Looking for a way outside of this reality? Look no further.


2020 was a dark year for everyone, it was like the world was shut off and no one was sure it would ever turn back on. With the rising numbers of deaths and the loneliness of quarantine, I can’t blame anyone for wanting to escape it all; and escape people did.This “escape” I’m talking about is a phenomenon called “Reality Shifting”, it’s the idea that you can move your subconscious out of this reality and into a new one. While there were other shifting videos before her, it seemed to be one girl that heavily drew people into shifting, @marleyswadffordd, on TikTok made a video crying because she claims she just came back from a 8 month shift/trip to Hogwarts. While you can kind of guess how shifting was popularized on TikTok it’s overall origins are fuzzy, some say it’s been around for years in religions, some say the idea was popularized on Reddit and spread to TikTok. Kristen Datto, a person very vocal in her belief of reality shifting and one of the pioneers of early “shifttok”, claims that she heard about the idea in 2015 when it was “relegated to the realm of witchcraft”. Years later she tried it and when she was starting to lose hope she woke up in her “waiting room” (a waiting room is a term to describe the limbo state of shifting, some people script a physical place for it.) Harry Potter/Hogwarts seemed to be the most popular shifting destination in 2020 but the range widened a lot since then; now people shift to other popular movies, tv shows, video games, books, and some even shift into various fanfictions.