Is Reality Shifting Real? The Science Behind Shifting

There is no evidence that anyone has ever traveled to another universe, and the science behind shifting has barely begun. The psychologists who have studied shifters see shifting as something that happens in your mind, a vivid, very focused state that works a lot like self-hypnosis and the daydreams you can lose an hour to.

That does not mean shifters are lying to you. The pictures you see, the feelings and that sense of being in another place are real experiences.

What those experiences are is the open question, and it is far more interesting than a simple yes or no.

If you are new to all this, our guide to what reality shifting is covers the words and the basics. When you are ready to practice, start with our shifting methods for beginners.

What Has Science Found Out About Reality Shifting?

Not much yet. As far as we can find, only two published research papers have set out to understand shifting, and neither one tried to test whether anyone actually leaves this world.

○ The First Paper Compared Shifting to Self-Hypnosis

The first came from four psychologists, led by Eli Somer of the University of Haifa in Israel. Current Psychology published it in 2021, and the authors thought it might be the first scholarly description of shifting at all.

No one sat in a lab for this paper. The team gathered what shifters had written online and set it beside hypnosis, tulpamancy (building an imagined companion who feels real), dissociation, daydreaming and lucid dreaming. (Lucid dreaming is also a route some shifters take on purpose, as our guide to using lucid dreams to shift explains.)

If you shift, you will recognize the posts they found. Some described a powerful sense of being present in the DR, and some writers were sure their DR was a solid, separate place.

The team reached a calmer conclusion. Shifting, they wrote, can be seen as a particular form of self-hypnosis. It matches hypnosis in how it starts, in its scripts, in what you feel and in who finds it easy.

They also placed it nearer the normal end of daydreaming than the harmful end, because shifters like you describe using deliberate, controlled techniques to get there.

○ The Second Study Asked Shifters Directly

The second paper, by Shweta Sunil and two colleagues, came out in February 2026 in a journal called Imagination, Cognition and Personality. They wrote that no study had yet gathered data from real shifters, so they set out to collect some.

First they ran two discussion groups, one with six shifters and one with ten people who do not shift. Then 59 people aged 17 to 30 filled in questionnaires online, and 19 of them were shifters.

Their reading is that shifting may satisfy a craving for novelty. They tie it to fantasy proneness, a natural pull toward imagined worlds, and to parasocial relationships.

Parasocial relationships are the one-sided attachments you can form with a character or a star who will never know you. (If you have ever cried over a fictional death, you know the feeling.)

Social media is likely where you learned the methods and found tools like subliminals, and the authors count that as a help. But they also found a cost. Social media seemed to bring overuse and some upsetting experiences online too.

So if you read that shifting has only been studied once, that line is out of date. Even a long April 2026 article in The Psychologist, the British Psychological Society’s magazine, still treated the Somer review as the one piece of published research.

Notice what neither paper did. Nobody checked whether a shifter went anywhere, and you would struggle to design a test that could.

Why Does Shifting Feel So Real?

If a shift happens in your mind, why can it feel as solid as your bedroom? Psychology has three good answers, and you have probably felt each one already.

○ Some Minds Get Lost in Things More Easily

Psychologists call this trait absorption. It means giving something your total attention, so that it feels more real, distractions stop reaching you and you live it rather than think about it.

Here is a quick test. Think of the last time you were so deep in a book, a game or a show that someone had to say your name twice.

If that happens to you a lot, you are probably high in absorption.

Somer’s team thinks that if you manage to shift, you are likely high in it. People high in absorption can narrow their focus, block out the world around them and experience their DR as a vivid, lifelike place.

People differ hugely here, and you could sit at either end. Ben Alderson-Day, a psychologist at Durham University, writes in The Psychologist that people reading stories and novels differ dramatically in their imagery skills and in how immersed they get. For some people, a trait called hyperphantasia can make mental pictures as vivid as real sight.

So if your first attempts feel dull, nothing is wrong with you. Your mind may simply work better with words or sound than with pictures, and these shifting methods without visualization are built for exactly that.

○ Everyday Trances and Self-Hypnosis

You slip into small trances more often than you think. Getting lost in a good book, praying, meditating, or doing something dull or creative can all put you in one.

Hypnosis uses that same kind of focus on purpose.

A 2019 article in the medical journal Palliative Care describes it as a waking state in which your attention drifts away from your surroundings. Your attention is absorbed instead by inner things, like feelings, thoughts and pictures. The focus can go so deep that what you imagine feels real.

Now read your favorite shifting method with that in mind, the way Somer’s team did. You lie still and relax, which focuses your attention and clears away other worries, much like the start of most hypnosis sessions. Your script, safe word and all, matches the detailed suggestions a hypnotist gives for one particular goal. Even the shifting affirmations you repeat are close to what hypnotists call ego-strengthening suggestions.

People who respond strongly to hypnosis also tend to be high in absorption, so the two ideas fit together.

We think this is the most useful way to understand shifting. It explains your methods, your scripts and why some people shift far more easily than others. And it does not ask you to give up anything you love about the practice.

○ The Edge of Sleep

Many methods are done as you fall asleep, and that moment has a name. The hypnagogic state is the in-between stage when you are no longer awake but not yet asleep, and you can still see, hear or feel things in it.

Try this tonight. As you drift off, notice the odd snatches of pictures, voices or a sudden falling feeling that arrive just before sleep.

Sleep researchers say these experiences are fairly common, so you are far from alone. They even say calling them hallucinations is misleading, because they fall within the normal range of perception.

They have also noted that making someone drowsy during hypnosis can make mental imagery more vivid, because it quiets distractions from inside and out.

Relaxed, drowsy and focused on your script is a fair description of a sleep shifting method.

If you have felt tingling, heaviness or a floating body during a method, the reality shifting symptoms explainer covers where those sensations come from. And if the edge of sleep makes you uneasy, awake shifting methods let you practice sitting up, with your mind alert.

Did the CIA Study Reality Shifting?

No. The file you keep seeing is called Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. It is a memo dated 9 June 1983 from Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell of the US Army to his commander. The copy everyone links to was approved for release in 2003 and sits in the CIA’s online reading room, which is why people call it the CIA document.

○ What Was the Gateway Process?

As McDonnell describes it, the Gateway Experience was a training program from the Monroe Institute for reaching altered states of consciousness, built around tapes that used a sound technique called Hemi-Sync.

McDonnell had been asked to assess how it works and whether it was practical. He compared it with hypnosis, transcendental meditation and biofeedback, then reached for quantum physics and theories of consciousness to explain it.

McDonnell’s list of next steps will sound familiar to you. Start with the Hemi-Sync tapes to focus your brain. Add sounds meant to bring you deep physical relaxation. Then use hypnotic suggestion, so you can put yourself into a deep self-hypnotic state at will.

According to McDonnell, the tapes played tones at an almost subliminal level, sometimes masked by sounds like sea surf, along with spoken suggestions.

That is very close to a modern night of shifting, with subliminals for shifting playing while you relax and repeat your lines. So it is no surprise that some shifters online say their practice was first described in this report.

But look at what the report actually is. It never mentions reality shifting, which only took off online decades later, during the pandemic lockdowns. Its aim seems to have been out-of-body states for time travel, remote viewing and gathering information.

And it contains no results. McDonnell judged Gateway plausible, then listed experiments the Army might run. His last sentence begins “If these experiments are carried through”.

The closest thing to a test the report describes is secondhand. According to one Monroe Institute trainer, as McDonnell reports it, people had tried many times to travel out of their bodies to a distant university lab and read ten numbers there. The trainer said most got enough digits to show they had been present, but none ever got all ten right.

That is a claim passed along from the institute, not a result McDonnell checked.

An Army officer’s hopeful assessment, built on other people’s theories, is not a study with results. We enjoy the report as a strange piece of history, but we would not want you to treat it as evidence for shifting. If you want to try the tapes themselves, read our guide to Gateway tapes shifting, which covers Focus 10, Focus 12 and how to listen safely.

More Science Behind Shifting Realities: The Many-Worlds Interpretation

The other big argument for shifting comes from physics. Somer’s team found that some shifters explain shifting with the multiverse, meaning the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, first put forward by the physicist Hugh Everett.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces the core idea back to Everett in 1957. Whenever a quantum event could turn out more than one way, every outcome happens, each in its own newly created world, even though you only notice the one you see.

Picture a quantum coin toss. In one world it lands heads, in another it lands tails, and a version of you watches each result.

It is a serious idea. But it is one way of reading the math of quantum physics, not the only one. According to the Stanford entry, no realistic experiment can tell it apart from at least one rival reading.

○ What Many-Worlds Does Not Say

Here is the part your favorite videos leave out. Once the worlds branch apart, they never influence one another, as Scientific American’s profile of Hugh Everett explains. Each branch has its own copy of the person watching.

The Stanford entry says the same about you. There can be many versions of you across the worlds, at most one in each, but none of them is another “I”.

So could you hop across to the branch where you live at Hogwarts? No.

Nothing in this theory says a mind can travel between branches. And even on its own terms, that other version of you is someone else.

Somer’s team points out two more limits. Multiverse theory does not say people can create their own realities, and some physicists doubt it because it cannot be tested. The Stanford entry adds that the tests physicists have proposed are far beyond any technology we have or can foresee.

So the multiverse cannot prove shifting. At best it says other worlds might exist, and the same theory says they never touch yours.

○ What Is a Quantum Superposition?

A superposition is when a tiny thing, like an electron, is in a mix of possible states until it is measured. Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at once inside a sealed box, was a thought experiment about what that would mean for something big.

Some shifting posts take this to mean you could live your CR and your DR at the same time. Physics does not say that. In the many-worlds picture the Stanford entry describes, the experiment splits the world before anyone opens the box, and in each world the cat is simply alive or dead, never both.

The same goes for you. No version of you lives two lives at once.

So, Is Reality Shifting Real? Our View

We do not think shifters travel to other universes. Nothing in the research, the Army report or the physics points that way, and we would rather say so plainly.

We also think what you feel when you shift is real, and that it can be good for you. If your mind can build a world vivid enough to visit, that is a real skill, not a flaw. Alderson-Day goes further, suggesting that changing how and what we can imagine could be a route to wellbeing rather than a sign of illness.

So you can enjoy shifting without settling the big question first.

Judge it by how your life feels the morning after, not by whether you can prove where you went.

There is one real caution. Hypnosis is not usually a problem, but Somer’s team warns that its risks are likely to grow when people practice without supervision, which is how you practice shifting.

If your DR starts to bleed into your day so you are not sure what really happened, or shifting is eating into your sleep, school or meals, stop for a while. Tell a parent, a teacher, a doctor or another adult you trust what has been happening.

Our safety guide on the dangers of reality shifting lists the warning signs and what you should do about each one.

Give Reality Shifting a Try

You do not need an Army budget or a sound lab to try this yourself. All it takes is a quiet room, a short script and a method that suits you.

Our reality shifting tips for beginners will help you set up your first evening, including how to write a script and look after yourself while you practice.

For a lift on a slow week, read the reality shifting stories other shifters have shared. Enjoy them as their own accounts, not as evidence. And whenever you want something new, you can browse every shifting guide on the site.

Wherever your mind takes you tonight, the best part of the story is that your own imagination built it.

Reality Shifting Science FAQ