A good example of how to visualize a shift in reality comes from an entertaining little book called "Flatland", written in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott, a London School headmaster. In this make-believe world made up of lines and geometric shapes, perception is limited to two dimensions. When a sphere enters this world, it is first perceived as a line, since none of the inhabitants of Flatland have ever looked up... looking up is not part of their paradigm. The sphere lives in the space of the third dimension; it fills out an area that Flatlanders have never even imagined existed before. Flatland is a kind of parable about mental blindness as well as narrow-mindedness. It works as a kind of psychological study of how mental models create our perceptions. I think it's a good visual way to formulate what might happen when a new paradigm is introduced onto an existing one. "Flatland" has even been the inspiration for popular books on physics like "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku, the preeminent American physicist working on string theory who teaches at City College, NY.