Was Dante Shifting Realities?
"Portrait of Dante by Botticelli" by paukrus is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Disclaimer: I am neither confirming nor denying the reality of shifting. I’m simply saying that if it is real, it could explain a lot about Dante’s Inferno. I’m bringing this to you from the perspective of teens, but it is also a spiritual practice for many.
If you’ve been on TikTok recently, you’ve probably heard about something called shifting. “Shifting” is the supposed practice of placing your consciousness in another reality. Relying on the theory that there are infinite realities, “shifters” believe that anything imaginable is real in some reality (this means that there are realities where you’re a student at Hogwarts, an Avenger, a man-eating venus flytrap, etc.). Stories of people joining One Direction or living in The Vampire Diaries are popping up all over the internet.
Many have made comparisons to Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz- where the characters seem to have shifted to an alternate reality. Basically, one’s consciousness travels to a version of themselves in a different reality and back. My theory is that Dante Aligheri’s famous Commedia was actually his story of shifting.
To shift from your current reality (CR) to your desired reality (DR), you must put the left side of your brain to sleep and tell the right side that you’re already in your DR. CIA documents released in 2003 about the “Gateway Process” are believed to support the idea of shifting,“the Gateway experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space.” Very sci-fi, I know. Stay with me here.
Shifting puts you in a disoriented state, so many wake up in their DR without fully knowing how they got there. Similarly, Dante describes waking up in a dark forest in the Prologue of the Inferno with little grasp of how he ended up there.
Your subconscious takes you to your DR. People can “script” what they want to happen there (EX: if you want to be friends with Morticia Addams, you can write it down in your shifting script). I believe that this could explain Dante’s relationship with Beatrice and why Virgil guided Dante through Hell.
Beatrice, Dante’s muse, refers to Dante as a friend and guides him through Heaven. In Dante’s real life, however, he only met Beatrice twice (that we know of). They were not friends, though Beatrice is the inspiration behind most of Dante’s works. Dante could’ve scripted Beatrice’s love for him. He could’ve also easily scripted in Virgil so that he could meet one of his life-long heroes. Additionally, this might shed light on the Euro-Centric view of the afterlife. It’s no secret that the Inferno Dante describes is incredibly Islamophobic (the cities contain mosques and Muhammad is tortured).This could also be why someone like Queen Cleopatra was punished for Lust and not for suicide or violence. Dante’s DR could’ve mirrored his own personal beliefs and desires, so it makes sense that Dante would shift to what he would’ve assumed would be the afterlife.
I’m not saying any of this is real. I just think it’s fun to theorize! What do you think?
