How I Manifested My Apartment in a City Where Waitlists Are 2 Years Long

I Was Living Out of a Suitcase in My Friend’s Living Room

In September of last year, I moved to Amsterdam for a research position at the university. What I didn’t fully grasp until I arrived was the housing crisis. The average waitlist for social housing is somewhere around twelve to fifteen years. Private rentals? You show up to viewings with forty other people, half of them offering six months’ rent upfront. I applied to over seventy apartments in my first three weeks. I got zero callbacks.

My friend Lotte let me crash on her couch, but she had a one-bedroom flat and a cat who deeply resented my presence. By week four, I was spiraling. I started looking at rooms in cities an hour away by train. I cried in a coffee shop one afternoon. Not dramatically, just quiet tears into a flat white while I scrolled through another rejection email.

That was the week I found Neville Goddard.

How I Stumbled Into SATS

I’d heard of manifestation before and honestly thought it was nonsense. Vision boards and positive thinking felt like decorating a sinking ship. But someone in an expat Facebook group posted about how they’d found their apartment using something called SATS (State Akin to Sleep) and the comments were surprisingly detailed and non-crazy. I looked it up. Read a few lectures. Watched some breakdowns on YouTube.

The core idea, as Neville taught it, was simple: as you’re falling asleep, replay a short scene that would imply your desire has already been fulfilled. Not hoping for it. Not visualizing it as a future event. Experiencing it as a present memory.

“An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact.”

– Neville Goddard

I decided I had absolutely nothing to lose. My current strategy of refreshing Funda fifty times a day was producing nothing but cortisol.

The Scene I Chose

I kept it short. Every night as I lay on Lotte’s couch, I imagined myself lying in my own bed. I could feel the weight of a duvet that was mine. I pictured turning my head to see a window with morning light coming through. Not a specific window, just the feeling of my window in my place. I imagined the particular satisfaction of stretching out in a bed I didn’t have to fold up every morning.

The first few nights were frustrating. My mind wandered constantly. I’d start the scene and then immediately think about a viewing I had the next day, or whether I should expand my search radius, or how embarrassing it was to be thirty-one and sleeping on someone’s couch. I’d drag my attention back to the scene. Duvet. Window. Morning light. My bed.

By night four or five, something shifted. I could actually feel the scene. Not just picture it, feel it. The texture of sheets. The specific warmth of waking up in a room that smelled like home. I fell asleep inside the feeling a few times. Those nights, I slept better than I had in weeks.

The Doubt That Nearly Broke Me

Around week two, nothing had changed in the 3D, as people in these communities say. I was still getting rejected. I went to one viewing where a couple offered the landlord a year’s rent in advance, in cash. I walked out of there and sat on a bench and thought, what am I doing? Imagining beds while people are throwing money around?

I almost stopped. I want to be honest about that. The doubt wasn’t a small whisper. It was loud. It said: you’re wasting time on magical thinking when you should be lowering your standards and signing the first overpriced room that’ll take you.

But I kept going. Partly because the SATS practice itself had become comforting. It was the only part of my day that didn’t feel like a fight. And partly because I didn’t have a better option. So every night: duvet, window, morning light, my place.

The Bridge of Incidents

Week three. I was at the university library and ran into a colleague named Peter, who I’d only spoken to once before. We got coffee. He mentioned offhandedly that his neighbor (an elderly woman named Bea) was going to stay with her daughter for a year or so and was nervous about leaving her apartment empty. She didn’t want to list it officially because she’d had bad experiences with tenants. She wanted someone quiet and trustworthy, ideally connected to the university.

I almost didn’t say anything. I remember the moment. I was holding my coffee cup and something in my chest said, speak up. So I said, very casually, “I’ve actually been looking for a place. Do you think she’d consider me?”

Peter said he’d ask. I thanked him and went back to my desk and sat there with my heart pounding. I did not spiral into hope. I just noticed my hands were shaking slightly.

Two days later, Peter introduced me to Bea. She was seventy-eight, sharp as a tack, and she showed me her apartment: a one-bedroom on the second floor of a canal house. Wood floors. Big windows. A kitchen with blue tile. It was more beautiful than anything I’d dared to imagine. The rent she named was below market rate because she said she cared more about the apartment being loved than making maximum profit.

I moved in ten days later. Six weeks after I’d started SATS.

The Morning It Hit Me

My first morning in the apartment, I woke up slowly. The duvet was heavy and warm. I turned my head and saw the window, tall, arched, with pale morning light pouring through. I lay there for a full minute before the recognition hit me like a wave.

This was the scene. Not approximately. The weight of the duvet. The light through the window. The feeling of stretching out in my own bed. I hadn’t manifested an abstract apartment. I had, night after night, fallen asleep in this exact feeling.

I cried. Good tears this time.

“You must make your future dream a present fact. You do this by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled.”

– Neville Goddard

What I Learned

I don’t fully understand how this works. I’m a researcher, I’m trained to be skeptical, and I haven’t turned off that part of my brain. What I can say is that the apartment didn’t come through any channel I was actively pursuing. It came through a conversation I almost didn’t have, with a person I barely knew, about a listing that never went public. The bridge of incidents, as Neville called it, was invisible to me while I was on it.

I also learned that SATS isn’t really about the thing you want. It’s about training yourself to exist in a different emotional state. When I was doing SATS consistently, I stopped refreshing listings obsessively. I was calmer at viewings. I probably seemed like a more appealing tenant in the interactions I did have, though I don’t think that alone explains what happened.

My Practical Tip

If you’re trying SATS for the first time, here’s what I’d suggest: keep the scene absurdly simple. I know the temptation is to build an elaborate movie in your head, the apartment tour, the signing of papers, the congratulations from friends. Don’t. Pick one sensory moment that implies it’s done. For me it was the feeling of waking up in my own bed. That’s it. One feeling, one moment, on repeat. The simpler the scene, the easier it is to actually feel it rather than just watch it like a movie. And the feeling is the whole point.