I read a post about someone being confused about whether or not they had shifted (I just discovered your account so I haven't read many posts yet that answer this question).
I have no idea if it's common or not, but I wanted to share something that has me very confused too
A few months ago, last year, I had considered writing a script for a Japanese student reality show since I hadn't really enjoyed my teenage years and was finishing high school, which went very badly for me. I looked at a couple of images on Pinterest, downloaded them, and thought, "I'm sleepy today, I think I'll do the script tomorrow," and went to sleep strangely happy.
In what I call the first half of the dream, I was in a supermarket. Again, everything went well; many guys paid attention to me. I felt good. As I was leaving that place, I suddenly stopped, as if I had thought of something while I was still happy.
But it was a dream, and I wasn't completely lucid; I simply had that idea while dreaming. And I closed my eyes, and without thinking anything at all, I let myself fall forward; I was completely sure that I would change reality to the point that I wasn't even afraid to touch the ground. What I mean is that I don't think it was a lucid dream; that would imply that I would distinguish between a dream, and a reality that 'waits' for me to awaken. But I didn't; at that moment it seems I was still dreaming, or very focused on the dream rather than on my reality here.
Still confident that i was going to shift, I fell forward. It only took a moment, but I closed my eyes anyway. I fell to the ground for a few seconds, and I didn't feel any impact. What's more, I didn't feel like I had fallen at all; in fact, I always felt like I was close to the ground. My forearms were in front of me, and I felt...strange?
I think the position was like crawling, knees and elbows on the ground. But that was the strange thing, it's an odd position.
Now, what confuses me is whether a bad experience can make you doubt your reality, or if you changed your mind so that your brain protects you from considering it traumatic (since anyway this brain would have to deal with the trauma).
Because I was on the ground, and this story might not be very pleasant.
While I was there, I felt like I didn't really have anything to celebrate. I felt unsafe, like my body sensed it and couldn't focus on getting angry or, I don't know, jumping for joy.
When I looked up, I saw very green, wet trees, and very dark clouds as if the rain were dissipating. I remember it was almost nightfall. It is important to note that here, I have high myopia and astigmatism in both eyes and I don't wear glasses; for me the world looks blurry.
But in that reality, what caught my attention the most, what I immediately noticed, was how beautiful the trees were. How clearly I could see, how clearly I could see everything.
I also noticed she had a uniform exactly like the one I'd seen on Pinterest; however, at that moment I didn't remember seeing it before, it was just something I noticed. A black uniform with a yellow handkerchief.
The ground was wet and dark from the rain.
There were several men there. More than seven, I couldn't actually count them. They were gathered on the side of the road, some were talking, others were simply resting, surely.
I didn't think it was nice. I know confusion is normal, or should be, when you "wake up" in a place like that. But I was filled with fear, with terror, I was completely terrified, and I didn't remember why.
I didn't even ask myself anything, I just had a feeling it was something very bad. I couldn't remember, I couldn't remember my name here, nor my name there. In that moment, all I could think was that it was a dream from which perhaps he had become lucid. I've had lucid experiences before, mostly after nightmares too, but I didn't feel at ease; at the time I considered it an act of faith rather than something I could be sure of. I wanted it to be a lucid dream, that would mean I was safe.
Then I started crawling, crawling because physically it felt like my body wasn't supporting me, I couldn't get up from the floor. All my limbs felt tired, slow, and heavy. I couldn't even breathe erratically, but I was tremendously conscious and mentally terrified.
When I looked at one of those men, one was looking at me. In my dream, the boys looked at me with affection, or warmth. But this man with short hair and a sleeveless shirt looked at me as if I were nothing. It wasn't disinterest, it was like I didn't matter to him; it was so different from how the boys looked at me in my dream. And my feet wouldn't obey me.
Desperately, I began to think—or rather, beg—to return to dream, or to change my surroundings. I hoped that if I kept walking, the trees would change into houses or something like that, In my lucid dreams it works like this; you move and it changes.
I heard them mocking me a little, they laughed at me, and I felt more and more like my head was spiraling into confusion. I think I had a panic attack or two. The thing is, I didn't move much, hardly at all. But it felt like hours being on that road. Because I couldn't change anything, no matter how much i thought about it and how desperate i was.
Whatever I had in my system, which is my main suspicion, was some kind of sedative. I've taken sedatives before; I've overdosed. From what I've seen, I know it feels exactly the same.
However, the space didn't change, the trees remained just as untouched, and the men continued chatting and relaxing. I remember that what I kept thinking was how tired I was, and how beautiful everything looked through those eyes. But I was so sleepy, I didn't want to go to sleep because I really wanted to leave, but I just couldn't. So it was like my eyelids closed on their own, like when I had that overdose years ago.
And there was darkness for a moment, and no thought, I wasn't even afraid anymore.
And I returned to what I recognized as the dream. Now I was standing there, a little girl talking to me. But I didn't understand what she was saying; I was thinking about what had happened. Because when I came back from the other thing, it was in an instant that I found myself in the dream again, There was no transit or anything, I was just back in the throes of a dream.
And I carried on as if nothing had happened. I thought to myself in that part of the dream; it's something my waking self will deal with. And I continued through the dream, different from the first part of the dream, it wasn't even the same theme (the boys giving me attention).
When I woke up I felt very confused, and a little scared. I didn't move much from my bed and I really didn't want to see anyone.
One mistake I acknowledge I made back then, since I don't have a support network or friend shifters, is that I used an AI to ask about this. I think that's where the doubts started. Now I don't use AI for that at all, but I admit it was something I asked about and I felt super discouraged because It just didn't understand.
In your experience, would you consider this a lucid dream, a nightmare, or actual shifting?
Since it's a traumatic event, I'm really not sure I want this to be my first reality shift. The event doesn't make me uncomfortable, nor does it make me cry, but at the time it was something that scared me a lot, and above all, made me sad because obviously I had to put two and two together on my own if i shifted and that if i did it, then some girl surely were dead right now; That made me feel guilty, and still does. I was in some girls body, and all I could think about at that moment were stupid dreams, guys, and I was a total coward from the second that was my body; I didn't even have any idea how she got there, but I just started being a coward.
So I'm confused. I would really appreciate some human help, thank you very much.
Remember that all of the following is coming from a good place and I’m not trying to invalide your feelings or experience in any way. But I’m gonna be straight with you.
Also since you said you asked AI, I’m very glad you decided to ask a human instead, because using AI for shifting can be dangerous and misleading.
Now I don't really understand what you mean when you say that you might have "doubted your reality" or even that your brain was "protecting" you from something. Your brain, ego or subconscious is not protecting you from anything. And (even if it was possible) I don't think the idea that your brain was protecting you from a traumatic reality or experience fits what happened. If anything, your memory appears remarkably detailed.
What you described sounds much more like an unusually vivid dream or a lucid-dream. Dreams are capable of producing experiences that feel completely real while they are happening. They can create convincing environments, physical sensations, emotions, memories and even long periods of perceived time. The fact that something feels real does not necessarily mean it happened in another reality, or that it was “real”.
You were already dreaming when the idea of shifting appeared. You did not consciously begin a shifting method while awake either. Instead while already inside a dream, you thought “I'm going to shift” and then the environment changed, but that is something dreams do constantly.
A dream can contain a dream about shifting just as easily as it can contain a dream about flying, dying, becoming famous, etc.
The fear you experienced afterward is understandable but I would not be interpreting that fear as “evidence” that the event was real.
Intense emotions are extremely common in dreams and nightmares. In fact, fear is often one of the strongest emotions people experience during sleep. The fact that you felt terror does not make the experience more likely to have been a shift. It simply means the experience affected you deeply.
I need glasses (im practically blind), but in dreams I’m often seeing perfectly despite needing glasses in real life. Dreams are not constrained by the physical limitations of your eyes. Your brain is generating the image directly.
What strikes me most is that your interpretation seems to depend on the assumption that if the experience was a shift, then you occupied the body of a real girl somewhere and took over her life.
The fact that you immediately wanted to escape, couldn't control your surroundings, felt physically weak and eventually drifted back into “another” dream sequence is actually very consistent with nightmare experiences.
Lucid dreams are not always fully controllable either. Many people become aware of themselves in a dream yet remain unable to change the environment (this is also what most of my lucid dreams looks like, sadly). Likewise, those feelings you described are common in dreams.
Sometimes a powerful dream can leave a person searching for a definitive answer that simply doesn't exist. Have you ever fallen in love with someone in a dream and wake up to realize non if it was real? Because it wasn’t “real”, even if it felt like it.
At the end of the day, it is your experience and I’m only interpreting what you told me, but I absolutely don’t think it was a shift in any way.
Again, Im also relieved that you do not rely on AI to determine whether experiences like this are shifts or not. AI cannot verify subjective experiences, and it can become EXTREMELY dangerous. At best, it can compare your experience to known psychological phenomena such as dreams, nightmares, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, false awakenings, dissociation, memory reconstruction and other states of consciousness.
Sometimes a dream is only a dream.
Lucid dreaming experience
Treating lucid dreaming as shifting
Your brain cannot make the difference between AI and a real person
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