During lucid dreaming, a state in which one is aware that one is asleep, one can intentionally change one’s perceived physical form to experience life as an animal or another gender. Researchers recently investigated how deeply the mind can simulate these alternative identities by asking volunteers to transform into wolves or opposite-sex versions of themselves while dreaming. The experiment published in The International Journal of Dream Research suggests that the subconscious mind is highly adaptable and can create entirely new physical sensations and emotional states.
Lucid dreaming occurs when a person is aware that they are dreaming but remains physically asleep. This phenomenon usually occurs during the rapid eye movement phase of the sleep cycle. By remaining conscious, the dreamer is often able to control his actions, change his environment, and change his body.
Modern culture often treats dreams as random neurobiological noise. Historically, however, indigenous cultures placed great importance on the dreaming state. In Mesoamerican tradition, shamans practiced certain forms of dreaming that involved transforming into animal spirit guides. Anthropologists call this concept Nafualism. These ancient practitioners believed that by adopting animal forms they could access hidden knowledge and connect with nature, blurring the boundaries between waking reality and the dream world.
Elena Drome, a researcher at the California-based company REMspace, led a team that investigated the limits of this practice in modern environments. Dromme and her colleagues wanted to see how far modern practitioners could push the mental limits. They designed an experiment to test whether average people could consciously change their deeply ingrained sense of self while dreaming. They particularly focused on the physical transformation of non-human forms and humans into different genders.
Dromme and her team recruited about 100 volunteers for the first part of the study. Participants were instructed to enter into lucid dreams using established techniques. Once the volunteers realized they were dreaming, they were instructed to get down on all fours and transform their dream bodies into wolves. The researchers asked participants to focus on sprouting fur, changing limbs, and activating animal-like senses.
If a person lost recognition of the dream before changing shape, or if they only visualized the change without actually physically feeling it, researchers recorded the attempt as a failure. Successful transformation required a deep sensory identification with the new body shape.
Of the original group, about one-third of the volunteers achieved the transformation into wolves. Many participants reported the sensation of their spines curving and their muscles becoming larger for running on all four legs. Some volunteers noticed that their breathing changed in time with the animal’s panting sounds.
Other participants experienced unusual changes in sensory perception. In normal dreams, the senses of sight and hearing are common, but smell and taste are very rare. However, during the wolf experiment, some participants experienced a sudden onset of a strong sense of smell. The volunteers were able to simulate a dog’s tunnel vision and enhanced ability to distinguish scents in a forest environment.
The emotional and behavioral changes reported by the volunteers surprised the research team. In addition to simply feeling like they were occupying an animal’s body, several participants said they adopted a completely wild mindset. Some volunteers described sudden urges to chew things or growl at other dream characters. These descriptions suggest that by changing the form of a person’s physical dreams, basic human psychological patterns can be temporarily overridden.
In the second phase of the study, the researchers asked an equal number of volunteers to transform their dream bodies into those of the opposite sex. Participants were instructed to focus on acquiring the corresponding physiological and psychological characteristics of the other gender while walking through the dream environment. As with the first experiment, its success required individuals to experience true internal sensations, rather than simply imagining visual changes.
Seventy-nine participants reported at least some success with this gender reassignment exercise. Men and women were able to change their physical characteristics at roughly equal rates. Several male volunteers described the sensation of walking with altered body structure, including the sensation of a shift in the center of gravity. Female participants similarly reported changes in muscle structure and gait stride length.
One female volunteer was able to induce both physical and psychological changes. She shared her experience with researchers, saying, “While walking around the apartment, I began to imagine that I was a man. Immediately my back became wider, my gait became more masculine, and I felt confident in my heart, as if I was not afraid of anything.”
Despite high partial success rates, researchers observed high levels of mental resistance during this particular task. Although the transformation into a wolf felt natural and exciting to many volunteers, changing gender often caused internal discomfort. Many participants found it difficult to fully complete the physical transformation and often got stuck in a state of partial transformation. The researchers suspect that rigid social conditioning around gender roles creates mental barriers that are difficult to bypass, even in fluid environments like lucid dreaming.
Researchers note that the brain maintains a constant mental map of the physical body, known as the body schema. Because of this mental imagery, amputees may experience phantom limb sensations both when they are awake and when they are asleep. In the context of lucid dreaming, the body schema is highly malleable. This experiment shows that dreamers can force this mental map to update to include non-human appendages such as tails and animal ears.
This research is related to psychological concepts proposed by psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He suggested that all humans share a collective unconscious filled with universal symbols. Jung proposed that every person has an innate, subconscious representation of the opposite sex within their mind. Differences in the degree of success of sex change experiments may reflect how comfortably people connect with hidden aspects of their inner identity.
Similarly, the ability to adopt a wild, animalistic mindset may tap into ancient evolutionary traits buried deep within the human brain. The researchers refer to a theory that postulates that memories of early evolutionary stages may remain accessible beneath our waking consciousness. Although this idea remains highly theoretical, the rawness of the volunteers’ experiences provides an interesting angle to explore how consciousness develops.
This study has some obvious limitations. Exploratory data relies entirely on subjective reports after participants wake up. Objectively assessing internal dream experience remains a major hurdle in sleep research. Additionally, the participants were people who actively explored lucid dreaming experiments. This self-selection means that they may be more prone to this type of intense experience than the general population.
In the future, Drom and his colleagues recommend conducting broader research into how consciousness functions organically. They suggest that lucid dreaming may ultimately serve as a therapeutic tool for a wider range of people. By allowing individuals to face their fears or break out of their everyday physical identity, dream transformation can help people process psychological blocks. In the meantime, these early experiments outline how adaptable the human mind can be when the physical rules of waking life no longer apply.
