Reality shifting: an emergent online daydreaming culture | Hacker News Reader

Reality shifting: an emergent online daydreaming culture

link.springer.com

149 pointsgeox95 comments

In a way it reminds me of being engrossed in reading, in that there's an almost complete suspension of awareness of the outside world in favour of the fictional one. The fact that RS users report writing detailed scripts seems to support this:

> Before I plan on shifting, I write myself a script in the notes app on my phone, in which I plan exactly what happens in the desired reality. This makes it easier to visualize exactly what I want to happen

I suppose one difference is that in reading, you (or I, at least) tend to also dissociate the self somewhat in favour of the main character in the novel, whereas RS users seem to retain their sense of self.

Following this train of thought, I wonder if reading could itself be considered a kind of meditation?

This sort of thing is so interesting from a psychological perspective, is a shame it has to come laden with bogus rationalisations via the occult or pop-quantum physics, which just provides an avenue for easy dismissal of the effect.

>is a shame it has to come laden with bogus rationalisations via the occult or pop-quantum physics

I'm guessing those help them though. The more you believe in it the better it works so having plausible (to laymen) explanations and talking as if the characters are real people improves the experience.

Good point. Constructing pseudo-scientific justifications and explanations becomes part of a self reinforcing system.

Unfortunately it is a similar mechanism that underlies various pathological delusions like paranoia, so I'm not sure how healthy of an activity it would be. I suppose like anything else it comes down to a matter of degrees?

Exactly this.

Just after I read the abstract, it reminded me of reading a long, engrossing novel (like War and Peace, LOTR, etc.), or watching a similar TV/Web series (like The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc.)

To a large extent I read long novels for this effect.

It gives you momentary escape from your reality, and when you "come back", you come back better.

I also want to point out that novels can be addictive in a bad way.

Long art forms suspends reality for a time period.

I think that's largely what it is. Reading goes out of fashion, only to emerge from it's ashes with a new, Matrix-y name.

Speaking of daydreaming, 2013 wasn't a great year for movies, so I was out of options when I went to see "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" [1], and boy it turned out to be a great one.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mi...

Interesting phenomenon.

I'm not super well versed on quantum physics, but I'm not sure that a system that includes travel between universes should be described as 'rooted in extrapolations of modern cosmology, quantum theory,[...,],' so much based on fictional systems lightly inspired by quantum physics.

Anyway, given the state of the world it isn't that surprising that people would like to indulge in a bit more daydreaming nowadays. Especially young adults missing formative early events (a happy and relatively free first couple years of independence in college, for example). Perhaps there's an 'alternate universe' in which we really isolated college campuses and the students there could have had their Hogwarts. We failed them miserably.

You can see any quantum event, such that is only described by a probability, as a fork. It produces two universes, in one if which the event has occurred, in another has not, otherwise identical.

Using this model, it is easy to imagine "parallel realities" which are very close to ours and thus amenable to fantasizing, but different enough to contain whatever makes the fantasies attractive.

Right, and it is interesting because 'quantum events' happen very often, which would seem to indicate an infinite number of universes, which means that any particular fantasy you'd like to think about is occurring in some of them.

The bit I get fuzzy at: something I believe, but without proof, is that any scheme that involved any communication between universes would fundamentally violate a ton of basic physics principles. I mean, it would seem to violate the definition of universe as the totality of existence, but that's just a definition. But I'm sure (again, without actually doing any math or physics) that it must violate some conservation of energy rules as well.

Edit: I bet there's a really slick line of argument like: if you want to duplicate a universe, there's all that matter in the second copy to make, which you've got to pay E=mc^2 for. This is OK in the many worlds interpretation because <reasons relating to the universes being totally disconnected from each other, or something like that>. But if they were connected to each other <the previous reasons would somehow be invalid>.

But filling in those two blanks -- that sort of stuff is why I retreated to thermodynamics, with the rest of the engineers.

Check out the concept of a "Everett-Wheeler telephone".

If quantum mechanics had a non-linearity and... some other conditions, then you could use it to send, uh, some information between two sides of a branch point, uh, once, I think.

At least, you could send a single bit from one side of the branch to the other.

I think the idea is, if there are non-linearities in time evolution, then either [the thing described above] is possible, or sending messages back in time is possible?

So, that's, I suppose, a reason one might expect time evolution to be completely linear? (beyond just, it being not completely linear being like, super ugly.)

But, also, I don't think the "duplicating the universe requires duplicating all the matter" really follows from QM stuff.

These "splittings", they aren't... It is all just linear combinations of things.

Ok, so, idk how to handle this in like, a relativistic context, but in a non-relativistic context, if you are just talking about unitary time evolution, with no born rule discrete jump stuff imposed on top (which, if you are using MWI , which I assume is what you mean because you are talking about the splittings, is the thing), then it's not like you have some single time at which you go from one universe to two universes? It's all just continuous time evolution of the wavefunction. The worlds are just projections of this wavefunction into parts that can be considered independently because of like, decoherence and such? Something like that.

Maybe you could think of it as less "the world if the measurement outcome is x" and more "the world insofar as the measurement outcome is x" ?

There was a really great short story by Ted Chiang about this concept (finite communication between forks): https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed... . I found it from an HN post a couple months ago.

>if you want to duplicate a universe, there's all that matter in the second copy to make, which you've got to pay E=mc^2 for.

This bothers me also, it's like every tiny quantum event creates a Big Bang in a new dimension. There is information duplication as well. Without a way to communicate between dimensions there would seem to be absolutely no way to test this theory. Maybe every quantum event is a communication? And why a new universe for every event? Why not just two universes? And how does time fit in? Maybe the second universe would be the first universe running backwards in time? The energy and information duplication seems too extreme. Could new dimensions eventually fill all possible dimensions and start to collide or overlap? Maybe our universe is a superposition of all dimensions?

I think that last bit is part of it -- the idea is that really there ought to be a wavefunction for the whole universe, so it is fine for the universe to be in a superposition (deemed the multiverse).

And while we're at it, take any imaginative 'thing' that fits like a fabled Panacea of Axiom and conclude any conclusion as "matter of fact" in another reality, which will never be dealt with in the physical whatsoever. My, what a fork of paths have we diverged from the seeking to understand the physical.

Anyone? Smells like a bad test suite that's been patched by hiding the failing tests through a layer of indirection.

The concept of living simultaneously in multiple universes (other "Narratives") is explored in Neal Stephenson's _Anathem_. Within the novel, a key assumption shared by those that practice this feat is that our brains' predictive power relies on simultaneously traversing the many worlds created at any juncture in the Narrative.

This just sounds like lucid dreaming awake imo. Kind of scary some of these people believe they're actually jumping dimensions or something. Wonder how much control they can exert compared to a lucid dreaming.

I've not managed LD awake/meditating yet , but I can fall asleep awake if my body is tired enough but I'm mentally awake, though it requires a lot of concentration. And doing it does not feel nice (you can feel your body paralyzing, feels like you can't breathe and you have to avoid reacting).

That sounds like hypnagogia. Have you gotten checked for sleep apnea?

Hypnagogia is the transition phase of the sleep cycle. You experience hypnagogia everytime you go to sleep. No, it's not a sign of sleep apnea.

Part of it probably is hypnagogia though I was so alert that it did not feel like that normal transition to sleep. It felt more like I had meditated myself into a lucid dream. There were some stray thoughts but none of that cloudy brain fog with senseless thoughts I would normally get going to sleep.

Also from what I understand the feeling of suffocation is quite common for people who experience sleep paralysis. You're not actually suffocating. Given I induced it, that's probably what that was. The first time it woke me up, the second time I ignored it and a few seconds passed and then the sensations stopped and I was lucid dreaming. At least that's what it felt. I slept for slightly more than an hour most times (I've only managed it during naps) and lost lucidity at times. It felt like the dream started immediately but it might not have. Also at other times I could feel my body in the bed again but wasn't dreaming just asleep.

Every once in a while there are posts on r/LucidDreaming from people who are beginning to believe they’re time traveling or dimension hopping or the like.

This touches on something I took away from Interstellar and Inception: our grounding in reality is deeply important and surprisingly brittle.

> Kind of scary some of these people believe they're actually jumping dimensions or something

Every time I have thoughts like this about <insert whatever> anymore, I find myself coming back to “well, there are actual Nazi wannabes still, so I guess <insert whatever> isn’t too bad” - let them live their life.

Once Nazis are out of the picture… then maybe we can justify cracking down on others things we don’t like :P

...um I didn't suggest we crack down on anything. Just personally I would think you're crazy if you tell me you're dimension jumping.

Also known as having an imagination. I remember doing this on bus rides to better understand quake levels.

I’m thinking being able to replay worlds or map geometry like your brain is rendering it live is more rare and maybe this is teaching it a bit. No one’s ever quizzed me on how many details (big and small) I could get right though.

Reminds of Maths class in school when our teacher got us to try visualising and manipulating a 3D object in our mind. Very few were able to do it, which surprised me a lot.

What kind of object? Visualize and manipulate how?

I tried imagining a cube, rotated it and then morphed it into a tetrahedron, which wasn't too difficult, but perhaps it was more complicated than that?

I imagine this is the kind of thing people refer to by spatial intelligence. But also I can imagine it's easier to do if you've actually done the thing in real life and paid some attention to perspective, shape, shadow and so on. Or if you've tried drawing cubes, etc.

https://aphantasia.com/vviq/

I used to play so much Tetris that after a while I could just close my eyes and play without a computer. From talking to other frequent players this was not uncommon.

And good chess players don't need a board either.

Right, lots of people have ongoing fantasies, which is basically the same thing, imagination. The only difference here is people are talking in public about their fantasies and enlisting others to help create and maintain them. And even that is not uncommon, people have used prostitutes this way forever. Perhaps video games have made sharing alternate imaginary realities more socially acceptable. These days you can imagine a fantasy world and actually create it in software and make it an actual reality.

Interesting how occult concepts like astral travel (reality shifting) and familiars & daemons (tulpamancy) are getting recycled without the Victorian baggage.

i think in the last 5-6 years we've seen in western/anglosphere culture a growing surge of interest in both occult stuff, like you say, or occultish New Age stuff (astrology) as well as renewed interest in the old organised religions among younger people. at the very least there is a willingness to hold a "live and let live" attitude toward the spiritual beliefs of others.

of course this is just a hunch and other people's anecdata might say otherwise, but i tend to think it could be a swing of the pendulum or "backlash" from New Atheist influence in the discourse in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The mystical stuff cycles around about every 25 years, but comes in from a different direction each time. The last boom was around the millennium.

As for the traditional religion, my guess is it's traditionalism in response to the increase in cultural warfare we've seen recently.

I interact very often with young people both online and in reality (barring the article's mention of several such things), and I see the same trends you mention. Some of it has always been mostly the purview of youth, such as interest in exploring known religions and inventing "new" ideas about the whys and hows of existence. Specific topics such as renewed interest in tulpamancy, dream interpretation, and chaos magic[k] I think can be traced roughly to a reflection of modern society: a desire to make sense of and control a world in which you have increasingly less control. As populations and communications grow, the signal to noise ratio that any given person experiences increases, leading to less sense of "I know what is what".

It's funny because those things were couching certain phenomena (chiefly, being able to imagine things and, perhaps to an extent, hallucination due to external factors) into terms compatible with the dominant beliefs of the time (magicks of all sorts) while this is somewhat couched in the ideas of rationality and science, at least "reality shifting."

The Tulpa stuff has been reinterpreted in materialist terms too (apparently 80% of people treat it this way, from some study or other).

Of course, interpreting these things in just one way is a category mistake.

Except now they're picking up pseudo scientific baggage. I'm not sure there's a net gain in that.

It seems natural for our generations who grew up with 3D worlds (from games or online communities) to be able to navigate the mind's eye version of it, the same way you can mentally walk in a familiar store in order to plan your route ahead of time.

This idea seems remarkably similar to an idea that was popular in Russia about 15 years ago - "reality transurfing" popularized by Vadim Zeland.

The same sort of shaky quantum physics justification is used for it.

It might be reaching but I'd say the Russians that grew up 90's were captivated by this idea perhaps because of the similar desire to escape a bad reality. That time was awful for a lot of them and covid restrictions have a similar sort of hopelessness and helplessness. When you do not feel you can have an affect on the world, it's best to focus on changing your perception of it.

The reality creation in Russia's version notably lacked the application of simply going to some commercialized fictional world. Instead it simply focused on creating your reality - whatever that may be.

Interesting to see them mention tulpas here. It's always been a bit of a meme online, but I knew a pretty tenured hypnotist who was utterly terrified of the things. He'd seen tulpas cause irreversible psychological damage to the people who adopted them, where many people would become completely attached to a character or particular fiction in their head. This could cause them to act out involuntarily, induce constant paranoia or even completely alter their perception of reality. He figures the human brain is simply not meant for multiple inhabitants, and I'm inclined to agree. Hearing the occasional story of a person who's gotten in too far with tulpas just makes me sad, particularly because there's no real easy "fix" for it. Oftentimes, people wall themselves in to an altered reality and refuse to leave, be it by their own volition, or even another's.

From reading around the subject there seems to be a weird intersection between the My Little Pony fandom, Tulpas, and some of the more unusual sexual proclivities.

I actually know an exorcist from a mainline church; I should ask him what he makes of it.

What's interesting about this stuff is that it seems to support interpretation through multiple cognitive frameworks. There could be a mystical/esoteric explanation for why those people became so attached to the characters or fictions. Or it could be that they were already vulnerable to schizophrenic or depersonalization/derealization-type disorders.

It's like how you'll sometimes hear/read people say that tantra/mediation stuff like Kundalini can be dangerous because it results in an energy imbalance that could potentially be irreparable and/or lead to lasting damage.

Yeah, the various explanations are a bit like geometry vs. algebra in maths. They're different tools for explaining the same things.

This is interesting, because my (more literary than scientific) understanding of ego development includes becoming aware of an 'inner tribe' or 'multiple voices' inside one's mind which simultaneously are and aren't the self, to differing degrees. Integrating these voices, allowing them to discuss with each other, et cetera has been a method which allows great insight into problems where reaching a solution was blocked by a limited perspective.

Accessing these voices is invaluable for writing fiction, perhaps the difference with a tulpa is the level of reality and influence ascribed to a single 'not-me' voice?

I also see the ability to have an internal Socratic dialogue as requiring a kind of ego-splitting, in a way that could be conceptualized as a tulpa asking (often surprising) questions.

Very abstract and hard to talk about stuff, I hope that makes sense.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model (of which I am a big fan, and it helped me a lot to work through past trauma and deal with my emotions), https://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-mindbus-technique/ , https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainsnacks/201606/w... etc

I lost one of my friends to the tulpa crap a few years ago. It's self-induced schizophrenia and it ruined his life. He lost his job, all of his friends, and last I heard was living on the street.

Schizophrenia is more common than people think. Happened to a family member but medication calmed the voices and they are steady now. I wonder what it takes for people to accept they are not well though…

Gen Z is using TikTok to teleport to Hogwarts? Is this parody?

We're in a 2021 mid-COVID civilization. A digital currency based on a dog meme has a market cap of $billions. A hint of bad news will empty store shelves of toilet paper. A chip shortage is in some loose way related to a turkey shortage.

We might have been on track anyway, but shit got crazy when 2020 took us down a sharp turn and dark alley towards a mashup of all of the dystopian fiction ever written.

Kids thinking they're astral projecting to Hogwarts is downright rational. That world had only a vague internal consistency and it still makes more sense than actual reality right now.

It's the equivalent of meteorologists finding themselves in the middle of a Sharknado and deciding that, hey, maybe getting weather from a groundhog wasn't so crazy because a few more/less weeks of winter was an understandable possibility, and Punxsutawney Phil never predicted weather of biblical proportions.

It's not parody, it's a coping mechanism because reality right now looks itself like a bad parody written by an SF hack in 2017.

1634 Dodge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

And they weren't even goosing fake market cap bits at the time.

> A hint of bad news will empty store shelves of toilet paper. A chip shortage is in some loose way related to a turkey shortage.

Ever hear of actual breadlines?

This guy thought he was a chicken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtLL3LOi87I

I think you might as well daydream yourself into a reality where the sky isn't falling. ;)

I'm not sure what your trying to say. I have heard of breadlines and also the toilet paper shortage (in the US) in the 70s. I picked a couple of examples ready to mind, but there's countless more right now that form a constellation of points that eclipse any single phenomena taken from history.

Note that I'm also note saying things are worse right now than other times.

I'm saying things are stranger, weirder than other times, less predictable from 3 years earlier, as a civilization, than at other times of high chaos.

There have always been flat earthers. The internet lets the freaks meet and tell each other that they are normal. Now the algorithm fuels it and the media amplifies it. And yet the earth is still not flat, and somehow, still spins.

Things are not stranger now, you just hear more about the strange people and unusual things.

I don't think it's only that. Things are stranger now because of increasing complexity.

Sure, ironic flat earthers bear some resemblance to past cultural touch points like SubGenius, and some people take them too seriously.

That isn't the strangeness I'm talking about. Or rather, it's only a part of it: Awareness of it by rank and file average young people is new and has an impact on their worldview and whether or not the world around them makes any sense. But you're cherry picking things like that which are not part of the strangeness that I mean:

I'm not sure you can look at lockdowns, quarantines, fundamental shifts in how we talk about socializing, a generation of students losing 1-2 years of normal academic and social development, mass shortages of basic items, the emergence of countless strange digital currencies based on mixtures of ideology, economics, and memes, politicians using the rhetoric of murder against their colleagues... How much more should I go on?

I don't think you can look at all of that and reasonably say "things are not stranger now"

Even if all of that had been going on previously (it has not) then greater awareness alone would still be enough provocation to push people into seeking the escapism of "RS".

Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other on the point that I'm making?

I think you should go for a nice long walk and read a good book or two and worry less. Swings and roundabouts.

You best start believing in absurdities- you’re in one!

Wow, and here I am dropping cash on weed and shrooms like a chump. I’ll be honest, this strikes me as similar to the whole binaural sounds thing…I tried that way back in high school and got nothing from it but my friend swore it was elevating. I won’t knock it, I’m sure some people really do get something out of it and who and I to say otherwise. I might even try it some time. But shrooms haven’t ever let me down. So at least I’ve got a backup

I always had this idea that meditation was the long way to the shortcut drugs offered. I am saying meditation, because, despite using fancy new terminology (RS)( ..[is] facilitated by specific induction methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion ), the paper does not really describe new phenomenon, but rather.. a new generation rediscovering 60s.

History. Rhymes. And all that.

>I always had this idea that meditation was the long way to the shortcut drugs offered.

Very well put! Every time I'm on LSD or psilocybin (or even THC in higher dosages) I think "I should learn how to properly meditate to get into this state of insight sober"

It is really quite easy: have someone you know provide a nonsense word. In needs to have no logical sense or connections to to anything - pure nonsense. Then, with that phrase held in your most present and loudest inner voice you repeat that phrase in your head. Repeat it over an over, forcefully to drive any other thoughts or thought fragments out of your mental conversation(s) (at all mental conversation levels, if you have more than one going at once). After a few minutes of forceful repeating, it echoes on it's own, and a few realization moments later 20-30 minutes have passed and it feels like waking from a refreshing dream. When in the "state", it really can't be described because it is whatever your imagination and recent experiences feedback froth back and forth. It's relaxing and refreshing, and a great way to clear one's head when working on difficult complex mental goals.

That just sounds like dissociation with extra steps.

It is a form of sensory deprivation which triggers an awake lucid dream.

If you can learn to focus in your day dreaming, weed can make it much more fun, I can’t speak for shrooms but I suspect if you can handle the hallucination it may be additive to the experience.

I'd recommend seeking out a copy of the original HemiSync recordings and follow along at least for the first 3-5 of them. I was skeptical and had no results from other binaural beat and similar things, but HemiSync blew me away.

Thanks for the recommendation consider it done :)

Funnily enough I just noticed this in the article:

> Some of those who experience RS reported on social media that their practice was first described in a declassified CIA document titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process.” (McDonnel, 1983). In the document’s 29 pages, the writer, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell, outlined a method involving hypnosis and binaural audio stimulation designed to achieve equal amplitude and frequency of EEG patterns in both brain hemispheres. Its purpose seemed to have been the induction of out-of-body states capable of time travel, remote viewing, and, ultimately, information gathering (for a review on out-of-body experiences, see Cardeña and Alvarado, 2014)

This is referring to the very same HemiSync (by the Monroe Institute). Interesting.

Some people seem to be able to will suggestive language, phrases, maybe audio additions to take them to an imagined fantasy they will testify in a legal court they "teleported and lived there". I made the mistake of discussing deep meditation as described by the Transcendental Meditation faddists during the Beatles hey days, and ever since that date I have been receiving emails and social media private message questions asking about "reality shifting", as if I'm some type of authority. I had no idea what this "reality shifting" phrase meant, so I responding describing literary authors who are known to have changed and elevated literature (basically, Nobel Literature authors) whom they did not know, but created some type of confusion circle. I still get about a dozen such private message contacts a month, asking how to "reality shift" with a half dozen acronyms and pseudo-science nonsense words in their peas to who they think is some type of reality wizard. I'm at a loss how to respond ethically to such irrational requests, they certainly do not respond to anything as I expect. Too often, the response seems to come from a perspective that I'm being coy, or testing their made up something or other. I feel like I'm on the tangential end of a mass mental disease.

This reminds me of when I was in high school, depressed, and desperately wanting to lucid dream. I understand the appeal. The blur between "worlds" gets into some wild sci-fi morality situations though.

Is it really anything new, or just newly noticed by these select researchers?

I used to meditate/imagine natural environments in the 1980s and while in them, I'd move my perception through, looking for entities to talk to. I didn't know the term tulpa, but the notion of a spirit guide or totem is similar enough. It was better than full on dreaming, but wasn't lucid dreaming either.

Some of my friends had the shared waking fantasy that they could do things like mentally cause the traffic lights to change. I don't remember what they called it, but being public about it seems to be wrapped up in notions of membership and the ingroup.

I wouldn't be surprised if variations of what we did in teen culture then and what the authors are writing about are somewhat universal to adolescent minds. It might be a cognitive development stage, like how young kids go through a nightmare stage.

My assumption was that the "new" thing were the sort of grass roots social communities and formalization of it all that the researchers stumbled upon. And maybe they're taking it too much as a new thing rather than just a social crystalization around a common thing that lots of people do (deep daydreaming)

Many young females report joining Draco Malfoy as his girlfriend. Draco is a fictional character from the Harry Potter series, characterized as a cowardly bully who tricks and hurts people to get what he wants, a cunning user of magic.

Were people paid to write this paper?

It sounds like their research was browsing wattpad and reddit for an afternoon.

Funny, I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the paper.

>It sounds like their research was browsing wattpad and reddit for an afternoon.

They explicitly say these are locations of the community in the paper. I don't think this invalidates anything. When performing contemporary anthropology, it is pretty common to observe subjects in their normal environment.

What a fascinating paper!

Somewhat sad that one of the top fantasies for young women is to be partnered to a cruel and abusive Draco Malfoy. I'm guessing it is an extension of bad boy syndrome.

Interesting. I have been doing this for decades but I absolutely started to get more intentional and in depth during the pandemic.

I’ve never been good in social situations and I generally avoid them, and I used this kind of day dreaming to play out various scenarios like a decision tree to “workshop” how to interact with specific people, and it has served me well for practical purposes, but I started using it more for “fun” since the pandemic.

> day dreaming to play out various scenarios like a decision tree to “workshop” how to interact with specific people

Seems like a reinvention of empathy.

Curious how you see it that way. I am a pretty empathetic person (maybe less so to strangers than friends), but I have limited (mostly by choice) filters, so sometimes I just want to make sure I’m not going to accidentally cross any boundaries. I think of it more like rehearsing lines for a play, but making tweaks to fit the intended scene.

To me, empathy is about trying to understand the way other people think or feel so you can anticipate how they might respond to things. In forming mental models of other people and running through simulated scenarios with those mental models to explore possible outcomes, I think you're engaging in a form of empathy.

> I am a pretty empathetic person (maybe less so to strangers than friends),

I feel the same, strongly so in fact. I think the accuracy of the mental models used for empathizing depends on experience; experience with that specific person and one's own life experiences in general. The better I know a person, the more accurate my mental model of their behavior and feelings will be. General experience socializing with other people also enhances empathy since that experience enables somebody to create more accurate models of how people in general think or feel about things. Further, personal experiences allow somebody to better empathize with people who have similar experiences.

Makes sense, thanks for elaborating!

This paper is worth reading, the whole reality shifting thing (and related concepts like tulpamancy) is a very interesting psychological phenomenon.

I learned about tulpas in the pandemic and it absolutely terrified me as a concept. I encourage anyone who hasn’t heard of it to look it up or go down the Reddit rabbit hole for a bit.

There is an huge area of possibility in exercises like Hypnosis but involving intense emotions.

We discovered ‘rewriting personal history’ to be a useful tactic for addressing pain in the past. I am right now thinking of when and if I want to make myself fall in love with another person. Another one is the deliberate flooding of the self with sadness (e.g. read the names at war memorial) to drown out feelings of anger to (i) never even in the face of provocation and (ii) intensely influence the other party.

Sometimes I get a download from the ‘Department of Emergency Psychology’ such as the above techniques, a phoenix visualization, etc.

Escapism ? + self hypnotizing to the max.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapism

> Escapism is mental diversion from unpleasant or boring aspects of daily life, typically through activities involving imagination or entertainment. Escapism may be used to occupy one's self away from persistent feelings of depression or general sadness.

The only novel part of this is the particular way that kids talk about it with each other on the internet. The activity itself is the same old stuff.

i think it can be healthy. visionaries are people who see the future using existing constructs, here is a way to look at it, before you do anything you typically think or envision yourself doing that action before you do it, the way it works best is breaking it down into steps instead of staying at the final image. in all actuality if you write each step down and give possible ways to accomplish each step and add a date you have what many planning books call micro goals that lead to the end goal or overall goal. never let the internet stop you from dreaming, a lot more is possible if we allow our minds to think of possible outcomes.

plus, mostly everyone dreams, even a nightmare is a dream, might as well think of alternatives to get yourself out of mental gridlock.

imagination is where abundance exist because abundance is the mindset of how we think about what we have in front of us. scarcity is the limiting of beliefs about the world around us. if we thought the cave was the only shelter none of us would be here sipping on lattes inside of a coffee shop scrolling yc

It's interesting to see a new generational take on lucid dreaming. For me, it was always more exploratory -- discovering the power of the human brain to construct reality out of nothing. There was no desire to play out an entirely scripted event.