“Reality shifting” is a practice that became popular among adolescents and young people in the #shiftok universe on TikTok at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It consists of reaching an altered state of consciousness through different exercises -meditation, self-hypnosis, writing a script, repeating “affirmations”, music- that allows you to escape from your current reality (CR, Current Reality) to access or “shift” to your desired reality (DR, Desired Reality). The desired reality is usually the world of a pre-existing fiction such as Harry Potter or Narnia, in which the person wishes to live.

Adopting the form of a tutorial, the performance will expose the different methods at our disposal to build our desired reality in digital capitalism. What is a desired or desirable reality, hyper-adapted to the subject that inhabits it? What fictions do we live in? What does the “reality shifting” tell us about a society increasingly terrified of risk, conflict and dissensions and immersed in a fantasy of security and individual omnipotence without limits?

PRESENTATIONS

• PLECS, Cultural Rizoma 2022
• ROOM TOUR, The Wrong Biennale 2023-2024

TEXT OF THE PERFORMANCE (ENGLISH)

Hello everyone, and welcome to this tutorial on reality shifting. Thank you for coming to share this moment with me.

For those of you who are not familiar with ‘Reality shifting’ it is a popular practice mostly among teenagers and young adults, especially females, on TikTok, within the #shiftok universe, and on Reddit called DimensionJumping. It went viral at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first confinement. Shifting consists of reaching an altered state of consciousness through different exercises that I am going to explain today – which may include meditation, self-hypnosis, writing a script, repeating ‘affirmations’, music or theta waves… This altered state of consciousness will allow us to leave our ‘current reality’ (CR) to access or ‘shift’ to our ‘desired reality’ (DR) by passing through a ‘waiting room’ or WR (waiting room). It is about transcending one’s own physical confines and visiting alternative universes or parallel realities. The desired reality can be the world of a pre-existing fiction, such as Harry Potter, but you can also design your own desired reality from scratch from a script where the parameters and rules that will govern this desired reality are defined. In that case there are no limits. When shifting, you can experience every detail of your desired reality as if it were your current reality, spending time with your loved ones, who are called Comfort Caracters, and living different experiences with these people, although your body remains in your CR. In the process of shifting, you are likely to feel some physical symptoms. These symptoms are numbness, tingling, tugging, racing heart, feeling of floating, sensation of your surroundings changing, hearing/feeling something from your DR, smelling a distinctive smell or flashes of bright lights. This is totally normal and you don’t have to focus on them.

In this tutorial, I am going to start by explaining 10 methods at your disposal to build and access your desired reality. Then I am going to ask you to try to shift together live into a desired reality. First of all, I would like to show you some videos as an introduction.

I am now going to explain to you 10 methods to access your desired reality.

1. The Raven method: it is the most popular in the community. It consists of lying down in starfish position and counting backwards from 100 while imagining or “manifesting” the reality you desire. The idea is to count backwards from 100 and visualize yourself moving further and further towards your desired reality. Once you fall asleep and have successfully shifted your consciousness according to what you manifested, you are likely to wake up in the parallel reality of your choice. The counting process can be repeated as many times as possible until one learns to master the technique.

2. The Alice in Wonderland method requires one to visualize oneself running after a person from one’s desired reality and jumping down a rabbit hole with them as in the famous fairy tale.

3. The Julia Method. In this method, the displacement of reality basically depends on two words: “I am” or “I am”, I am, for the whole process. In starfish position, you have to start repeating the mantra “I am”. These mantras must be conjugated in the present tense, as if what you are saying has already happened. You can complete the phrase with anything, such as: “I am vibrating at a higher frequency”, “I am in transit to my desired reality” or “I am pure consciousness, without physical attachments”. If you do this in as much sensory detail as possible, you will soon be in the reality of your dreams.

These are the best known and most commonly used methods. But I have found other alternative methods to access your desired reality.

6. The Google method. It consists of doing a search on the Google search engine so that it gives you all the answers you need.

7. The Tiktok method. It consists of training the TikTok algorithm to show you only the content you want to see.

9. The Open AI method. It consists of asking for things and giving orders to the Open AI GPT CHAT so that it obeys systematically and automatically. Although sometimes this method does not work perfectly because this artificial intelligence has just been launched and is still in beta phase.

8. The Uber method. It consists of ordering food or a driver from Uber, Uber Eats or other applications when you are too lazy to get out of bed or take public transport.

10. The rich moms method. It consists of buying a surrogate womb in which to gestate your future child if you prefer to save the nine months of pregnancy and the emotional and physical complications involved.

4. All of these methods can be combined with script writing. The shifting script is described by some shifters as a “search bar” for the desired reality. The script can contain information about the people you want to see in your desired reality, called comfort characters, what you want to do, and the type of experience you want to have in general. You can also dictate the time you want to spend in your desired reality and the purpose of the shifting, such as getting into a relationship or meeting a famous person. The possibilities of the type of places you can visit are endless. You can create a new identity for yourself or keep your own. Think about what you want to look like and what skills or super-powers you want to have. Use a “time ratio”, i.e. a formula that calculates how much time passes in your current reality – the CR – while you are in your DR. For example, one hour in your CR may be equivalent to one week in your DR. Make a character biography that includes details such as your history and habits. Outlining the rules of the dimension you are going to will allow you to access it more quickly. Express in your script also what you don’t want, such as dying, experiencing traumatic experiences or pain. Some examples of phrases you can put in your script are: “I always smell good, have good hygiene and my breath always smells minty”, “My phone or any device is always fully charged, always has coverage and does not malfunction”, “I am not easily embarrassed and have confidence in myself”, “My clothes always fit me well” or “Others can always hear me clearly and I don’t need to repeat myself”.

5. Writing and repeating affirmations. Affirmations” are short, powerful messages that train or program your mind to think in a specific way. To access your DR, make up affirmations about how you are fully capable of jumping into another dimension.

PART TWO

Next, I would like to try to guide you through a meditation so that we shift all together into our desired reality. Even if you don’t believe in this, I am going to ask you to join in the exercise. First of all, we are going to determine a Safe Word, a safety word, which will allow us to return to the current reality at the end of our shifting. I propose that our safe word be PLECS.

I am going to play some music. I am going to ask you to try to sit somewhere nice, like a sofa, an armchair or a bed, in a comfortable position. Try also that there is no noise around you, that there is silence, that you are in a quiet and intimate environment, alone. Perhaps you can put on headphones or earphones. I am going to ask you to close your eyes to begin to guide you to the desired reality.

Now, imagine what that desired reality looks like. No one can throw you out of there. You cannot die there. Nor experience any kind of pain, suffering or traumatic event. There you can achieve anything you set your mind to. You have no obstacles. You are going to start by detaching yourself from your current reality. Little by little… Breathe in deeply. Breathe out. Let your mouth gently close. Bring your attention to your breath as the air moves in and out of your body. Relax.

What is a desired reality?

A desired reality is a reality that is hyper-adapted to the subject that inhabits it. A reality in which that subject operates as a demiurge that nothing and no one contradicts or disobeys. In that desired reality, our strength and power have no limits and we are in no danger.

Relax, breathe in, breathe out.

I invite you to think of shifting as a way to try to have a sense of control in a world that seems increasingly dangerous. Younger generations face an existential crisis, not knowing if our planet will continue to exist to sustain human life. The threat of the global coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent imposition of social isolation measures were followed by a sudden appearance and sharp increase in searches for ‘reality shifting’ on Google. The broad emerging interest in this practice in this context implies a connection between the two events. People’s mental health was severely affected by the pandemic. In 2020, a substantial increase in the intensity of Google searches for words such as boredom, loneliness, worry and sadness was found. In addition, Gallup’s Negative Experience Index, which tracks sadness, anger, worry and stress around the world on an annual basis showed that in 2020 the world felt worse than it had in the past 15 years. The global threat contributed to the rapid emergence of alternative and solitary mental activity. On most websites about shifting there is also content related to mental health.

Relax, breathe in, breathe out.

Faced with increasingly precarious and degraded material conditions of existence, it seems that the only option left to us is to dissociate ourselves, to flee from reality and invent another world built according to our desires. This personalized, customized universe, this fantasy of security and individual omnipotence without limits, is a defense mechanism. But as a defense mechanism it poses problems. Because it eiterates already existing tendencies in society that are linked to the very context that gave rise to the pandemic.

In a society terrorized by conflict, danger and dissent, immersed in an obsession with security, calculation and anticipation of risk, within what fictions do we live? What kind of reality are these fictions endowed with? These fictions have given rise to what the philosopher Éric Sadin has called the era of the tyrant individual. In the age of the tyrant individual, there is a profound disconnection between the individual body and the social body. The individual has ceased to believe in a common reality, in a common, shared project of society. Anomie imposes itself. That is to say, the isolation of the individual as a consequence of the incongruence of social norms. The social pact is broken. Faced with the destruction and precariousness of life forms, the autarchic subject takes refuge in a fantasy of individual omnipotence as a defense mechanism. But this gesture only accentuates the reigning individualism that governs the neoliberal capitalist system that has destroyed the forms of life and that has led us to resort to this defense mechanism… In this vicious circle, the problem only gets worse and worse. If we understand politics as Hannah Arendt did, as the negotiation between divergences and dissents in order to reach an agreement, to be able to live in community, shifting is apolitical. The illusion of autonomy and individual freedom of shifting allows us to have the feeling that we are masters of our own destiny, that we can bend reality by the power of our will. But it only feeds increasing forms of isolation and the primacy of the self over the common order.

Relax, breathe in, breathe out.

Shifting is the spherization of reality, which becomes a bubble, a sphere in which the subject occupies the center of gravity. In this sphere reigns a mirage of personal sovereignty and singularization of the self, a self-representation of the self freed of all weight, light. The desired reality is a closed totality, folded to the belief system of the subject who imagines it. It is a symptom of the definitive collapse of the common world, of the so-called current reality. The tyrant individual is produced by the Internet and the Smartphone. Digital interfaces offer us a sense of omnipotence because they obey our orders and bend to our will. Ordering an Uber, a pizza through Deliveroo or a womb to gestate your future child through the internet are experiences of omnipotence because they erase or disguise our limitations. Faced with the erasure of our limits, the need for community, for bonds with the other, is also erased. Alexander Galloway writes that in order to be in relation with the world digitally, we must erase the world, subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, anticipation, modeling and transformation.

In our desired reality, there is no danger. The philosopher Laurent de Sutter explains that what is dangerous is what goes outside oneself, what exceeds the self. Security, the normative order, evacuates danger, doubt, uncertainty. They evaluate risks, calculate probabilities, control chance. They perpetuate power. For to know the risks is to know the future. It is to govern the future.

Relax. Breathe in. Breathe out.

What would be a desirable reality instead of a desired reality? It is a reality in which there is room for danger. Dangerous is what happens against all odds, the unthinkable, the unpredictable, the incalculable. It is what can save us today, in a world bent on eroding our capacity to imagine possible solutions to the almost inevitable collapse, to invent new ways of cohabiting together in our difference with the human and the non-human. In a desirable reality, we will inhabit that space of danger from which to try to imagine the unimaginable, to think the unthinkable.

PLECS!

Now you can open your eyes. I hope you have been transported to your desired reality. If you have succeeded, congratulations. Thank you all very much, I hope you enjoyed the journey. And I say goodbye until the next tutorial.