In the Raven Method, you lie down in a starfish position, count backward from 100, and repeat: “I am shifting.” Do it right, and you’ll wake up in your own Desired Reality, be it Hogwarts, the Shadowhunters World, or the Star Wars universe. In the Alice in Wonderland Method, keep chasing Draco Malfoy (or an anime protagonist) down a rabbit hole until you “shift.” If those options sound exhausting? Just set an intention before bed. That’s the Intent Method—the beginner’s shortcut. Wake up, and maybe—just maybe—you’re somewhere else.
These are just a few of the methods flooding many Generation Z discussion corners of TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube. The common denominator? A generation, born between 1997 and 2012, who are escaping their Current Reality—a term used in the Reality Shifting subculture—and migrating into worlds of their own making. Reality shifting—the act of mentally or spiritually transporting your consciousness into an alternate reality—thrives on visualization, affirmations, AI, deep fakes, and virtual worlds. Fueled by fandom, TikTok, and digital escapism, it’s where media-driven illusion feels more real than reality itself. The problem is, immersion in this virtual world could rewire memory, in which case the brain could start treating vivid and repeated memories as real—even though they’re false. This may be problematic, as it leads to distorted self-perception, poor reality handling, and dissociation or detachment from reality, according to scientists studying the phenomenon.
For many who practice shifting, it’s all about control—breaking free from a world that feels deranged, unstable, and increasingly bleak. Or, it may be an escape from academic pressure, climate anxiety, and even the crushing weight of the social hyperconnectivity that ironically enables the getaway. But beyond emotional reasons, mentally wandering off to fictional universes might also be about the pull of a contemporary philosophy—where your personal identity and experience are yours to tailor-make as you wish.
Shifting began gaining significant popularity in 2020. But is this trend really new? Convincing the mind of a shadow world isn’t a “screenager” invention—it’s a glitch in human memory that’s been studied for decades. In 1995, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus proved just how easily memories can be rewritten. In her now-famous Lost in the Mall experiment, she implanted entirely false childhood memories in participants—including a fabricated account of getting lost in a shopping mall as a child. About 25 percent of participants developed vivid false memories, complete with emotional responses, sensory details, and fabricated trauma.
“Loftus’s research shows that complex autobiographical memories (or the memory of personal events) can be implanted,” says Amy Reichelt, Ph.D., a neuroscientist. “It reproducibly demonstrated that memory is highly malleable and susceptible to suggestion, particularly when the suggested events are plausible and embedded within true memories.”
But here’s the twist: the line between reality and imagination has never been thinner. Raised on social media, AI, and algorithm-fed content, this generation lives in a world where virtual existence isn’t just an idea—it’s a fully legit way of being. A December 2023 study on the preprint server arXiv tested the ability of Gen Z dreamers to distinguish AI-generated text from human-authored text on communications platforms like Discord. The result? They struggled. AI isn’t just fooling the eye anymore—it’s creeping into cognition, subtly rewiring how reality is processed. And it doesn’t stop there. AI-generated influencers like Lil Miquela and Shudu Gram blur the boundaries further, interacting, endorsing, influencing—as if they were real. What’s illusion, what’s not?
Maybe it’s easy to dismiss all this as nothing more than youthful imagination—kids caught in a digital daydream, destined to crumble under the obligations that come with adulthood anyway. But what if, by immersing themselves deeply enough in a fictional world, Gen Z brains start storing those experiences as real, longer-ter memories? What if—through repetition, rituals, and AI’s surreal contact—Desired Reality, as shifters call it, starts implanting memories of its own while pushing Current Reality to the curb?
Memory isn’t a perfect recording—it’s reconstructive. Our brains have to piece together past events each time we recall them, leaving the original experience ripe for distortion. This phenomenon is well-documented in courts, when false memories have led to wrongful convictions because jurors misjudged reality based on warped recollections. Reichelt explains that several neural mechanisms are at play during recall. The hippocampus, responsible for encoding memories, relies on partial cues to reconstruct entire experiences through pattern completion—but sometimes, it fills in the blanks with errors, says Reichelt. Meanwhile, the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex, our brain’s built-in fact-checkers, weaken under misleading or confusing information, making us more susceptible to suggestion, she continues. In other words, when suggestive cues—including personal visualization, digital immersion, or AI-led guidance—are strong enough, the brain doesn’t just imagine a false memory. It believes it actually lived it.
Yet other experts suggest this belief isn’t just a cognitive glitch, but a cultural mindset that’s shaped and likely reinforced by the times. “Shifting is a practice that helps people embody a modern secular ideology of subjective self-creation, and enact it in their life,” says Omar Sultan Haque, Ph.D., a psychiatrist and social scientist at Harvard Medical School. Reality imposes a limit to self-creation. “But when one can fool oneself about the nature of reality beyond the self, there is no in-principle limit to self-creation,” Haque says. In a world where the line between illusion and truth is eroding, that kind of thinking has consequences. “People will come to make up their own subjective reality (including false memories, AI deep fakes), believe it to be true and to really have transpired, and enact its effects in their lives, for better or for worse,” Haque says. Some shifters already report feelings of disconnect both from their Current Reality and, interestingly, their Desired Reality, and start questioning the meaning of relationships, existence, and even their own sanity. Proof, perhaps, that the real motive behind mind migration isn’t just escaping Current Reality, but escaping yourself.
Maybe Gen Z will wake up one day and laugh at their old shifting rituals, just like boomers laugh at their old photos—hippie bell-bottoms, tie-dye shirts, and wild, unkempt hair frizzing with pride. But when Planet Marvel now feels realer than ever—courtesy not of daydreaming, but AI, deep fakes, and algorithmic illusion—who’s to say they’ll want to wake up at all?
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Headshot of Stav Dimitropoulos
Stav Dimitropoulos’s science writing has appeared online or in print for the BBC, Discover, Scientific American, Nature, Science, Runner’s World, The Daily Beast and others. Stav disrupted an athletic and academic career to become a journalist and get to know the world.