Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture.
Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) October 30, 2021 Eli Somer, Etzel Cardeña, Ramiro Figueiredo Catelan et al. 19 citations
Reality shifting (RS) is a mental activity that gained popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily among post-millennials. Practitioners report using relaxation, focused attention, and autosuggestion to feel they transcend their physical surroundings and enter alternate, often fictional, universes—such as those from Harry Potter. Online forums have over 40,000 members, and RS-related clips have been viewed over 1.7 billion times. Some shifters report a strong sense of presence in these realities, with some believing the alternate world is concretely real. The paper describes RS's phenomenology from online reports, compares it to hypnosis, tulpamancy, dissociation, maladaptive daydreaming, and lucid dreaming, and proposes a theoretical model of interactive factors. It concludes RS is an important, uninvestigated phenomenon and suggests future research.