Magic Flights or Mind’s Eye? Competing Content Analyses of Dimensional-Slip Narratives

Follow-up with the ostensible focus person from a published ghostly episode revealed ongoing displays of various subjective and objective anomalies, which now included four examples of a phenomenon described here as ‘dimensional-slips,’ i.e., instances where the percipient felt physically transported to other temporal or spatial realms to interact with deceased loved ones, mystical figures, or uncanny locations. These novel events (occurring from January to July in 2024) were allegedly documented soon after they happened. Independent thematic analyses explored the contents and features of the written narratives against five alternative hypotheses involving increasingly esoteric sources or mechanisms: (a) conscious fabrication, (b) mental time travel, (c) clinical dissociation, (d) shamanic-type journeying, or (e) psi activity like remote viewing. The AI language program ChatGPT-4 computed fit indices for each hypothesis, which content experts then reviewed and amended as appropriate. The phenomenology of the anomalous experiences showed mixed characteristics that were judged as most strongly aligned to conscious fabrication, clinical dissociation, and shamanic journeying. We thus conclude from the available evidence that the dimensional-slips were some type of spontaneous and self-generated dissociative or hypnotic states, involving projections of deep-seated fears, desires, or unresolved conflicts and perhaps further confounded by imaginative elaborations. These accounts nonetheless imply the possibility that transformative ‘magic flights’ can sometimes manifest in secular contexts to thin-boundary individuals without deliberate cultivation or ritual training.