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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UC Berkeley chapter.

A year ago I downloaded TikTok out of sheer boredom from the newborn state of the pandemic. Yes, I’m aware I’m late to this: Most millennials owned Musically accounts and collected their favorite Vines, but I wasn’t part of that club. Around the time Draco Tok blew up, an interesting topic started up. They called it “shifting,” and claimed it has been around forever. 

What is shifting? Some people relate it to lucid dreaming, only it’s supposedly not a dream at all, but a way for human beings to project themselves into another world while their bodies remain in this one. The rage of shifting came onto Tik Tok as users were claiming to have successfully “shifted” to Hogwarts and experienced friendships, relationships, and life in real-time for anywhere from a few months to several years before returning to this reality.

At first, I thought surely this was a joke, a prank, or even a desperate cry for attention, but upon further research, I stumbled onto adults that had podcasts and Youtube videos where they spoke about their extensive experience with shifting. This told me one thing – Gen Z didn’t invent this. After that, it was suddenly everywhere from government conspiracies that claimed powerful people knew of our ability to do this, to claims that certain vibrational frequencies encourage a quicker transition to names for settings such as CR (current reality), WR (waiting room), and DR (desired reality). 

Moreover, people write scripts that entail visual and written elements of their DR to better help them shift into it. Such elements include their desired appearance, desired identity, capabilities, friendships, lovers, age, and backstories. In this way, shifting is essentially writing oneself into a story of their own design. 

So are thousands of people lying about this or could it actually be true? Who knows.

But if it is true, what does this mean for the human brain’s capabilities, and for the existence of the spiritual world? Could these realities be real, or merely an advanced, self-induced hallucination to aid in confirmation bias? If all of it points to something immaterial and not imagined, could this help humanity get, at least in part, spiritually and intellectually beyond where we are now, or will it create an addictive means of escapism as a negative coping mechanism? 

I suppose time will tell if all the rumors are true and what, if anything, should be made of them.

Sarah Laver

UC Berkeley '22