Let’s Shift Again, Like We Did Last Summer
Thank you for reading this newsletter. I am trying to do this more often. Part of this plan (which you may have seen a tease for in the last newsletter I wrote) is to write more things that give me joy. This newsletter is one of the joyful things.
You’ll see that this one follows a structure wherein I write about a subject and then, in the second half, write some personal thoughts.
I intend to write these every week. If you would like to read more, please subscribe. If you’re already subscribed, I love you.
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Everybody’s Shifting, So Why Aren’t You?
Wait, I can hear you saying, what is shifting? Should I know what that is? Should I be shifting?
My answer to you is a most emphatic: no, you should not be shifting. Actually, in all honesty, you’re probably already doing it, at least a little.
Let me explain.
What is Shifting?
I was first introduced to “shifting” from a video much like this one:
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Like many things I encounter on the wild, wonderful internet, I never know if I’m watching
a very dry joke
a reference to something in pop culture that never beeped my radar
something I already know about but has been discovered by a new generation or segment of the internet that didn’t know about it before
In this case, it’s specifically a trend that all the kids are doing on and posting about it on TikTok. By the time this stuff reaches me, it’s usually passe and tired, like when my dad started wearing Jams.
Shifting is one of those last things–I found a blog post about it from 2020 after one quick search–but it’s kind of a bunch of different things, too.
Everything is a Multiverse Now
The essential premise of shifting is this: you exist in a multitude of different realities, like in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once:
That movie (and many other books, movies and tv shows) starts with a theory called the multiverse theory, which posits that every event could have occurred differently.
For instance, I decided not to go to graduate school for English. There was a single moment: I held the application in my hand and stood in front of the department’s mail box. I had fully intended to go to graduate school. There had been no question for me, at least not one that I was aware of.
Suddenly, standing at the precipice of an academic life, I was struck by doubt. Did I really want to go to graduate school? No, I suddenly decided, I didn’t. I threw the application in the garbage instead.
What if I had turned it in and followed that path instead of this one? Presumably there’s a universe out there where this exact scenario happened, and I submitted my application, and etc.
The universe you exist in right this minute (and, presumably, the entirety of your life) is this one, and shifters call this your CR or current reality.
I don’t know if the universe where I went to graduate school is better than the current one (I like this universe a lot), but shifting posits that there are, indeed, universes we would rather be in.
The nature of the multiverse is that every conceivable outcome is possible, even the existence of fictional worlds like Harry Potter or Marvel comics. There’s a universe out there where I’m a student at Hogwarts, say, or a Jedi Knight, and I would love to experience life in those universes. That destination, my ideal world, would be called my DR or desired reality.
You “shift” from your CR to your DR. According to the TikTokers, you are not simply imagining or pretending: your actual mind literally moves from one universe to another.
There are many methods that you can use to shift, but they all involve one primary component: you fall asleep in your CR, and “wake up” in your DR.
When I say that people are doing this, what I mean is that people (most of them young, if we’re honest) are falling asleep, dreaming about a better life, and calling it “shifting.”
It’s easy and tempting to write them off as just silly kids goofing around but they’re extremely earnest about this new method of interdimensional travel they’ve discovered.
Traveling Between Dimensions is Cool and Awesome
I love the idea that, properly equipped, you could journey from one universe to another. There are tons of different methods of this depicted in fiction, from an actual machine that transports you, to a drug that transports only your mind.
There’s a lot of different takes on the methods and ramifications of interdimensional travel. Some you might already know about, like His Dark Materials and the latest Marvel movie. Here’s a few that you can read or watch right now that you might not have heard of:
– The Discovery is about a scientist who discovers actual proof of the afterlife, but it’s really just traveling between dimensions (spoiler alert, sorry).
– Anathem by Neal Stephenson is a big, beautiful book about alternate universes and one way they might iterate on specific aspects of the worlds in proximity to them (this might not make sense until you read it?).
– The Long Earth is a series of books about the discovery of a method of “stepping” or moving between universes.
– This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a fantastic little book about two soldiers in love, except they’re on opposite sides of a multi-dimensional war.
I Think Shifting Might Just be Lucid Dreaming
One of the issues that shifters often encounter is that jerks like me point out that they’re really just lucid dreaming. It’s clear to me that this is the case. They might not even be “lucid” in the traditional sense, just very vivid. There’s something to be said here about the increased use of SSRIs in young people and the prevalence of vivid dreams among people who take them, but I’m not a scientist.
According to shifters, however, lucid dreams are related experiences but different from shifting. A lucid dream, you see, is simply your imagination. A shift, however, is a literal movement from one universe to another. That’s the difference.
Is There Any Proof That Shifting is Real?
Of course not! There’s no evidence for aliens or psychic powers, either, but that doesn’t mean people don’t believe in them. And just because it’s silly doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Pushing our food hole against another person’s food hole is considered the height of romance in this very universe, and that’s no less weird than shifting in your sleep.
Okay, maybe it’s slightly less weird.
I Want to Shift
I probably would have experimented with shifting if I had discovered it as a teenager. It’s appealing, especially to a sullen teen with depression and anxiety, to go to a world where I’m still me but I’m not hampered by those challenges.
Maybe I have shifted and just interpreted it as lucid dreaming? Maybe whenever we dream, we’re shifting into alternate realities?
I have had extremely lucid dreams for most of my life. I find my memory tenuous at the best of times and lucid, or even just vivid dreams can make the line between reality and imagined reality extremely fuzzy.
Because all of our sensing really happens in our brains, with our eyes and ears merely providing the raw data, dreaming can seem an awful lot like reality. Things like drugs, hormones, even moods can wreck our sense of self and our grip on reality. It’s tempting to think we can alter the universe simply by wishing a better one into existence.
I Have a Dream House
I have a specific house I always visit when I dream. I know it’s the same house because something in my mind goes “ping” and it feels familiar, like only your home can. I know I’m at my house, even though the arrangement of rooms might have changed since the last time.
There are secret rooms and false walls, and doors that open to empty attic rooms crossed by sunbeams, or a musty basement with a pegboard wall with tools and padlocks hung on crooked nails. Sometimes I own only this house, and I feel the anxiety of who pays for this and do I owe money like I somehow missed it on my taxes.
The last time I dreamed about my house, there were used tissues in piles on a few tables and the heavy smell of perfume. I knew that my Aunt Posy was there, despite the fact that she has been gone for many years now. I felt her presence before I saw her. She knew she was dead, but if we acknowledged it she would have to leave, so I sat on her sagging couch and we talked about my life. Maybe I told her I missed her, and maybe that made her start crying, but she would make a joke before the tears became more than a mist and maybe we would laugh and I’d wake up.
I always wake up and the house and everything in it disappears and I know I have been dreaming. But maybe there’s a place where Posy is still alive and living in a house that I can visit? It’s nice to imagine.
Week in Review
Most newsletters I read have a little bit at the end where they put things they didn’t talk about in the main newsletter part, so here are mine:
here’s a poem I really liked called The Lammergeier Daughter by Pascale Petit
I love when smart people write about pop culture in ways I didn’t think of before, and this piece about the influence of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint on designs in the video game Destiny 2 by Merritt K fits the bill
the letters “ough” can be pronounced at least 8 different ways in English! Here’s a Twitter thread about why
I wrote about Ling Ma’s book Severance last week, here’s an interview with her
I haven’t been listening to a lot of music lately but Vulfpeck is really fun
Thanks again for reading. I really appreciate it. Like, a lot. <3