The Truth About Shifting

So. Shifting Realities.

At some point recently I had stumbled upon the concept on YouTube via a commentary channel I watch sometimes called "Ready To Glare". 

I'm not a total stranger to the concept of  "dream-weaving" as I was heavy into Lucid dreaming circa 2007-ish. I had gotten quite good at it, too.

I had gotten to the point where I could control my astral body at will- however, I had reached this point somewhat accidentally. I had gotten really good at the W.I.L.D method which focuses on inducing lucid dreaming after waking up and going back to bed, instead of realizing you're dreaming while already asleep.

Lucid dreaming is great! I had a ton of fun doing it and always woke up feeling so well-rested. The thing that prompted me to stop, though, had to do with the method itself.

When you do the WILD method, there's a few things that happen that are perfectly normal across the board of people who practice, but feel incredibly surreal to the common person. The first thing is when you count backward from some indeterminately high number to keep your mind active while your body begins to fall asleep. There is a tingling sensation all over (imagine how it feels when your foot falls asleep), and after that, you slowly feel your body fall asleep. Your breathing slows, and you fall into that state of the unconscious where your mind makes your eyelids, limbs and body feel very heavy- it's so you don't move around too much and hurt yourself while sleeping. It's the state that some people half-wake to find themselves suffering from sleep paralysis and also why your legs never move fast enough when you need to run away in dreams. Once that state sets in, assuming your mind is still fully conscious, the next step is to rock to and fro, to build up some momentum and roll out of your body. That part was weird. It felt like taking off something skin tight as, I guess, skin literally is. Once you've gotten free of your body, you're free to walk around and explore, but that's not the lucid state. That's the Astral state.

The Astral plane is also called Limbo, Purgatory, or Preta-gati in Pali- which translates roughly to "ghost realm". Astral projection is something that everyone does at some point in their life, because that's why we all know what the falling dream feels like. Your "ghost" or "spirit" body floats above your physical body for a bit and when you get scared or close to waking up somehow, you feel yourself falling in a way that wakes you up as soon as you would feel impact with the ground- and it feels real, right? 

Well if Lucid dreaming is an Enchanted Fairy Tale forest,  the Astral realm is the short little footbridge to cross into it, so to speak; and there's a troll under that bridge.

The final creepy-ass stage in the WILD method is named, by the Lucid dreaming community, "The witch over your shoulder". It doesn't happen every time,  but, the feeling is of something malevolently watching you, just outside of your line of sight. I looked. There was nothing there. Nonetheless, it's a creepy feeling. It didn't stop me until my aunt gave me some food for thought asking "What if you leave your body and something else comes and takes it?"

That didn't exactly scare me off of the WILD method, but it definitely made me become more cautious. In the end, I eventually tapered off simply because it takes time to master this skill, and I had basically gotten as good as I did, because I was on a jobless summer break from college that year, with nothing but time on my hands. 

 

I'm no stranger to this kind of self-hypnosis.  When I did look into shifting a little bit, I didn't take it very seriously, but I took it marginally more serious than the Tik-Tokkers who are having these months long trips into their "Desired Realities" that makes them full of despair when they actually wake up in the real world, because this state of consciousness is open to unlimited possibilities, which also means there is a risk of psychological side effects involved, especially if a person is just dicking around. Also, there's the spiritual portals, which I already touched on, but somehow the same people who believe that Hogwarts is real and they can experience it for themselves are somehow quick to dismiss or completely unaccepting of the fact that hungry ghosts can attach to them while they're in this state. Like, do they think Buddhist monks just devote entire lifetimes to mastering his shit for fun? 

I digress.

I'm always, at least, a little lucid in most of my dreams. My dreams are a way for extradimensional beings to communicate concepts with me that would probably give me a stroke if they attempted to download the data while I'm awake. So sometimes I answer my own questions in waking life, not knowing how I know the answer. In this way, it's like a background download of data streams saving to a storage space in my subconscious that is full of reference books. I know that sounds cool, but it does make me feel tired when I wake up after a night of them doing this; and I often have to do bureaucratic tasks and celestial training in my dreams that is so rigorous, the least they can do is let me forget it as soon as I wake up because, even if the data is still there, so is the fatigue.

I don't know how they gauge my levels, or even if they do at all, but sometimes they have me work for months in preparation for whatever the hell is coming up in my timeline that I'm not allowed to know about. They just equip me with variables of worst-case scenarios.

Every so often, though, I finally get a break and have regular dreams in which I almost always remember after waking up. In these dreams, I'm not fully lucid as I'm not totally aware that it's a dream, but I am aware of my thoughts in terms of speaking, so I don't say nonsensical things when I'm conversing and even would venture to call my responses cheeky, witty and clever at times.

In terms of the methods that concern shifting, I'm not completely familiar, as I didn't really want to invest my time in what it takes to do it. But here's what I do know:

• You're supposed to write a script of your desired reality that details your role in the world of your desired reality  (think like a character sheet and background story
  
  
•  You're supposed to make a playlist of songs or maybe even sounds, to shift to so that your mind associates and connects to that desired reality
  
  
• Then you pick a  comfortable position to fall asleep in, and then, more or less employ the first steps of the WILD method in which you count backward to keep the mind awake long enough for the body to fall into its hypnagogic state where you feel the tingling all over.

From there, I wouldn't know what to tell you in how to weave the Desired Reality VS a Lucid Dream, but since I think I accidentally experienced a shift the other day, I'll tell you what the perceived differences are on a personal level.

When I shifted, I was aware that I wasn't fully asleep, but also that I wasn't fully awake, and maintaining that state can be easily disrupted by, well, really anything, including your own level of excitement. Lucid dreaming in comparison is harder to wake up from since it is a deeper state of sleep.

There were also things that seemed half-assed, like loading textures in a game or something, the entirety of the reality just may have not had time to fully manifest, but I just noticed some things weren't exactly "loaded" yet, whereas in Lucid dreams, every perceived thing is not only completed but very vivid.

The final thing I noticed was how shifting isn't restful. Once people wake up from shifting, they might be miserable because they've become severed from their desired reality, but they're probably also emotional from the feeling of sleep deprivation as well. 

Again, I only shifted for a very short time, and I didn't employ any of the recommended methods for doing so, but, from what I understand, if you do it right, you're not exactly sleeping-it's more like the state that people are in when they're susceptible to hypnotism, so there is no R.E.M or any real rest to be had while doing it.

The one upside to it, is that people seem to experience much longer stays in their Desired Realities while shifting than while Lucid dreaming and they are recounting every minute of those days, weeks and months, when they come out of it.

I watched a video on YouTube of a girl who had successfully shifted to the MHA reality for 2 days after having put a lot of thought into her script. She recounted how she was basically the new girl in the 1-A Hero class and how the people didn't look exactly like they did in the Anime, but more real somehow and how their variant personalities, from a personal perspective, were real enough to actually form an opinion on whether or not she liked them as friends or mere acquaintances.

But of course, almost every person who does this shit has ulterior motives, and she had her sights set on Bakugo. 

What I found interesting was that she had scripted what she wanted to happen and things didn't go her way. Her first day of school at U.A. seemed absolutely exhausting as she recounted how they had so many classes and even after school was over, she found herself involved in an after school club that she didn't even know she was in; led by Iida's intense, overachieving, headass.

LET THE CLUB ACTIVIES COMMENCE!

The first night she went back to the dorm rooms with the other students, she got to know the girls better in the common area, but all the boys seemed to be just oh so conveniently preoccupied with other things, and Bakugo was nowhere to be found.

She went to sleep and Uraraka woke her up early as hell the next day- like 2 hours before class time, (because the girl hadn't set an alarm) and this day they had hero training where they had to play out scenarios in 3 man teams of hero/villain/hostage. She was the villain, Deku was the Hero and I think Uraraka was the hostage?

Apparently, that went AWFUL. 

Deku had her incapacitated so quickly, she said she was embarrassed. Then Aizawa sensei pulled her aside and told her he was gonna cut her some slack because she was new but that if she couldn't pick up the pace, he would kick her out of the class. I doubt that was in the script!

She's bummed, but after the day finally ends and she ends up back at home in the dorms, she puts on her pajamas and cheers herself up with the familiar idea that she's only visiting, and it's not her actual reality, so her hero career isn't really gonna be impacted by Aizawa's bad grade. Just then, Uraraka comes and knocks on her door telling her it's dinnertime, and she seems taken aback, like she forgot all about it, and is already dressed for bed. She goes and has dinner with everyone, again, noticing Bakugo's absence and once she's finished, goes back to her dorm.

Then, she decides to be a little more proactive. It's late; maybe around midnight, when she goes to his room and knocks on the door, acting all cutesy asking for help with her Hero training.

WARNING!!! DISASTER IMMINENT.

⬆⬆See, that there, is what we call a red flag.⬆⬆

#1. Bakugo failed the provisional exam, so that's why he's been scarce in the first place (at least that's why in the Anime) so why would he spare time to help you when he's already making up, taking extra classes, doing extra homework etc... for his own shortcomings?

#2. Bakugo is a mad dog. I love him as a character, but I wouldn't ever think in my right mind that this nigga could be prompted to do ANYTHING as SELFLESS as offering help to a fellow student as he sees EVERYONE as competition.

#3 Bakugo comes from a middle class family. His mom is the ONLY person he listens to (and fears), and if you think she didn't have the "If you end up knocking up some little fast ass girl while living in that co-ed dorm, don't bother coming back home." talk with him, you got him and her fucked up.

Wakatteru! (わかってる)

In so many words, he basically told her to fuck off and slammed the door in her face, KNOWING what she was up to and your girl was MORTIFIED. She goes back to her room, lies down on the bed and can't stop thinking about all the shit that basically made her feel real in her desired reality and she says her safe word and wakes up. Force quit that shit real quick.

No shade to that girl, because I really pity her experience, I do, but honestly, after 2 days, you thought Bakugo was gonna slide you some dick? It's just not in his character to do some shit like that in the first place.

But if you were lucid dreaming, your chances probably would've been higher because you can mold dreams more easily. But stone sober on a Tuesday school night, business as usual after just meeting you? Oof...

Ah, well...