There are moments when the world seems to shift.
I remember standing in the middle of Bonnaroo, surrounded by tens of thousands of strangers, an artist I loved providing the soundtrack to the moment. Lights flashed across the crowd and confetti fell from the sky. I don’t remember exactly what song was playing, or even when it happened, but somewhere in the middle of it, something changed.
I felt myself expanding to include the people around me, the artist, and the stage itself. It felt as though the stage reached out and physically wrapped me in a hug. For a moment, I was no longer just me – I was everything and everyone around me. Time seemed to stand still as I was engulfed in this overwhelming sense of oneness. Something in me shifted as I understood that this was what reality was supposed to feel like.
I’ve encountered that feeling again in completely different moments – the first time I held my son in my arms, while standing wrapped around my best friends at a festival, even in quieter moments of solitude during meditation. Some are vast, some almost impossibly small, but each has carried that same sense of recognition that this is real.
What does it mean for a moment to feel more real than reality itself?
Most of the time, we experience reality within familiar boundaries. We move through time from past to present to future, remembering what has already happened while anticipating what might come next. We experience ourselves as separate individuals, occupying one body, one perspective, and one place in the world. Our awareness moves constantly between the world around us and the thoughts, memories, plans, and emotions moving within us.
But sometimes we encounter moments that seem to stretch beyond those boundaries. Time can slow down, speed up, or disappear entirely. The separation between ourselves and the world around us can feel less distinct. Our usual stream of thought grows quiet, and for a moment, we become completely immersed in the experience unfolding around us.
There is something profound about stretching beyond the familiar boundaries of ordinary experience. These moments can feel unusually immediate, meaningful, and complete, as though there is less distance between ourselves and the moment we are living. Somehow, they can feel more real than ordinary reality.
What is it about certain moments that makes them feel so profoundly real? Why do some stay with us long after they end, shifting the way we understand ourselves, our relationships, or the world around us?
There are different ways of understanding what happens to us in moments like these. From the perspective of consciousness research, some can be understood as shifts away from our ordinary state of awareness. Our everyday waking experience is often described as an ordinary state of consciousness. Yet consciousness encompasses a much wider realm of experience, in which perception, awareness, emotion, sense of self, and even our experience of time and space can shift in profound ways. These shifts can give rise to experiences described as altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness.
I find myself drawn to another word: expansive. Not every altered or non-ordinary state necessarily feels expansive, but for the experiences I’m interested in here, the word captures something that the others don’t. These moments can feel like an opening – a portal into something beyond the familiar boundaries of ordinary awareness, where our experience of ourselves and the world begins to expand.
Expansive states of consciousness can emerge through many different pathways. For example, psychedelics can profoundly alter perception and awareness, but shifts in consciousness can also arise through meditation, breathwork, sensory deprivation, prayer, chanting, rhythmic drumming, dancing, music, and movement. Some are intentionally cultivated, while others find us unexpectedly.
The human impulse to shift consciousness stretches across cultures and throughout history. People have long used ritual, contemplative practice, psychoactive substances, and other methods in pursuit of healing, transformation, connection, and experiences of the divine.
But the moments I’m interested in aren’t limited to experiences we deliberately seek or states we intentionally induce. Sometimes they arrive without warning, in circumstances that look entirely ordinary from the outside. A piece of music. The birth of a child. A moment of deep connection with another person. Standing beneath a night sky and suddenly feeling impossibly small and infinitely connected at the same time.
However we arrive there, these moments can open us to something beyond our ordinary experience of ourselves and the world.
The circumstances surrounding these moments can be entirely different. I’ve experienced them surrounded by thousands of people and completely alone, with deafening music and in silence, in the overwhelming magnitude of holding my son for the first time and while simply sitting outside, watching the trees dance in the breeze.
Across all of these experiences, the common thread isn’t necessarily what’s happening around me, but what seems to happen within me. The details change, but the feeling remains familiar. The noise in my mind quiets. Time stands still. I feel intensely present and deeply alive. The boundaries I ordinarily experience between myself, other people, and the world around me seem to dissolve, leaving behind a deep sense of connection.
I become acutely aware of my humanness, yet at the same time feel myself stretching beyond it. I feel connected to my own Self, to this vessel that my soul resides in, to the emotions moving through me, to those I love, and beyond them, to something vast and universal. In these moments, I am not escaping who I am, but rather expanding into the fullness of what I already am. It is as though I can feel my soul expand and touch the surface of something much deeper.
Alongside this feeling of expansion, I often experience a deeper kind of knowing – a sense that I am encountering something I already understand, even if I cannot explain how I know it.
William James described this characteristic of mystical experiences as their noetic quality – the sense that they carry insight or knowledge that reaches beyond ordinary intellectual understanding. This idea has always resonated with me because these moments do not feel like conclusions I have reached by thinking my way toward them. For a moment, I feel as though I can experience these truths directly.
For me, that knowing feels more like remembering. The insights they bring rarely feel entirely new, but more like truths I have always known somewhere beneath the surface but have somehow forgotten in the noise of everyday life.
One of the most powerful things I remember in these moments is connection. The separation between myself and the world around me no longer feels quite so distinct. I don’t feel as though I am learning that I am connected to the world around me; I feel as though I am remembering that I always have been.
The sense of remembering is part of what makes these moments feel so deeply real to me. For a moment, the noise of everyday life quiets, along with the automatic patterns, anxieties, expectations, and identities that so often shape the way I experience myself and the world. Even the boundaries that ordinarily feel so fundamental to my experience can become less absolute. Beneath all of that, I feel closer to my own true Self and more aware that I am part of something much greater than myself. I feel expansive, limitless, and deeply connected to the world around me.
In this way, these experiences have shaped the way I understand human potential. Our ordinary experience may only reveal part of who we are. In these moments, I experience myself as both deeply human and somehow more expansive than the limitations that usually define my experience of being human. They remind me that we may carry far more possibility within us than we realize – that we may be far less limited than we have learned to believe.
What else might exist within us that we have yet to access? What becomes possible when we loosen our attachment to the identities and patterns that tell us who we are supposed to be, and begin to question the limitations that ordinarily define our experience?
The challenge comes when the moment ends.
I fall victim to this often. After experiencing something that makes me feel so alive, connected, and completely present, I want to find my way back to it. I begin looking forward to the next festival, the next experience, the next moment when everything might open up again.
The problem, at least for me, comes when I begin living in anticipation of them. When these moments become isolated points on the horizon that I am constantly moving toward, everything in between can begin to feel like a waiting room for the moments when I feel most alive.
I have noticed how easily anticipation can turn into anxiety or expectation. I can build an experience up in my mind, imagining how it will feel or hoping to recreate something I have experienced before. Then, when the moment finally arrives, I am so aware of what I want it to be that I am no longer fully present for what it actually is. Even when another beautiful moment comes, it doesn’t always fill me in the same way.
The experiences that have taught me the most about presence can become the very experiences that pull me out of the present when I spend my everyday life waiting for them to return.
Recognizing this doesn’t make me want to stop seeking these moments. I still want the festivals, the music, the awe, the experiences that shake me out of myself and remind me how deeply I love being alive. The lesson, for me, is learning not to make those moments responsible for giving my life meaning.
The question becomes how to bring something from those moments back with us.
The feeling itself may be fleeting, but through integration, what the experience reveals does not have to disappear when the moment ends. We can carry the insights from these experiences into our everyday lives, allowing what we felt, saw, or understood within them to shape the way we live afterward.
Of course, integration isn’t always easy. There is a difference between experiencing connection in a moment when the boundaries of Self seem to dissolve and remembering that connection while moving through the routines, anxieties, and responsibilities of everyday life. It is one thing to feel completely present while standing beneath a sky full of confetti or holding someone you love; it is another to find moments of that presence while making breakfast or answering emails.
This is where the possibility for transformation begins: not in recreating the intensity of the original experience, but in allowing what it showed us to become part of how we live. If a moment reminds me how deeply connected I am to the people around me, I can choose to carry more of that connection into my relationships. If it reminds me how incredible it feels to be completely alive and present, I can pay closer attention to the ordinary moments I might otherwise move through on autopilot. If I experience myself beyond the identities and expectations that ordinarily shape who I believe myself to be, I can begin to question how completely I allow them to define me.
Even when the feeling fades, the memory remains. I may not be able to hold onto the expansiveness of these moments forever, but I can remember what they allowed me to see. As I continue to encounter these experiences and integrate what I learn from them, I can see the subtle ways they begin to unfold in my everyday life too.
Living in alignment with my soul isn’t about trying to remain in an expanded state. It means allowing these moments to remind me of what I can so easily forget in ordinary life – the connection I feel, the presence I experience, the deeper sense of Self I encounter – and carrying those rememberings into the life I already have.
These moments aren’t about escaping reality, but rather expanding it.
They allow us to step outside the automatic patterns of everyday awareness and glimpse something more true, more whole. For a moment, we experience what life can feel like when our usual ways of understanding ourselves and the world loosen their hold, allowing us to simply be in it.
These moments may look different for everyone. Some arrive with overwhelming magnitude, while others are so quiet we could almost miss them. They may find us through music, love, loss, meditation, awe, or in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. What makes them meaningful isn’t necessarily how extraordinary they appear from the outside, but the way they shift something within us.
I used to think the moments that felt more real than reality were meaningful because, for a brief period of time, I had somehow stepped outside of ordinary life. I am beginning to see them instead as moments when I was more fully present within life itself.
The feeling will eventually fade. Time begins moving again. The music ends, the confetti settles, we put our feet back on the ground and return to the lives we were already living. Yet something from the experience can remain – a memory, an insight, a sense of connection, a remembering of what it felt like to be completely alive.
I am learning not to spend my life searching for the next moment that feels more real than reality, but to allow the ones I have experienced to teach me how to become more present within the reality I am already living.
A Thread to Follow…
Can you remember a moment that somehow felt more real than reality? What made it different? What, if anything, stayed with you after the moment passed?
If a moment came to mind while reading, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to share your own thread below.
Until next time ✨
Threads of Consciousness 
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