My son looked up from his cereal bowl last Tuesday and said, very matter-of-factly, “I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality.”
I almost laughed, because he’s four. He was wearing one red sock and one green sock, and he had just asked me why the moon sometimes follows the car but sometimes doesn’t. “Alternate reality” is not a phrase I’ve ever used around him. I asked him where he heard it, and he said he didn’t know. He just felt like things were a little bit different than they should be.
I did not laugh, which I’m glad about, because he wasn’t joking. He was very serious, stirring his Cheerios slowly, looking past me at the window. I asked what that was like. He said, “It’s like when you’re in a dream, but you know you’re not sleeping. The colors are the same, but they’re not.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. Part of me thought he was just being imaginative, which he is. He has an older sister and a tablet and a loose grip on the line between pretend and real. He regularly tells me he has a pet dragon in his closet. But this felt different. There was no playfulness. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything. He was just reporting a feeling.
I said, “That sounds kind of interesting, and kind of strange.” He nodded and went back to his cereal. I let it drop.
But I thought about it all day. I thought about all the ways a four-year-old gets told that the world works a certain way, and then sees it not working that way. Maybe he had woken up from a nap too early. Maybe he’d had a dream that mixed with the afternoon. Maybe he’d seen a shadow move in a way that didn’t make sense. Or maybe he was just trying on a big, grown-up phrase to describe a small, wobbly feeling.
The more I sat with it, the more I realized the feeling he described wasn’t abnormal. It’s actually pretty common for kids around that age to go through phases where the world feels less solid. Their brains are doing a lot at once. They’re learning the difference between appearance and reality—that a sponge can look like a rock, that a stranger can look kind but not be kind. They’re also developing a theory of mind, starting to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings different from their own. That’s a lot. And when you’re four, you don’t always have the words to say, “I feel confused” or “Things feel weird.” Sometimes you just say you feel like you’re in an alternate reality.
What helped me was remembering that he wasn’t asking me to fix it. He was just telling me something true about his inner experience. The worst thing I could have done was brush it off or tell him he didn’t really mean that. The second worst thing would have been to overreact and ask a million anxious questions. What he needed was for me to acknowledge it and stay calm.
That evening, at bedtime, I brought it up again. I said I’d been thinking about what he said in the morning. He looked at me blankly, which is also normal—four-year-olds often say things and then let them go, because the feeling has passed. But I wanted to give him a chance to say more if he wanted to. I asked, “Did that alternate reality feeling come back today?”
He said, “No. But sometimes it comes when I’m in the car.”
I asked if there was anything that made it go away. He said, “When I say the names of my stuffed animals.” That made sense to me. Naming things is grounding. It pulls you back into the real world because it connects you to objects you know and trust. I told him that was a good trick. He seemed satisfied.
The next day, nothing. He was back to being a normal kid who demanded the red cup and not the blue cup, and who cried because his sister breathed too loud. I almost forgot about the whole thing. But then, a week later, at the grocery store, he stopped in the middle of the produce aisle and said, “This place feels like a fake place.”
I’m not going to lie—that one was a little harder to hear. The fluorescent lights were humming, and he was staring at the stack of watermelons like it was a glitching video game. I asked him what made it feel fake. “The lights are too bright,” he said. “And there’s no windows.”
That was so concrete I could work with it. He wasn’t describing a deep existential crisis. He was describing sensory overload. The grocery store is bright, loud, echo-y, and full of stuff that doesn’t make sense to a small person. It’s easy to imagine that feeling like an alternate reality.
So I did a simple thing. I knelt down and said, “Okay, let’s find five things that are real. I’ll go first: those apples are real.” He looked at the apples. Then he said a banana was real. Then a box of cereal. Then his own shoe. By the time we got to five, he was fine. He even added a sixth: “The cart is real, because it’s heavy.”
That little game became something we use when he gets that faraway look. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s just a way of bringing his attention back to his body and his immediate surroundings. Naming things, touching things, noticing textures and temperatures—these are all small but concrete ways to help a child who is momentarily overwhelmed by an internal feeling they can’t name.
I also started paying attention to what was happening right before these comments. It’s almost always around transitions: after waking up, getting out of the car, walking into a big store, or right before bed. The more I noticed, the less alarming it felt. It wasn’t a sign that he was losing his grip on reality. It was a sign that his brain was working hard to process a world that doesn’t always look the way he expects it to.
If your child says something similar, I’d say this: don’t jump straight to “that’s impossible” or “no you don’t.” Take them seriously. Ask what they mean, but don’t ask too many questions. Sometimes kids say things and just want them to be heard. Then give them something to ground themselves with. It doesn’t have to be a game; it can just be a familiar routine. A snack, a blanket, a walk around the block. The point is to reassure their body that the world is still here and still safe.
We’re still figuring it out. I don’t think this is a phase that has a clear ending. It might come and go for years. He may be the kind of kid who feels things a little more intensely than others, or who has a naturally dreamy temperament. He also might just be four, and four is strange. The line between pretend and real is thin, and sometimes it wavers.
Last night, he told me he wanted to be a “reality scientist” when he grows up. I asked what a reality scientist does. He said, “They check that the world is actually there.” That’s not a bad way to live, actually. I told him he could start by checking if the living room was still there, and he ran in and yelled, “It is!” and that was the end of it.
I’m still not sure what he meant that morning at the cereal bowl. But I don’t need to be. The feeling passed, and he knew it passed, and it was real enough to him while it was happening. My job isn’t to explain his reality away. It’s to let him know he doesn’t have to walk through it alone.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My son looked up from his cereal bowl last Tuesday and said, very matter-of-factly, “I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality