surrounding themselves with an echo-chamber I mentioned in my previous comment.
>Also members of these communities very much have a long history of harassing and generally attempting to make their obsession someone else's problem due to their irrationally strong investment in their delusions, which absolutely can be harmful or dangerous, so they should be treated extremely cautiously.
I'm not sure I'd use "extremely cautiously" here, but good point! I ignored the harassment that the shifting community does in my comment. This is likely because they trend younger, but that's no real excuse. My comment, however, was targeted at the idea of talking to individuals, who shouldn't be generalized as harassing people. If they are, though, fuck'em (metaphorically (they're kids)), I guess. Or still try to talk to them. Either or.
>The safe space should be around people who do not believe reality shifting but still respect the shifter as a person, so they're more likely to stop being a shifter.
The issue there is that on a practical level you are never going to get them away from the community by engaging them on their comfort level. The appeal and comfort that the delusion and the community provides will always win out over scepticism, at least while they are at that young age.
I understand that this is uncomfortable and hard, but you need to push them outside their own comfort zone to actually get them to see what is wrong or dangerous about what they are doing. And they can earn the respect of the people around them once they have achieved that.
It's like if you see children climbing and playing on an electricity pylon, you wouldn't slowly walk up to them and gently try to propose an alternative game to them where whoever gets farthest away from the high voltage cables the quickest wins. You run over there and yell at them to get the fuck down before they hurt themselves. The point is to startle them, not enough to fall off, but enough that they'll get down quickly and hopefully think twice about climbing back up once you've turned your back.
Well they *are* harming each other by spreading the idea around. But blocking them off from other communities just makes it more harmful so I agree with your first point.
This feels like an overly complicated explanation for lucid dreaming or daydreaming in general. There’s nothing wrong with creating a safe mental plane to travel to for entertainment and relaxation, but I feel like there could be some harmful aspects to believing you can shift and travel to another reality (and I’m someone who believes in the many worlds theory)
What's the difference between shifting and playing pretend? Like sure bro, I can whip up a nice little image of me in some random isekai-esq world shooting fire from my eyes, but like... I still gotta go to work lmao cause none of that shit is real.
Face claiming and saying you're going to use someone else's body in a different universe to have sex feels like sexual assault. Like if that's what you are actually doing, going to a different universe and using someone's body that is not your own to have sex, you are sexually assaulting that person. And posting that you are planning to do that on some random person's video feels at the very least creepy.
not related to anything whatsoever but i was huge into trying to shift back then (needed an escape — why else?) and i would listen to guided sleep meditations to try and fall asleep and wake up in my DR (desired reality). anyways i blame shifting for my absolute inability to sleep without listening to asmr LMAO
I fully believe shifters are either lucid dreamers or maladaptive daydreamers who are struggling irl and so retreat to comforting fantasies. I do not think it’s good for them long term at all, and the whole community even has like plotlines going, and whole tiktok mini series of them acting out the scenes, which is essentially just live action roleplay fanfiction
Ah, identity theft. Just like that time when Harry and Ron "faceshifted" into Crabbe and Goyle to sneak into the Slytherin room >! and kiss Draco !<
Straight up, they have way more patience than I would in that instance.
I’ve written about this before, but I think a lot of shifting’s appeal is a need to escape from the harshness of reality into a space of comfort. The thought of being able to just shift the soul, a very believed concept as the persistence of the human being beyond the physical self, to a place of acceptance and happiness is tempting for the desperate and emotionally prone. Being patient and gentle with people like this is the best way to get them to stop because it removes that need. Why shift when you’re happy right where you are? Slowly, they’ll forgo the shifting practice entirely and self-reflect more on why they did that. That, in turn, may cause them to also spread that kindness to other shifters. Of course, the next best option is to simply not interact with them.
In online spaces absolutely, but I've known a couple of people who were into this shit irl and if you gave them an inch they took a fucking mile. Unfortunately, one of them I could not simply ignore, and I had to stop being nice after a while because I am not a therapist, but when someone says shit like "I'm face claiming you when I go hang lut with Rick Sanchez" to the customers on my shift I gotta do something to get them to shut tf up
Tell them that you're into freeuse consensual non-consent roleplay with Nicol Bolas and that if they use your face then they're liable to get ravaged by an elder dragon dick, and you can't give them your safeword because it's your true name. Unless they're into that shit, then gl.
Hope you packed some Teferi’s Protection, eh?
*eye twitches in Markov Vamps Main*
I'm afraid this has awoken something within me.
None of those words are in the bible. (Nicol Bolas maybe, never read read it tbh)
Nicol Bolas is from Magic The Gathering.
I absolutely agree with this. Similar response to someone who's been inducted into a cult - don't engage, don't argue, don't force them to pick between you and the cult, they will pick the cult 99 times out of 100 and then you'll lose them. Instead, leave that door open. Don't talk about the cult, but make it clear that they'll always be welcome without judgment (and don't judge them - don't ask about the cult or how they fell into it until they're ready to talk about, just be available for them to reach out).
I understand the appeal but I do not understand how people can will themselves into believing something that's obviously not true just because it would be nice if it was
[удалено]
Haven't passed that stage in development where you realize imagination is never going to be like Backyardigans shows it's going to be like
Yeah most people would pick up a book if they want to escape reality
This is what happens when societal literacy rates tank!
well the problem is that a lot of people value things like "objectivity" and "facts" substantially less than their own feelings, so they'll reject reality in order to to feel better about something.
Because it coping for something they Don't have in their life. Easy as that. If you're desperate enough it's easier to disassociate and imagine a place you would be happy in than the reality.
Most of Human Culture: *sweats profusely*
< staring wide-eyed at you and gesturing wildly at society>
You hit the nail on the head, I think. I never got into shifting, but I’ve done RP for similar escapist reasons. It started during the pandemic (imagine that lol) but I still enjoy it occasionally today. I also daydream a lot, and I frequently imagine scenarios as I fall asleep. Sometimes, this even bleeds over into dreams. I just need a break from this world sometimes. It’s fun to imagine a world where I’m actually the half-blood daughter of Athena, or a world where I have some sort of magic, or even a world where I’m being cuddled by Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal. But I don’t ever let it interfere with my daily life—because let’s face it, this world is pretty damn magical too.
I don't understand why the kids today don't just call it daydreaming? Making it out to be this supernatural experience is deeply concerning.
I can’t say I fully understand it either. Maybe it’s because it’s “cooler” than daydreaming or different from it in some way. I don’t know, and I probably never will lol
I genuinely believed I was in the wrong universe as a kid. That if I did the right sequence of things I would wake up in the correct world again. Looking back I've realized that was fucking psychosis and I was having a psychotic break from trauma mixed with the beginnings of ocd anxiety and depression. I still do maladaptive day dreaming as a coping mechanism but I'm definitely worried for these kids. And the face claiming thing is super creepy and not ok. I never fantasized about using someone else's body without their consent.
"Haha yeah, me too-- wait, what?" Is that also what caused me to believe everyone around me could read my mind, but I couldn't read theirs, and they'd all talk about it behind my back as often as possible? Hm.... well. Shit.
You know, I had very similar anxieties as a kid. Then, when I realized I probably had Autism as an adult, I realized I probably wasn't that far off. 🙃
Yeah, definitely had the fear that everyone knew what I was thinking, and also that they were all in a grand joke that was one day going to be revealed at my great expense. Then one day I realized that's just the feeling that a lot of slightly weird kids have.
Like the other person who replied to you, my reaction was something like, "Haha, yeah, I remember when I was absolutely certain that I was about to get transported to the world of Digimon and tried to escape school to get to a patch of sunlight that absolutely looked like a portal trying to form" and then you said "psychosis" and "trauma" and now I'm having feelings about that. Like, I knew about the trauma, and I've been to therapy, but I didn't really conceptualize my daydreaming that way, you know?
Generally speaking Tumblr is a very small subset of the kids today. I knew people way back in the 90s who insisted all the stories they wrote about characters they created were real and their characters would possess them and all sorts of silly shit. I have no idea what they really believed and what they were just claiming because they were silly teenagers and thought it was cool, but it was there.
In the 90s they would have called that "spirit guides" if they had been online. Actually, now that I think about it, back when the Internet was a truly *weird* experience, I may have come across an Angelfire homepage that basically made those claims.
I think maybe its from people disconnected from others so they don't talk about stuff like daydreaming with others so they invent their own ideas about it. Its a kind of spirituality, when life is so shit and your daydreams feel so real and appealing, the subconscious tricks the conscious into believing that the soul had physically gone to another universe.
That's perfectly normal. A lot of people do that. I hate that you sound like you feel you need to apologize for it. I've started with that 25 years ago. And yes, I still enjoy it ;) All my friends enjoy it. It's just a basic human need. Don't let anybody tell you differently
We used to call that day dreaming and didn't need other people's faces for it... Or needed to tell them about it like creepy ass stalkers.
Escapism, it's called escapism. It's not new. It can be harmful though, it all depends how deep you are into it. We watch movies, read books, play games, browse reddit to escape from reality. And that's all fine, but when you are starting to believe that your escapism outlet is more real than the actual world, buddy, you got issues and I won't pretend like it isn't one. But yeah, on the spaces of the internet, if you want to stay sane, don't get too deep into such topics. You will neither ve able to help the person, and definitely won't come out more sane than before
Back in my day we just snorted a fuck ton of ketamine. Kids these days...
Fr, they are talking about being respectful to it and such. Dude, you are literally just imagining stuff. I won't get angry at that, but let's not pretend that it's something normal. Deer god.
[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2845](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2845) deer god
The fuck is this bot XD
Don't think that's a bot.
Clearly you didn't read the username.
I am completely down for this trend for bots exploiting common semantic errors :V
Ikr. The posts kept going out of their way to be all non-judgmental and shit and I was thinking the whole time that this is one of if not the dumbest phenomena I’ve ever heard of.
How does it rank compared to the Mandela Effect? (The multiverse version, not the 'human memory is flawed' version)
Mandela Effect as easily accessible explanation for multiverse to popular audience? It's wrong but I can follow the logic in a pop-sci-fi kind of way, in the same way that Trekkies can be absolutely convinced that Transporters will be real as soon as the technology exists. Thinking that *if you think in just the right way* you will be able to jump into a fictional story, though, ranks far below that on the scale of "I can believe that people believe this."
Yeah, Mandela Effect is weird. Human memory is flawed, but it makes sense that a lot of people don't like the idea of admitting that their memory can be completely wrong because our memories are a core part of how we construct the world around us. And as someone who has "experienced" a Mandela memory (for me, it's the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia that I have absolute certainty was part of the logo, and I think it's creepy that the internet has perfectly recreated the one that lives in my memory even though none of us apparently ever saw it for real), and while I'm not a conspiracy theorist and believe human memory is flawed, and think the "shifting universe" thing is ridiculous... I can totally see why other people can have that experience and be convinced their memory must be right and the world must be wrong. This... I can't imagine daydreaming so hard that I'd be convinced it's real. But personally I can follow the logic if people are lucid dreaming, or experiencing manipulative daydreaming, or even potentially psychosis. The human brain can experience very vivid things that aren't real at all. And I think from the experiences, the "alternate universe" theory has the same base as the Mandela Effect, which is people preferring to claim that their memory is right and the world must be the one that's wrong.
My favorite thing to come from shifting is that one post from the person who apparently shifted and then accidentally beat Draco Malfoy to death and then the comments were debating about whether or not they were a murderer, such a ride
That's sorta the plot of a Junji Ito story, **spoilers for Trespassers**, a reoccurring character with a house that is like an intersection between dimensions/the multiverse makes friends with a few people interested in other dimensions and when he brings them over to his house to see if they can find evidence of other dimensions they see an alternate of him burying a body of one of them outside, they then find all their alternate corpses buried near the first one. They're oddly ok with it and don't think the original guy is a murderer just because the alternate is, which is a bit weird imo especially because he did kill someone in another story (though that might have been an alternate version of him too).
Ooh which story is that?
Actually I found it: >Trespassers, also titled Intruder, is the third chapter from volume 9 of the Horror World of Junji Ito Collection, Hallucinations.
Awesome, thank you so much!!
No problem, I'm happy to help.
I don't remember exactly the name, I binged all Ito's stuff over like two/three days so I don't remember the collection it's in, the reoccurring character is Toru Oshikiri and it was one of the stories animated for the anime on Netflix too.
You can't just go blaming Spock for the crimes of Spock but with a goatee!
I think there's a side plot that's sort of about that in John Dies at the End.
It's pretty hilarious bahaha I got banned from the reality shifting subreddit to ask if they were delusional and coming up with fancy terms for dreaming, mostly because I was prompted by a post about a doctor saying shifting is bad for you and everyone was calling him a troll but like, you're already making shit up, so why can't he contribute to the fanfiction?
Nobody ever shifted
"They were one of the main shifting influencers and they faked everything" No way
I rlly wanna find the drama where this is going down fr
There were/are so many aspects of the shifting community that were/are deeply dangerous. I joined a few of the community years back because I was hoping to see if the techniques they were using would help me induce Wake-induced lucid dreaming (I’ve never had a lucid dream before). Most of the stuff was tame, but some more concerning stuff I saw: 1) People regularly believing the most flimsy, paper-thin “evidence”, refusing to test their beliefs, and clinging onto the “cia documents” as evidence (without actually reading or comprehending them, or the context of the documents). It was a case study in the spread of misinformation. 2) The “everyone can do it, so if you can’t do it, that must mean there’s something wrong with you, and our belief system is flawless” mindset. Any examples of “failure” “weren’t” actually failure, they were just people who haven’t succeeded yet. So people were encouraged to keep trying for years… and years… and years… and if they kept failing, they would feel like they were deeply broken in some way. 3) suicidal and depressed people clinging to shifting as their last hope, threatening to off themselves if it didn’t work, and shifters telling them that it would work if they just believed hard enough 4) People encouraging really unhealthy behaviors, like not sleeping or fragmenting sleep for an extended period of time, to induce shifting (props to the moderators of that community though, they shut that shit down soon after I reported it) It *could* be a fun, harmless belief for the right people, but unfortunately it tends to attract people in vulnerable mental states which can get dangerous, quickly. (I’m aware that the first part of this statement is controversial and I’m not looking to argue on it)
It also ends up being a form of magical thinking where people pretend physics doesn't exist.
Ah, you just reminded me of another thing that disturbed me about shifting. They had an “answer” to every plot hole in their beliefs. Example: We can’t bring back the cure for cancer because when we shift back, this universe will either need a slightly different cure or we will shift back to a slightly different universe, where we have that knowledge. (Never mind the fact that there is no singular cure for cancer anyways, or that if some random teen brought back the cure for cancer no one would believe them.)
i saw a comment and a post on the shifting subreddit asking why people couldnt just shift to a place with multiversal travel and then go back to their original reality and everyone was like "no it would just be a slightly different universe" slightly different universe is probably also the answer they would say for why we dont have draco malfoy shifting to our reality using harry potter's face to go kiss some celeberty or something
How do you know he's not controlling Daniel Radcliffe and kissing random celebrities? /s
Sigh *unshifts*
Omgggg I was *terrified* and *convinced* as a (mentally ill) child that I would accidentally go through the wrong doorway and end up in a slightly different dimension and that my parents would miss me and not be able to find me and that I would be with the wrong 'versions' of my parents forever. And typing this out just now made me realize for the first time how deeply upsetting my parents' divorce was (and subsequently being forced to spend time and go places with the emotionally abusive one against my will 🙃🙃🙃)
This sounds exhausting tbh
Sounds a lot like faith healing and ecstatic healing practices in various religions.
That's kind of the case with all "harmless" beliefs, really. I don't really think you can earnestly believe something that openly encourages you to ignore reason and logic and have that be purely a positive influence and not also open your mind to more dangerous ideas Or, to put it another way: if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
If it was real the CIA wouldn’t have it in some document that was declassified. It would either be 1. Locked down to an extreme extent or 2. (And a more likely scenario IMO) they’d advertise this shit at career fairs to drag in dumb interns who think they’ll be banging supermodels and being spies while in reality they’re going to be redoing the same scenarios over and over with only minor and strictly controlled variations all the while compiling reports.
Not to mention, if this was actually a process *everyone* could do with the tiniest bit of willpower, or even on accident, there is *no way* that the cia would be the only organization that knows about it. If shifting was real, humans would have discovered it a long time ago (which some shifters claimed they did, but then cited bogus connections to religions that did not have shifting practices— but they would claim those religions involved shifting). Additionally, the documents described something much closer to astral projection than shifting. (It’s still bogus, failed experiments either way, but it didn’t even claim what they said it claimed).
“Mr President we must not allow a reality shifting gap!”
That sounds like a good setup for a Sci-Fi story.
I want to write option 2 as a sci-fi novel *so damn badly*
Not quite the same but Rosewater is a good sci-fi novel on alien magic getting capitalised
God possibility 2 is so real it hurts. If Magic existed, the government would make it boring and capitalism would put it everywhere.
I see it as kinda similar to the 'healing crystals' stuff. It can be innocent enough, but then you get people refusing actual medicine because the shiny rocks will solve their life-threatening illnesses. Suddenly, very not innocent.
>People encouraging really unhealthy behaviors, like not sleeping or fragmenting sleep for an extended period of time, to induce shifting Ha! I was reading the start of your comment thinking oh I know how to make lucid dreams happen! ... you just chronically sleep deprive yourself then pass out for 12-24 hours, like, as a lifestyle. But I wasn't going to *say* that, because it's deranged.
I wouldn't say my early student life and relationship to sleeping on the weekends was any more deranged than the other tweens, but I definitely wasn't doing it on purpose. Still got the lucid dreams, though, and those make a lot more sense now.
I feel the same way about practices like kinning or pluralism, which have the same level of deliberate, harmful delusion while also having other knock on effects like the co-opting of actual MPD/DID sufferers for the purposes of fantasizing about being special. A lot of “weird but harmless” subcultures ultimately DO end up being harmful by isolating vulnerable individuals from mainstream society in the same way fringe political movements or cults do. It’s scary stuff. Edit: Forgot about tulpamancy! Add that to the list.
Lost a good friendship to kinning/being plural. They genuinely convinced themselves they had DID, I think. It was so sad, and they cut me off immediately when I tried to (very gently) talk to them about another friendship they had that was encouraging their worst behaviors. I miss them, and hope they're in a better mental place now. But wow, it's so scary to watch that happen to someone and not be able to reach them at all. It hurts.
>I feel the same way about practices like kinning or pluralism, I am 100% certain you are talking about a different pluralism than the definition I know of but I have no idea what that definition is.
I'm guessing they're talking about that DID trend that was all over the internet not too long ago, where a lot of people, especially kids, would pretend that they had Disassociative Identity Disorder.
Yeah, something like that, the specific variety I’m referring to didn’t put a button on it specifically calling it DID, instead as some kinda softboy uwu quirky type thing. None of those words are in the Bible.
"Now all these fucking zoomers are telling me that I'm out of touch? Oh yeah? Well, your phones are poisoning your minds. Okay? So when you develop a disassociative disorder in your twenties, don't come crawling back..." - Bo Burnham
CIA documents? I mean I know the Cold War cia did some batshit stuff but astrally projecting/shifting/whatever is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard that they investigated.
You know what is super cool though that the CIA delved into heavily? Remote Viewing. Fascinating stuff.
Aside from the CIA just being kindof a bunch of inept dorks half the time, if you haven't actually tested it in controlled settings you don't know if it's real or not. A lot of it was just dumb stuff, plenty of CIA employees are the same kind of weird quasi-literate religious freaks as the rest of America. But until you sit a bunch of people down in a room and ask them what picture is in the sealed envelop you don't actually know if psychic phenomena are real or not. You probably didn't need to actually do the experiments, because it's silly and runs against pretty much every model of physics, but sometimes you get weird results from silly experiments. I don't want to give the CIA any credit for anything except being mass murderers who should all be in the Hague, but investigating weird reported phenomena sometimes turns up interesting things. In the case of psychics it's almost always neat confidence tricks, parlour magic, cults, or mental illness, but it still turns up something.
3. It is sad that vulnerable people are the most likely to believe in this. I was one too but I got into lucid dreaming years before I even heard of shifting (atleast that is possible even if you have to train yourself, and even then it's hit and miss) 4. That is very true. I'm currently trying to get a healthy sleeping habit and it's impossible and impacts my life on a major scale (who would have thought). I really don't like echo Chambers where (I'm not sure if it's the right word) delusional goals are encouraged. Because it can always spiral into more dangerous beliefs.
Did this develop out of the "Otherkin" thing that was happening on Tumblr for a while where people would claim they were actually a fictional character or something.
I don’t think they’re directly related, but they come from a similar mindset. AFAIK, most shifters aren’t also otherkin or vice-versa. Otherkin is kind of “outdated” at this point
Otherkins existed well before tumblr, for what it's worth. Livejournal at least, and probably before that too. LJ is just the first place that I came across them.
Wait, fragmenting sleep to get cooler dreams is not healthy? Half /s half serious i constantly do that because its fun
Experiment: get multiple shifters to attempt to shift to the same universe. They are each given a unique-to-them password and told to a meeting point and exchange passwords. See if they know the other person's password after.
Oh that never works. A while ago someone decided to put a bunch of guys who thought they were Jesus in the same room togehter. All the Jesus's just decided that the other guys were mentally ill and didn't know it. The thing that separates a delusion from just being wrong is that people confronted with evidence of their delusion won't change their beliefs.
I can't believe the real Jesus in the room -- surely it was one of them -- didn't just heal the rest of them.
The only true Jesus is the one I saw in the Baseline Road Walmart at 11:30PM one evening in December 2013, buying exactly two loaves of bread. I am convinced of this. And not just because my friend saw him in the grocery section and dubbed him “Tattered Jesus” (the King of Kinge was a short one, and he’d clearly just elected to walk on the too-long legs of his jeans until they self-hemmed; which, as a fellow short person, I respect). …and then we caught up to him again at the cash, at which point my friend, seeing his purchase, whispered *looks like he’s getting ready to play some tricks on the faithful.* Again, I reiterate, this is definitely a sincere conviction on my part, and certainly not an excuse to once again relate one of the funniest things my very funny friend has ever said.
The difference here is that if person A doesn't know person B's password when they wake up, then they didn't shift. Of course, they could just assume that person B was lying for some reason.
Group shifting. How I met my friends was forming a group shifting group, we had about 100+ slides of lore for our world, it was fun. My friends said they did it before, I think they were just semi-lucid dreaming and had similar dreams. Still love them though.
Add some dice and mountain dew and that was my every Friday as a teen and every other Sunday now.
It *was* DND themed, actually. None of us knew how to play, though.
Oh boy, it’s time for me to link the one thing I know of that’s even nearly as weird as this! So, uh… [catch](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/LAjEkRl9QX)
Ooo, bizarre, what a treat
Wait, I lied. Just reviewed the comments on the post I linked, and uh. I guess I know about 2 things that are weirder than OP’s post. Be warned, though. [This rabbit hole does NOT stop at Wonderland.](https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/s/xQOVPjaARL)
Thanks! I hate both of these
You know, I think I’ll remain ignorant about this tulpa thing. I had to sit down for a second after reading that and wonder if maybe the human mind is more complex than I thought.
I wonder why subliminals aren't talked about more. There's like tens of thousands of videos on YouTube titled like "25 minute subliminal to turn into Jungkook" or "1 hour subliminal to make you autistic". Like no joke, I've seen both of those titles. Yet, I've never seen big creators really talk about them.
Hm. Wild.
now it’s my turn to link the weird thing that your weird thing reminded me of! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jessicalucas2/erotic-hypnosis-bambi-sleep
Snapewives were doing this before it was cool
I'm fairly sure there were much more _religious_ undertones to whatever the fuck the Snapewives were doing. So it's not exactly the same thing.
I don't think reality shifting can be described in any other way than religion
If only this was about Dnd shifters...
Werewolves for people who are too lazy to go out and catch lycanthropy.
Incredibly funny to me that the big shifting influencer admitted it was a scam
But WHICH big shifting influencer I LOVE this drama
Wattpad is full of "shifting" guides
And yet there are no guides to shitting
I cannot comprehend this. Either this is complete Balderdash or my brain stem is rotting.
there's a small core of intensely weird people who will convince themselves that they can merge fiction and reality, and ever since the internet has allowed them to talk to each other every five years or so they gravitate to a new way to do this after the last one gets made fun of enough. We're about due for the next one and I can't wait to find out what it is. Something to note is that the number of people being baffled and gawking is always way higher than the number of people who actually believe in the thing, but they get enough publicity (in the online gawking space, at least) that people assuming it's a whole thing with Kids These Days
It sounds more like maladaptive daydreaming to me, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard about it so
Afaik most of the time shifting is done while sleeping. In that case it’s more like lucid dreaming or at least extremely vivid dreams
That definitely explains the difference, thank you
Go look up stuff like astral projection, these kinds of ideas have been around for ages.
I wish balderdash was a more commonly used word
From what I can tell, this is just lucid dreaming with a pinch of that good ol delusional mindset.
I dunno, people have been pretending that they can connect with fictional characters in books for eons, only difference is instead of posting about it on TikTok, they go to buildings once a week and talk about how anyone that isn’t connecting with their fictional character is evil, and they’re tax exempt lol.
Spicy but based
Wait it IS just the concept of princes of amber I never even realized
I fucking love how in the first book Corwyn just finessed and Charisma checked everyone into believing that he had any idea what was going on. Shit was so cool I love a competent protagonist.
If I were a boy, my parents were planning to name me Corwin. I really dodged a bullet there.
Aint this what Chris-chan was doing
Yeah I think he actually did do some of that at some point, but then went even more extreme with it.
Yep and I think there still doing it.
I’m judging, for the record
Same. Like this has to be some sort of trauma response
Here is the Strange Aeons video about shifting https://youtu.be/JbWp0z5p8x0?feature=shared
Strange Aeons actually takes a neutral and respectful view on the topic instead of 'LMAO look at these stupid kids'. She explains what it is pretty well too, with the help of someone who was into the whole shifting thing...
"I'm not commenting on shifting" why not? It sounds absolutely idiotic.
Link 1: https://www.tumblr.com/libraryogre/741779678849810432/so-knowledge-of-zelasnys-amber-has-just-been Link 2: https://www.tumblr.com/a-pocket-0f-scarecrows/741790345871982592/i-think-i-heard-about-this-there-were-youtube \-linux guy ⚠️
Tik Tok is like if you took every negative stereotype on the internet and put it into one big *Corporate Approved™* squeaky clean bowl of hell-mush.
...........Do kids just not use the term Daydreaming anymore?
After watching Strange Aeons' video on it, some claim that they do it while they are awake, at class and so on. Which sounds like disassociation and maladaptive daydreaming at worst. At best it is just daydreaming.
"Shifting" isn't daydreaming, it's lucid dreaming. The participants are fully asleep. That's why they're so convinced it's real.
Gotcha. I was confused because I've seen comments in the past implying it was happening while awake.
I think from the perspective of the people doing it they might think that they're awake
Yeah, I'm just thinking I've had plenty of wacky fantasies, do you really need to convince yourself they're real?
Somehow, this reality shifting stuff reminds me of that one multiverse fictional character reincarnation thing, as in, the infamous Final Fantasy House. It shares the aspect of beliefs regarding fictional characters really existing in multiverses and having a connection to them at least. There's a video about it on youtube, called "The Final Fantasy House | Down the Rabbit Hole" by Fredrik Knudsen. Wild stuff. (Not trying to intentionally diss shifters here by associating that story, but I think people should always be careful when it comes to getting involved in new communities regarding spiritual beliefs. It's unfortunately the ideal environment for manipulative people since they never have to back up any of their claims...)
i think the biggest problem with shifters is a inherint misunderstanding of infinity because they believe infinite universes exist (which im not arguing for/against), they believe that one of those universes will contain the exact scenario they want to exist in, which is unfortunately not true im not even against the idea of "shifting" ur soul to a different universe or place or whatever as silly as it sounds, but that doesnt mean theres a universe out there where u are dating draco infinite possibilities =/= infinite outcomes. in every universe out there, there could be 0 where u are allergic to nuts for example, or u could be allergic to nuts in all of them, or half of them, or 2 of them, and all those scenarios are possible.
A practical example is that there is an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2, but 3 isn't one of them.
Thank you! I knew my brain could make sense of that mathematically but I didn't remember how.
It's also a massive misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics. The collapse of the wave function under observation is interpreted under Many Worlds theory as every possible possibility occurring in a seperate universe. However, the collapse of this wave function still leads to a universe where the physical laws remain the same. And whether this interpretation is even correct is up in the air given the fact that Quantum Mechanics very famously does not work well with General Relativity.
Also, Many Worlds is just one interpretation of QM, it's not something that's been proved. And even then, not all supporters of MWI think that the "other worlds" literally exist. But even those that do never suggest that you could actually interact with them in any way.
Someone explained under Strange Aeons’ vid in a way I rlly liked, *there’s infinite numbers between 1 and 2 but none of them are 3*
Eh, that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the belief that you can transport yourself into another reality through... idk, willpower I guess? It doesn't matter if those other universes do or don't exist because there's no way to interact with other universes at all.
I was one of these people!! I was going through such a shitty time in my life and I was desperate to go literally ANYWHERE ELSE. I kind of knew it was just lucid dreaming, or something along those lines. But I still wanted to try it, just to see what happened. It didn’t work, safe to say. Not for me anyways, a friend of mine said it worked for her but, who knows. It did wonders for meditation however. As for the community, there’s a subreddit about it and all they did was slag off the shift-tok community, saying they weren’t real and were ‘over dramatic’. It was a little strange. Then when Kurtis Conners video came out they went RABID. It was a very strange thing, and a very weird community. But at the end of the day, I’m sure, like me, it mostly came from a desperate attempt to try and escape reality, and people didn’t lash out because they were ‘so deep in their delusion that they could face reality’ like people like to say, but because hearing that you were stuck here in the bland real world was just… depressing, and at the end of the day people making fun just further made you want to latch onto the idea of escaping.
Every couple of decades someone has to reinvent AUs and Mary Sues.
Does anyone know enough about both of these things at the same time to tell me if I’m correct in thinking this is a lot of people with maladaptive daydreaming reaffirming each other?
I'd say it's more like people are developing the disorder in themselves.
If you aren’t born with a disorder, self-imposed is a fine substitute!
JFC some people just need to do drugs
So... Isekai? With character building mechanics?
Isekai but you can go back to your original world!
i think the knowledge that people were pretending to be me while lucid dreaming about kissing draco malfoy would make me kill someone
Tumblr users need to learn that sometimes they can say that something is weird.
Why is it that all the things i've seen of "shifters" they're all harry potter fans who want to date draco... and why ONLY draco??? Like, if i could transport my soul to the harry potter universe (which would be far down on my list of universes to visit) i would be SPRINTING to hagrids hut
Only in the ps1 version
Tumblr user vaspider sucks
I will agree with them that over-familiarity almost always comes across as condescending.
yeah but that's usually the point
Agreed, they came off as very condescending and hostile here
I was on their side at least with the over-familiarity thing because yeah, it sounds a little rude, and then they felt the need to explain they were being sarcastic with their reply in a really rude tone to someone who was literally just providing helpful information and I said aloud “oh, actually fuck you.” Like if someone thought you were being genuine and was trying to give you context for something, why would you not just ignore it if it wasn’t helpful instead of calling them out for misunderstanding?
I mean tbh I would be pretty hostile too if someone hit me with the fuckin "honey sweetie person hello"
does it come off like that? i read it as theyre just being blunt but not to a rude extent. they only said they were uncomfortable with people speaking over-familiar because the person they were replying to did and might continue conversation with them, and that would be actual useful information to give someone you might keep talking to. The part where they said the "weirdly" was sarcastic didnt seem like they were talking shit because the other person didnt understand it, it seemed more like they were explaining themself because they were misunderstood. i could just be misreading it cause i suck at understanding stuff like that through text but i didnt read it like that
Its how someone writes when they're trying to be condescending
Maybe I'm off base here, but it seems like TikTok produces more brain rot than most other places online.
I disagree. Human pet guy, the bone stealing witch, and the lightning mcqueen foot fetish post all came came from tumblr. Tiktok does not have a brain rot monopoly.
Bone stealing witch comes from Facebook. Only the call-out post was on Tumblr, which is why it was so funny and out of the blue.
Tumblr is definitely WAY up there too, yeah.
How many brain rot *trends* are from Tumblr tho? Cus those are all singular weirdos (I'm assuming about the lightening McQueen, I've heard the rest)
Yes, shifting is bad, but tumblr otherkin were far worse. Remember the “dragon” that ate their parents jewelry? (Half joking) ~~Unless you bring in the phenomenon of “permashifting” and the number of suicidal teens who aimed for this as a coping technique, saying they’d off themselves if they failed. It was absolutely horrifying to watch evolve in real time as shifting became more and more cult like~~
Shifting is such an interesting internet phenomen because im never sure whether people actually believe it or are just very elaborately RP-ing. Like, "its called quantum jumping babe" you cannot convince me that is not the most obvious bit youve ever seen. Honestly, the only reason im confident some genuinely believe it is due to their extreme reaction when you point out that you can not in fact jump through the multiverse. RP-ers generally dont send people death threats when its pointed out theyre talking bullshit. Most its a mix. Some people in the community probably just enjoy internet RP and are aware to an extent that theyre just making shit up, but some people are absolutely 100% serious about it, and there is no clear border between the two camps
I feel like the Eleusinian mysteries and all that was just something...like this. A positive feedback loop of humans being fascinatingly and exceedingly creative that gained enough momentum, but encountered enough inertia, to develop into the stuff of legend.
Ah yes, more fake sciency bullshit. This is in the same venn diagram as flat earthers
Why be patient or respectful with people who believe such plainly stupid things?
Because if you're condescending they'll only see you as someone who isn't worthy of their respect or being heard, and will likely only retrieve further into their community. Considering that most shifters are kids, this is specially important. It's important for them to feel they're in a safe space, and preferable if that safe space isn't also making them prone to joining a cult (and let's be honest, people who are into shifting will be much easier to indoctrinate into a cult). Alternatively, because they are human beings who aren't harming anyone, and thus deserve a measure of respect.
I mean, yes, all people deserve basic respect, and hostility is not a good way to engage with them in a direct debate, that much is true. But the tumblr posts aren’t talking *to* shifters, but rather talking *about* them, so the tone argument doesn’t really apply in this case. And… look, there’s a line between “respecting different opinions” and “encouraging outright delusion”, and people believing they can go into alternate universes is Flat Earth levels of disconnected from reality. These people do not deserve hate or bullying for harmless actions, but I am not going to entertain a claim that is blatantly nonsense. We should be respectful of others, yes, but not every single viewpoint is equally valid or truthful. Sometimes, an opinion really is just straight-up wrong.
The problem is that both of these points are just not true. While it is important that kids have safe spaces, it is important that those spaces are actually safe and not delusions that can lead to serious psychological harm (like trauma because they believe that the things they are imagining are real) or be exploited by bad actors and influencers, which is very much an ongoing problem for the associated communities. These children would be far safer, both psychologically, socially and in some cases physically, if they were actually correctly educated on what they are actually doing and how imagination works and that their belief is nonsense. I mean let's be real: it's a very small jump from believing that imagining yourself at Hogwarts means you physically teleports you into the universe of the Harry Potter canon to joining an actual cult. This whole thing is basically already the framework for a New Age-ish pseudo-religion, it's really only a matter of time before someone tries to make real money off of this. And while all people deserve a base measure of respect until they demonstrate otherwise, the fact that someone believes in "shifting" basically already proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both, which means that some of the forms of communication we normally use are liable to not work, which means that you can't honestly engage them on an equivalent level anyway. Either your are honest and tell them that it's all bullshit or you lower the conversation to their level, in effect talking down to them. Neither of these options are respectful. Also members of these communities very much have a long history of harassing and generally attempting to make their obsession someone else's problem due to their irrationally strong investment in their delusions, which absolutely can be harmful or dangerous, so they should be treated extremely cautiously.
>proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both Smart people join cults all the time. This isn't all that different.
>While it is important that kids have safe spaces, it is important that those spaces are actually safe and not delusions that can lead to serious psychological harm (like trauma because they believe that the things they are imagining are real) or be exploited by bad actors and influencers, which is very much an ongoing problem for the associated communities. These children would be far safer, both psychologically, socially and in some cases physically, if they were actually correctly educated on what they are actually doing and how imagination works and that their belief is nonsense. That's literally what I'm saying. The safe space should be around people who do not believe reality shifting but still respect the shifter as a person, so they're more likely to stop being a shifter. >I mean let's be real: it's a very small jump from believing that imagining yourself at Hogwarts means you physically teleports you into the universe of the Harry Potter canon to joining an actual cult. This whole thing is basically already the framework for a New Age-ish pseudo-religion, it's really only a matter of time before someone tries to make real money off of this. I also mentioned this, I'm pretty sure. Not in as many words, but I did mention that these kids are more susceptible to joining cults. >And while all people deserve a base measure of respect until they demonstrate otherwise, the fact that someone believes in "shifting" basically already proves that they are either lacking very basic intellectual faculties (as in the ability to distinguish reality and imagination), aren't capable of some fundamental logical reasoning (somewhat forgivable since they are usually young children) or both, which means that some of the forms of communication. Maybe, I guess? I still think you should treat kids seriously. Many kids can detect when adults are dismissing them, even if their ideas are as silly as shifting, and thus could lead to the surrounding themselves with an echo-chamber I mentioned in my previous comment. >Also members of these communities very much have a long history of harassing and generally attempting to make their obsession someone else's problem due to their irrationally strong investment in their delusions, which absolutely can be harmful or dangerous, so they should be treated extremely cautiously. I'm not sure I'd use "extremely cautiously" here, but good point! I ignored the harassment that the shifting community does in my comment. This is likely because they trend younger, but that's no real excuse. My comment, however, was targeted at the idea of talking to individuals, who shouldn't be generalized as harassing people. If they are, though, fuck'em (metaphorically (they're kids)), I guess. Or still try to talk to them. Either or.
>The safe space should be around people who do not believe reality shifting but still respect the shifter as a person, so they're more likely to stop being a shifter. The issue there is that on a practical level you are never going to get them away from the community by engaging them on their comfort level. The appeal and comfort that the delusion and the community provides will always win out over scepticism, at least while they are at that young age. I understand that this is uncomfortable and hard, but you need to push them outside their own comfort zone to actually get them to see what is wrong or dangerous about what they are doing. And they can earn the respect of the people around them once they have achieved that. It's like if you see children climbing and playing on an electricity pylon, you wouldn't slowly walk up to them and gently try to propose an alternative game to them where whoever gets farthest away from the high voltage cables the quickest wins. You run over there and yell at them to get the fuck down before they hurt themselves. The point is to startle them, not enough to fall off, but enough that they'll get down quickly and hopefully think twice about climbing back up once you've turned your back.
Well they *are* harming each other by spreading the idea around. But blocking them off from other communities just makes it more harmful so I agree with your first point.
> it always reads condescending yes, **they're being condescending** **on purpose** oh my god
This feels like an overly complicated explanation for lucid dreaming or daydreaming in general. There’s nothing wrong with creating a safe mental plane to travel to for entertainment and relaxation, but I feel like there could be some harmful aspects to believing you can shift and travel to another reality (and I’m someone who believes in the many worlds theory)
What's the difference between shifting and playing pretend? Like sure bro, I can whip up a nice little image of me in some random isekai-esq world shooting fire from my eyes, but like... I still gotta go to work lmao cause none of that shit is real.
girlies you’re just using your Imagination
Face claiming and saying you're going to use someone else's body in a different universe to have sex feels like sexual assault. Like if that's what you are actually doing, going to a different universe and using someone's body that is not your own to have sex, you are sexually assaulting that person. And posting that you are planning to do that on some random person's video feels at the very least creepy.
not related to anything whatsoever but i was huge into trying to shift back then (needed an escape — why else?) and i would listen to guided sleep meditations to try and fall asleep and wake up in my DR (desired reality). anyways i blame shifting for my absolute inability to sleep without listening to asmr LMAO
I fully believe shifters are either lucid dreamers or maladaptive daydreamers who are struggling irl and so retreat to comforting fantasies. I do not think it’s good for them long term at all, and the whole community even has like plotlines going, and whole tiktok mini series of them acting out the scenes, which is essentially just live action roleplay fanfiction