I spoke to 23-year-old reality shifter Maddie about her experiences traveling to other timelines.

You may have heard of reality shifting before—probably through the lens of the now-familiar genre of ”this dangerous TikTok trend is endangering your kids” clickbait. ‘Reality shifting’ is, simply put, when people shift their consciousness to another timeline—an alternate reality—including ones with fictional elements. My friend Esmé Partridge has written about reality shifting extensively through the lens of occult studies, and contributor Clinton has touched on it (though unintentionally) through the lens of media studies in some of his articles on this very website.

The more I talk to people with these types of unconventional experiences, the more I believe that we’re experiencing a fundamental shift in our perception. It’s one that the scholar Patrick Galbraith has documented extensively in Japan—I highly recommend his work, too, for people who want to gain a deeper understanding of how one might experience the shifts in their consciousness or fall in love with a fictional character like I’ve been documenting here.

This shift in perception is something that I think too many people write off as “mental illness,” a “fake” mental illness people use to differentiate themselves or get attention, or a pernicious, TikTok-specific form of brainwashing.

Recently, I have seen it pop up in the culture war, too… often with the note that “nobody is talking about this.” Hopefully, if you read this blog, you know none of that is true.

I recommend you listen to these two other interviews and read this mailbag note, if you haven’t already, as companion pieces to this one:

Watch Maddie’s videos on TikTok here, and check out her shifting resources here.

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#26: Esther Lioba – Studienwechsel, Auslandsjahr und Harry Potter