writing/bilocation_projection

bilocating into the compost; projecting across the flowering fields

ah, shifts! this experience which was once wholly identified with the shifter community of the 90s is basically everywhere in the alterhuman communities today. a wolf, an elf and an anime character, even though their experience of Self might be worlds apart, will probably all use the same terms to describe their changes in perception. and while new ideas, like envisage shifts, burst into the mainstream sometimes, most people are still referring to the same categories established in the very first shifting glossary created on alt.horror.werewolves.

...should we maybe check up on that?

part i: horsin' around

back when i was writing the unicorn article for otherkin wiki, i read to be unicorn by galatea of chimeras and found something that really interested me. she (along with others in her system) describes feeling a phantom body which doesn't fully map onto the system's physical body, being partially or sometimes fully outside it. as well as that, what the phantom body does isn't always directly analogous to the physical body.

around this time i'd started going on some Really Long Walks, and if you're also a person who enjoys walking you might know that there's a sort of headspace you get into when you're at it for a while. at some point, on a trail deep in the woods, it occurred to me: could i try doing that too? i already had some experience projecting a daemon — she was trotting along at my side at that very moment (because she's also a horse, of course)! surely it wasn't so different from that.

now, being that i'm animalhearted, shifts are usually something i use deliberately as a way to enter deeper into the experience of my species rather than an instinct welling up. i'm a horse the same way i'm a pianist: i have to stay in practise! so i decided to experiment, and i couldn't tell you what i actually did to make it happen, but almost immediately something like this popped out:

a sketch of a humanoid figure overlapping a sketch of a horse. the horse's hind legs intersect with the humanoid legs.

this was weird and surprising! the hind legs of my horse-body were rooted to my physical human legs. it made me feel like the back half of a pantomime horse (or the puppet from the stage production of war horse, for a more dignified example (did you know the horse from war horse is also called joey??)) multiple people i showed this drawing to also described it as "a fucked up centaur". thanks!

i felt huge, and immediately had a different sense of how i fit into the environment and how much space i needed than before. my viewpoint was still firmly rooted in my physical noggin, but given that my horse-head was a couple meters forward, it produced the uncanny feeling of being able to see 'behind' myself in a way which wouldn't be too incongruent with a horse's vision!

it stills feels weird to call it my body, and it's hard to say why it does feel like that. it's extremely difficult to describe the qualitative feeling of choosing to move your projected body and how it's different from visualising a daemon or some other not-you thing. i mean, a daemon is you in many senses, and a lot of daemians have explicit executive control over what their daemon does. but she was standing there, and i was standing there, and there was a clear division between the two sensations in my head.

the stage puppet analogy comes up because it does kinda feel like there's some sort of thread between the horse bits and their matching physical bits. turning my head corresponds to focusing on a different part of my field of vision, though i don't physically move my eyes. my forelegs feel like they tug on the back of my wrists when they plod along, though i don't physically move my arms. that's about the best i can describe it right now.

when i first started this writeup, and i was struggling to put things into words, i figured it might be helpful to look others' personal experiences and see how they described it. i set out on what i didn't yet know was going to be a weird journey...

part ii: a load of horsefeathers

i took to the otherkin wiki discord to ask about experiences like mine. i already knew about bilocation shifting, and i knew that it was controversial. that was largely because of what it originally referred to: the ability to manifest a second physical body in the form of an animal. many more people discussed and believed in experiences like this in the early days, but they were still far from universally accepted as real.

it was also controversial for its ambiguity. it also came to refer (less frequently) to manifesting a non-physical (but still objectively real) form outside of your body. even more infrequently, it referred to the subjective experience of a second body. except, sometimes those were called relocation shifts — but some glossaries said that was an outdated term. some said that relocation and bilocation were synonyms for all meanings... you're starting to see the problem, right?

in the discord discussion, page shepard also mentioned that actual documentation of any of these experiences was really rare. but for lack of better places to look, i thought i'd give it a search.

the earliest mention i could find was this: in 1996, sinclair andersen claims on AHWW to have experienced a bilocation shift (which he defines as "appearing as a material wolf elsewhere") in 1990. he doesn't elaborate on the experience whatsoever. he does mention its presence in norse myth.

the next is in 1997 when akane10349 asks if it's possible to manipulate physical objects when you astral project. coyote osborne says he'd heard of that happening — "they can supposedly even be seen by others". he says he has a friend who "on several occasions managed to be in two seperate places at the same time" but gives very little detail. his wording implies he saw this himself, but i'm not sure.

these two posts establish pretty much every theme for accounts of bilocation shifting. someone says they've done it, or know someone who has, or that they've heard stories. they offer absolutely no detail on the specific experience. they frequently appeal to mythology or folklore for precedent instead. the posts are formulaic enough that i don't really feel like spending a lot of time on this! suffice it to say, i concluded pretty quickly i wasn't going to find people reflecting my experiences here.

what became interesting to me was the term itself.

when jakkal rewrote his shifter's FAQ in 1999, he added bilocation shifting. he solicited definitions from the community for this, and notably, most people leave the 'bilocation' field blank or say they don't know what it is. but take a look at the definition that ended up there:

In [a bilocation shift], the "spirit body" of the were in question leaves the "physical form" and reforms itself outside of the human body.  The "new form" the spirit takes is a physical form (as opposed to the Relocation Shift)
- Shifting and Awereness Terms

i'm presenting the development of the term in chronological order, but it wasn't the order i found my sources in. before this, i'd found what felt like a hundred other nonhuman glossaries — and so, so many of them used this exact phrasing.

in fact, glossaries were almost the only type of source i found. many of them had different identical entries for bilocation shifting! many more were clearly just paraphrasing these. and many did the things i described earlier: say they'd only heard about them, or allude to ancient myth as 'proof'. and this sort of unsourced copy-pasting is still happening today! lots of contemporary sources i found were reposts of therian nation's 2018 definition, for example. the one development that seems to have occurred is that modern definitions are more critical of the idea.

a few of these repeats proved to be crossposts by the same person, projects moved to new sites, or similar. but the fact that that wasn't clear is part of the problem! i remember being young and new to the community and seeing these definitions everywhere. it gave the illusion that this was a big thing, on par with mental and phantom shifting.

one of the last sources i found was this therian guide thread, "Trying to define Therianthropy can be bad". in a post, bearx says this:

Take "bilocation shifts" for instance... I've never had a lucid conversation with anyone who experiences them. Nor, any proof that they happen. In my mind, they're as much an impossibility as physical shifting. Appearing in another location as your animal form? I'm skeptical. The only reason this made it into the AHWW FAQ back in the day is one guy said he experienced them.

and, yeah, that pretty much capped off my search. because i think he's right! kind of. it's like a dominoes thing: if it weren't for that one guy briefly mentioning a supposed experience, jakkal probably wouldn't have included it in his FAQ. if it weren't for jakkal's FAQ being seen as having so much authority, people probably wouldn't have copied it so much. if it weren't for rehosting and repeating the exact same information on your own site with no credit being so weirdly prolific, the term might not have been perceived as being so common.

there are other things that "bilocation" has been used to mean. especially in the post-tumblr world, i saw a good few people using it to describe parallel-life experiences, or visions or senses of being in a different place in one's mind's eye. that seems like a reasonable thing to want to describe — if only it weren't using a term that also described like three other hotly contested ideas! and i never saw this way of using it in any of the glossaries i looked at. the perceived authority of the original definition prevailed in sources that aimed to be authorities themselves.

i have to conclude that most instances of 'bilocation shifting' have not been used to meaningfully describe or discuss a real experience. earnest reports are sparse, contradictory, and ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to arguments about the meaning and validity of the term itself, as applied to multiple things that people may or may not actually experience, that may or may not actually even exist. and yet it remains in most terminology lists because... everyone else was including it in theirs, i guess? it survives almost exclusively in glossary pages, or else in meta-discussion about the term itself, like a zombie. and so, i say, we bury it!

but... i was still having my experience, wasn't i?

alright, let's start from scratch.

part iii: from the horse's mouth

i figured the best thing to do at this point was break from bilocation entirely, and make a new term. i didn't want to adopt a term that has so much ambiguity and controversy surrounding it, and honestly, i came away from my research feeling like it would help if everyone else stopped using it too!

but first, i needed to have a full understanding of the real experience, so we knew what we were even talking about. no room for confusing, competing definitions to take root. no glossary entries talking about supposed phenomenon that sounded more like hearsay than fact. i wanted the testimonies of multiple people. i wanted in depth descriptions. i wanted to be able to tell you what it's like, not just what it means. i wanted to write this essay about an experience, not just a word. this is what it was all for at the end of the day — this is what all terminology should be for.

i had some existing sources, and i had my own experience, but i wasn't satisfied. so i started asking around! i asked in an alterhuman discord i'm in, name of alterhuman coalition, and i asked on the r/alterhuman subreddit. the discord is private, but you can see the reddit thread here. with this, in combination with my own experiences and these other sources, i can semi-confidently say the following things are common to experience:

the body may partially overlap, in which case there are usually some places where a part of the projected body maps to an equivalent part on the physical body. for many people, that was phantom forelegs to physical legs. for a few, it was head to head. one person who experienced their forepaws mapping to their physical hands and their hindpaws mapping to their feet theorized it's because their theriotype was much smaller than a human and wouldn't 'stretch' to completely fill in their physical body. a second person also felt it was size-related for them. i didn't see anyone else describe the same mapping i had. what's up with that?!

the body may be completely separate, in which case it might walk in front of or beside their physical body. one dragon even said their phantom body would fly overhead! after hearing this i experimented with 'sending' my body completely outside of myself, and it worked, but it required some effort. the feeling got more fuzzy and insubstantial the further out i pushed.

multiple people reported other sensory or perceptual experiences as a consequence of this type of shift. a couple mentioned that it was like they could physically feel the ground their phantom body was standing on. one person said it was as if they were seeing from two perspectives at once.

conclusion

so i guess this is the part where i officially 'coin' this, huh? here's a nice one-sentence definition for all your glossaries:

a projection shift is a shift in which a person experiences an entire phantom body partially or completely outside of their physical body.

that's tight, but i also want to provide some further differential definitions:

it's similar to a phantom shift, but distinct because the phantom body is complete and has a looser spatial relationship to your physical body. it's similar to an envisage shift, but distinct because the visualization is outside of you and not in your mind's eye. it's similar to projecting a daemon or other sort of headmate, but distinct because the phantom body is still entirely you.

it should be noted that i'm collapsing the experience of an overlapping phantom body and a projected body into the same category because they feel the same to me and seemed to for other people as well. chimeras wrote about these as two separate things, and i hope that my proposal doesn't diminish their ability to keep talking about their experiences the way that makes sense to them.

also i put 'coin' in quotations because i don't really see it like that. chimeras and i both independently came to the same term for this because it's intuitive, and i think many other people could've arrived at the same conclusion. chimeras were also the first ones to write about this so extensively, and i wouldn't have been moved to do all this without seeing their experiences first, so i really want to shout them out in particular. i implore you to go read their stuff!

this definition is synthesized from not just my own experience, but also theirs, and about another dozen others who volunteered answers when i asked. basically, i'm not uniquely clever or inspired for coming up with this, and i reject any claim of ownership or authority over the idea in general.

the final thing i want to really impress on you is that this post is the beginning of this definition, not the end. please, please, please, write about your experiences with projection shifts! there's so much still to explore. i have a lot of questions still, like:

we can answer these questions together by experimenting and experiencing directly, and discussing that, rather than getting twisted up in definitions and hypotheticals. for the community's wellbeing and your own, try it out! give your inner animal some enrichment and let it run around!