“It starts in the back of my neck,” Javier Palejko told me over Skype. “It’s like I have a muscle there and I just make it work.”

The “it” in this case was goose bumps, which Palejko, a 34-year-old tech worker in Argentina, says he can control at will. Like most unexceptional people—by which I mean, people whose goose bumps only appear when we’re cold or feeling intense emotions—I could not even begin to imagine how to control goose bumps. I inquired, could he do it, like, right now?

“Let’s try,” he said, angling the webcam toward his forearm. “Do you see it?” And sure enough, within two seconds, the hair follicles on his arm had become bumps, visible even on a grainy Skype video. “I thought everyone can do that,” Palejko said.

Everyone cannot do it. But Palejko is not alone, either. He is among dozens of people that James Heathers, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, identified during and after a recent study on the phenomenon. Heathers posted a preprint—which has not yet been peer reviewed—describing 32 people who can control their goose bumps, and he’s been contacted by several others since. Many of them, like Palejko, had thought this ability was perfectly ordinary for most of their lives. Palejko told me his brother can do it, too.

But this is not how the human nervous system usually works. Scientists think goose bumps are a reflex left over from our hairy ancestors, whose fur would fluff up for warmth or for scaring off enemies. On relatively hairless humans, goose bumps appear when tiny muscles pull on the hair follicle. Those muscles are controlled by the autonomic nervous system, which also manages other involuntarily actions like heartbeats, pupil dilation, and wave-like contractions in the digestive system called peristalsis. Inducing goose bumps at will, says Heathers, is “like saying you can suddenly change peristalsis action or stop your heart.”

Heathers—who, like most people, can’t control goose bumps—first became intrigued by the phenomenon by reading old case studies. “I have a particular fondness for old journals and forgotten, abandoned articles,” he says. It was in one of these old dives into old journals that he came across a 1938 case study in which scientists observed a middle-aged man controlling goose bumps. He kept digging. Another case study popped up, this time about a 27-year-old student from 1902. “He can produce the condition of ‘goose-flesh’ at will in from two to 10 seconds from the instant of volition,” wrote the physiologist who examined him, “and can cause it to disappear in a like time.” In a more recent article from 2010, Austrian and German scientists actually filmed a 35-year-old man who could control his goose bumps.

If this was real, Heathers wondered, could there be more people out there?

He began to search on Google—following the maxim that if something is real, then it must be documented online. Indeed, he came across forums discussing the phenomenon and videos deep in the long tail of YouTube. He devised a survey to advertise on forums and psychology Facebook groups, and his team eventually heard from 32 people who claimed to have voluntary control of their goose bump. The survey was long and complicated, Heathers says, so he didn’t think people would take it just to mess with him.

The survey revealed that not all goose-bump powers are created equal. Some people said they needed to actually induce an emotional reaction. One participant, Heathers noted, said he actually needed to think about his girlfriend getting murdered to give himself goose bumps.

For others, getting goose bumps requires concentration but no particular emotional reaction. “I always have to close my eyes. I try to do it without closing my eyes and I can’t,” said Eliza Bacon, a biologist in Southern California who contacted Heathers after reading a short article about his research. She experiences it as a tingling sensation that begins at the back of her head and spreads through her scalp and body.

For people like Palejko, inducing goose bumps is no more difficult than moving an arm. He did note one difference, though: It takes time for his goose bumps to recharge. “I can do it again,” he said after showing me his goose bumps over Skype, “but it’s just like losing power and I have to wait around 10 minutes.”

Brenna Mickal, a college student in Louisiana, told me something similar. “If I do it twice in a row, I have to concentrate more the second time,” she said. And if she tries and fails, it actually feels uncomfortable—like having to sneeze but being unable to.

None of the people I spoke to associated controlling goose bumps with especially negative feelings. It was even positive in some cases. Mickal says she feels a warmth spread through her body and uses it to warm herself up when cold. Bacon says she uses it to alleviate headaches.

“It’s a fascinating story,” says Timo Siepmann, a clinical neurologist at Dresden International University who has studied inducing goose bumps in people with a small electric shock. It reminded him of epileptic patients, who have abnormal brain activity in the cerebral cortex that sometimes results in involuntary goose bumps. Perhaps people who can control their goose bumps are able to activate certain regions of the cerebral cortex. But, he cautioned, “at this stage, I have no idea.”

Christian Kaernbach, a psychologist at the University of Kiel and an author of the 2010 case study, told me his lab had actually advertised in local papers afterward and found about 10 more people who could control their goose bumps in a lab. He never wrote up those results because the Ph.D. student leading the study left to pursue a career in comedy instead. And as a psychologist, Kaernbach was more interested in studying emotional triggers of involuntary goose bumps, anyway.

Heathers has not yet studied any his subjects in a lab yet. “I have never seen it with my own two eyes,” he admitted. But his approach—advertising on Facebook groups and then publishing the preprint online rather than waiting to publish in a paywalled journal—has created the beginnings of an online community around voluntary goose bump control.

A few years ago, ASMR videos featuring people whispering and rustling pieces of paper shot up YouTube’s most popular list. ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response”—a term coined not by scientists but by an ASMR Facebook group—and it describes the pleasurable tingling sensation some people feel watching these videos. Psychologists, playing catch up to YouTube, have since begun to study ASMR.

Bacon told me that as a kid watching “Sailor Moon,” she had thought of the tingling sensation she felt with goose bumps to be like exerting energy on the outside world. “It’s like those were my powers,” she said. I asked if she boasted about it to other kids. “I don’t think I said anything,” she replied. “I was at least intelligent enough to know that was weird, and other people would think that was weird.” She paused to consider how we were talking about it now. “God bless the internet.”

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads.

It started with a meeting with a new Verge intern and ended with plans to destroy a mysterious device that swaps matter between dimensions. Just your typical Saturday.

On Friday, The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton messaged me, letting me know that a woman named Paige Keane was going to be joining our tech team over the summer and was interested in talking about experiential entertainment here at SXSW. It’s an area I’ve been covering for the last two years, which has taken me through wild horror experiences and immersive alternate reality games where I became wrapped up in a ‘70s-style paranoid thriller. It turned out Paige was friendly with a producer from Meow Wolf, the immersive art collective from Santa Fe, New Mexico, that was working with Deep Dive Austin on my SimuLife experience. Given that I was meeting with that same producer on Saturday, Paige suggested we grab coffee beforehand, then asked if she could come along to the sit-down.

The truth is, covering festivals like SXSW can be intense, and I wasn’t in love with the idea of bringing an intern into what I thought was going to be the beginning of my immersive story experience.

Turns out, I really didn’t need to worry. The story itself had already begun.

Photo: Interactive Deep Dive

The moment I sat down for our coffee appointment Saturday morning, two men in suits rushed me. I’d never seen them before, but they clearly recognized me. They excitedly called me “the mind behind the mind” and said I’d gotten a raw deal on something that happened in December. I figured this was the immersive show starting, so I played along as they mentioned some big meeting set for Monday. Then a blonde woman in professional attire showed up with an assistant. The two men addressed her as “senator” and leaned down to give me a peck on the cheek. (Apparently she knew me as well.) Then all four of them rushed off. I heard an odd noise — what sounded like a warbling ringtone from a phone — and suddenly Paige Keane, intern-to-be, appeared and introduced herself.

The timing was suspicious. The actors from the show appearing at the exact time Paige and I were set to meet suggested she was in on it. But if she was, that would mean Casey was in on it, too, which seemed unlikely. And it’s generally a bad idea to accuse a potential new Verge employee of being a fictional character, so I erred on the side of caution and didn’t say anything. Paige and I chatted about her interview process — she said she’d spoken with our managing editor, T.C. Sottek, which seemed to establish her bona fides — and then we headed to our meeting.

We were late to arrive, and couldn’t find the producer. Eventually, Paige shouted that she saw her, and ran around the corner to flag her down. I followed, but Paige was gone. Instead, there was an older gentlemen staring at me, a man with kind eyes and a gray mustache. He seemed to know me as well — only he thought I was one of his former students.

Dr. Everett brought me into a classroom on the University of Texas campus for a proper chat. He was surprised I was willing to talk to him at all; we’d had a falling-out, he indicated. Then he asked about the senator. In the process, I learned her name was Faith, and Dr. Everett was convinced she was my wife.

Dr. Everett quickly called me out. The Bryan Bishop he knew wasn’t a journalist, he was a genius who founded a company called OpenMind. (The comment from the two men that morning suddenly clicked into place: they’d meant “You’re the mind behind the Mind.”)

OpenMind had created technology that was able to access and store thoughts in the human brain, leading to advances in big data that yielded tremendous benefits to society. But the man Dr. Everett knew — everyone seemed to refer to him as “Bishop,” whereas my real-world friends and family simply call me Bryan — had also been too single-minded for his own good, experimenting on himself in the early days of OpenMind when he couldn’t get proper regulatory approval. Bishop also saw greater potential in the core OpenMind technology. He worked from the assumption that we live in a multiverse, with an infinite number of possible timelines all coexisting. He thought if he pushed the technology hard enough, he might be able to swap physical matter from one timeline to the other.

And as we talked, Dr. Everett became more and more convinced that his former student had succeeded, and that I was periodically swapping places with Bishop. I’d phase into the OpenMind timeline and take the place of the company’s founder, while he would phase into the Verge timeline and take mine.

I am fully aware that this sounds like the ravings of a madman, but that’s what most characters say when something bizarre or fantastical happen to them, isn’t it?

The doctor and I traded numbers, and then he headed to a class. As I waited for the elevator, I heard another sound: a weird ticking from the water fountain nearby, and my mind started racing.

The thing about immersive stories like this is that they work best when it’s not clear what’s real, what’s fiction, and what’s some user-generated combination of the two. The trick to these pieces is that the players are investing emotionally as themselves, which brings a level of immediacy to the storytelling that isn’t really possible when you’re watching a movie or a TV show. It’s not some spandex-clad superhero or big-screen actor facing these scenarios; it’s actually you, so every emotional beat and plot twist is heightened because it’s unavoidably personal.

The dark side of not being able to tell reality from fiction, however, is that you start seeing connections everywhere, like a conspiracy theorist with too much time and red string on your hands. Was the fountain ticking a sound effect? A trick of the plumbing? Or was I just starting to lose it? Thankfully, the elevator doors opened, and soon enough, I was outside.

Paige was there, and she was not pleased.

While I was hanging out in the OpenMind timeline, apparently Bishop ran into Paige and the producer and gave them both nasty looks before running off. Which meant Paige was clearly part of the story, and I definitely couldn’t trust my Verge colleagues. Now that I’d learned about the multiverse theory, should I share it? If I did share it, how would I not sound like a lunatic?

It was a Jenga stack of conflicting emotions and impulses. There are multiple ways to approach an immersive story like this. You can try to game it, figuring out what you think the storytellers are going for, and playing along for what you hope might be the coolest possible outcome. And you can always try to keep it safely at arm's length, in the hopes that you’ll never get fooled, played, or betrayed by someone who ends up being a character. But what I’ve found to be the most rewarding approach is to truly fall into the story emotionally, without reservation. Michael Douglas’ world was upended in The Game because he believed everything was real, after all, not because he was trying to work the system. And here I was, being challenged emotionally both within and outside the game — and finally, I let those Jenga blocks tumble to the ground.

There was no point in trying to be self-aware. There was nothing to be gained by trying to strategize a next “move.” The best and only option was to succumb to the story, utterly and honestly. I told Paige everything that had happened. I still felt like a lunatic. But at least she believed me (or pretended to).

We eventually parted company, after scheduling another coffee chat for Sunday. But Paige also told me that the producer we never found wanted to do a photo shoot in my hotel room that night. Meow Wolf is famous for its colorful, eccentric installations, and she said they wanted to give my room the same treatment and that I should stay out of my room from 7 to 8PM.

Wait until 8PM. Sure, no problem. What could possibly go wrong?

Join us for the next installment of The SimuLife Diaries, where I find myself on a romantic night out with Bishop’s wife, the senator.