For those who are curious about the subjective and malleable nature of reality, yet wish to abstain from experimenting with hallucinogens, consider this sober-friendly mental-tease:
Stand facing a digital countdown at an angle, such that the two rightmost vertical segments of the 7 segment display are hidden from view. When the number lit is 9, make it a 5 in your mind. And as it’s decrementing, imagine it incrementing. Granted, optical illusions are a far cry from actual reality bending, but they seem to me a sensible place to start.
*pause*
Establishing concrete definitions is imperative if one hopes to gain anything meaningful from these sorts of discussions. You might begin by asking, “What constitutes whether reality has undergone sufficient change for it to reasonably be deemed ‘bent’ with respect to its previous position?” A viable answer might be, “Such a condition is constituted when, either by external influence or internal brooding, the catalogue of knowledge and experiences, particular to the person in question, has been altered to the extent that their beliefs have changed.”
The merit I find in this answer is its implication that reality is based in the individual, which jives with my worldview. Specifically, that, though much of our reality likely shares common ground with the realities of others, it is unique to our own perceptions, and the blanket statement that we all live in the same reality is patently false.
My main criticism of the quoted definition is that it’s too broad. Using it, one could claim that reality bending is quite common, occurring perhaps several times a week. It defines the type of minuscule reality altering that politicians are referring to when they begin a speech with “Today, we live in a new reality,” in an effort to gain support before passage of draconian legislation. I could not care less about such trivial reality alterations. I’m infinitely more interested in alterations involving dreams, other worlds, states of consciousness, and physics laws whose equations are populated by Greek letters and mathematical expressions that enjoy nothing more than to play musical chairs and laugh gleefully as they observe the effects.
*play*
It’s nauseatingly typical for eye trickery to be dealt with on a per example basis, as an end in and of itself: “Look, it’s a pretty, young lady with her face turned away… oh no, now it’s an ugly, old woman glaring into your soul!”
But consider the unexpected stacking of two or more uncommon illusions experienced, as I hope the descriptor ‘stacking’ might allude, roughly simultaneously. First, let’s setup a scene. It’s a sunny day. You’re sitting in a bullet train car, head leaning on the window glass, gazing outdoors at the breeze, and cruising at a fast clip. A train traveling in the same direction on the parallel track immediately adjacent begins overtaking your transport at a rate of a couple miles per hour, quickly populating the entire view afforded by the window and imparting the sense that your train car is stationary and the other is moving slowly. In the adjacent train’s window, you see the following reflected: electric power poles, with power lines that, as a result of 3D to 2D transposal, appear to intersect, these intersections marked by glistening white dots that glide along the lengths of the lines. And if you change the focus of your eyes, you can perceive the weak suggestion of someone sitting behind the reflections, sipping a coffee and reading a book.
Clearly, all of this can be deconstructed and explained in an expressionless and matter-of-fact manner. It’s an alluring thought, though, that experiencing a mash-up of sensory information seemingly contradictory and not normally encountered, leading one to question one’s perception, births doubt in the premise of reality as forever static.