By reality shifts, I mean startling appearances of physical objects (such as keys appearing out of thin air), disappearances (such as a woman vanishing as I watched her walk towards me on a sidewalk across the street), transformations (such as a coat changing from one kind of fabric to another) and transportations (such as keys or wallets appearing somewhere completely different than where they had just been set down). I've been delighted and amazed to discover that it is not just possible but indeed likely that large-scale objects can appear, disappear, transport and transform... and that time can stop, speed up, and slow down.

If I hadn't seen reality shifts occur right "in my face" repeatedly, I would not believe such things were possible. After all, it's a whole lot easier to reassure myself that those missing socks in the laundry simply got tucked inside some other item of clothing in the wash... never mind the fact that I shook everything out, and know for sure that I put both socks into the washing machine!

When I first began seeing reality shifts, I felt I needed to experience this phenomenon with other people, in order to reassure myself that what I was seeing was real. I felt blessed and lucky to see so many reality shifts with witnesses, such as an illustration in the children's story "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" changing to show the troll much closer than he'd ever been before. My daughter and I had read that same story many times for many days, and so it was shocking to both of us to discover one day that the illustration of the troll getting bumped off the bridge was completely different! I was speechless when I turned the page and saw the picture of the troll close up and coming towards us, when on every other occasion he'd just been a tiny speck vanishing off in the distance. I'd often wished I could see the troll close-up, and now my silent, unspoken wish had come true. My young daughter gazed up at me, her eyes wide with wonder, and she asked me why the picture was different. I asked her what picture she remembered seeing before, and she described in perfect detail how the troll had always been shown very small "over there" as she pointed up and over to the right, in the background of the illustration.

Now that I was certain that reality really WAS shifting, I wanted to understand what was going on just as much as my daughter did! How could it be possible that an illustration in one of our favorite picture books could be so completely different? In every other way, the book was the same. We inspected it from cover to cover, and found no other differences. It seemed as if we were now in some kind of waking dream, where things can change completely without warning... or perhaps that we had found ourselves in a parallel universe in which everything was the same except for this one picture. From our perspective, there was no way to know for sure how the book changed, although quantum physics provides us with many clues that some of our most cherished and blindly accepted assumptions about reality are untrue. The old assumptions that have been overturned by the study of quantum physics are (1) that we only affect what's right in front of us (locality), (2) that we can observe something without affecting it (objectivity), (3) that we can predict the behavior of things when we know certain information about their size, speed, and location (causality), and (4) that we can disregard all that we can't measure (material monism). We now know that quantum particles behave as if they are somehow intimately interconnected across time and space, and their behavior can only be predicted with probabilities. Every observation we make of quantum particles has a distinct effect on them, and it's abundantly obvious that we can no longer afford to assume that "only matter matters" and we can disregard what we don't know how to measure.

Reality shifts are the source of all synchronicity and coincidence -- and all dreams, wishes, and prayers come true. We can see reality shifts as they occur, and learn from witnessing this awesome phenomenon how our thoughts and feelings change the physical world.

Cynthia Sue Larson holds a bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley (1982), earned in conjunction with her pursuit of a more complete understanding of reality. Shortly after receiving her physics degree and working with scientists at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, she earned an MBA degree from San Francisco State University with the intention that she would be able to help scientists better manage their projects. Following completion of her MBA degree in 1984, she worked as a project manager at Citibank for seven years at the California Data Center.

Cynthia currently writes articles for Magical Blend and Parabola magazines about reality shifts - discussing everything from the physics of prayer to the connection between language and our culture's view of reality. She has taught workshops and classes to dozens of people, and communicated with thousands more on the internet through discussion forums and chats. She has been interviewed by Elliot Stein for his Stein Online talk show.