A drug-free trance can blur the line between self and surroundings

Practitioners of a drug-free trance technique describe it as profoundly changing how they experience their own minds and bodies, according to a small new study. When recalling a deep trance, participants reported fewer self-focused thoughts, blurred body boundaries, and a strong sense of oneness, along with more inner peace than during an ordinary meal. The findings were published in Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Psychologists generally divide our sense of self into two main components. The “narrative self” is the internal storyteller, consisting of the thoughts we have about our past, our future, and our personality traits. The “minimal self” is the immediate, wordless physical sensation of being anchored in a body and being the one who controls its movements.

Theorists have proposed that loosening our grip on a rigid, self-centered focus might open the door to lasting happiness. According to a 2011 theoretical paper co-authored by Michael Dambrun, one of the new study’s authors, moving beyond an everyday self-centered mindset paves the way for deeper emotional stability and peace of mind.

Later experiments provided evidence for this idea. For example, a 2016 study by Dambrun found that people who felt their physical boundaries dissolving during a body scan meditation reported greater happiness. A 2021 investigation mapped out how deep meditative states systematically break down specific parts of self-experience, such as where people feel physically located and whether they feel in control of their actions.

The new study extends this line of research to a practice called auto-induced cognitive trance. This is a learnable, drug-free state of awareness characterized by deep sensory immersion, spontaneous body movements, and vivid mental imagery. Practitioners use personal sounds and gestures to enter the trance without external aids. In a study covered by PsyPost in 2026, brain scans of a single practitioner showed her activity shifting toward an internal focus as she voluntarily entered a similar drug-free trance.

“For about a decade, our research has focused on the link between states of ‘self-transcendence’ (moments when the feeling of being a separate, self-centered individual fades) and the emergence of positive emotions and well-being,” said lead researcher Pierre De Oliveira of the Psy-DREPI laboratory at Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon, France.

“So far, this link has mainly been studied in the context of meditation, a practice grounded in stillness and the attentive observation of one’s own thoughts,” De Oliveira told PsyPost. “We first wanted to know whether a very different route, a self-induced trance practice that is dynamic, bodily and expressive, would also alter the experience of self.”

To investigate this, the researchers interviewed 17 practitioners (13 women and four men, with an average age of 49) who had previously undergone specialized training in auto-induced cognitive trance. On average, they had trained about 15 months earlier and practiced several times a week in sessions lasting about 10 minutes.

The participants were asked to vividly recall and describe two distinct moments in a randomized order. One was an ordinary waking state, specifically the last time they had a meal. The other was one of their most intense and memorable episodes of deep cognitive trance.

During the interviews, the participants answered open-ended questions about what they were thinking and feeling, and they also completed quantitative ratings, scoring different aspects of their self-awareness and emotional states on scales from 0 to 100.

The results indicated a large shift in the participants’ narrative self during the trance. Mind wandering dropped dramatically, with thoughts about the future falling from 31.5 percent of the time in the ordinary state down to just 2.7 percent in the trance state. Present-focused thoughts also dropped, from 63.5 to 37.0 percent of the time, with one participant explaining they were fully present in the trance rather than in the room.

Participants also felt much less like the authors of their own thoughts and feelings, with ratings dropping from 67.4 to 12.1. However, the feeling of being an observer of those thoughts did not change significantly. Time perception was also sharply altered: the feeling that time was present in their mind dropped from 64.3 to 7.0, and 11 of the 17 participants could not even estimate how fast time passed during the trance.

The minimal self also underwent profound changes. In their ordinary state, participants generally felt located in their head or upper torso and reported a high sense of bodily control. During the trance, this feeling of motor agency plummeted from 83.8 to 10.4, as movements and vocalizations were described as spontaneous or irresistible.

Dissociation refers to feeling detached from one’s own body, actions, or surroundings, and in clinical settings it can signal psychological distress. “What we found particularly interesting were participants’ accounts of a nonpathological form of dissociation,” De Oliveira explained. “Several participants described a body that moved and made sounds on its own, without any sense of deciding to do so, while a part of themselves watched the scene unfold.”

“They felt both like spectators of the experience and carried along by it, in a kind of willing surrender,” De Oliveira said. “For several of them, however, this surrender remained partial. They described this observing part as a kind of brake on whatever might emerge, one that both limited how deep the trance could go and allowed them to keep some degree of control.”

“Unlike the dissociation seen in clinical settings, this experience is self-induced, and many participants spontaneously mentioned that they could come out of it whenever they wished,” he added.

Additionally, the physical boundaries separating the practitioners from their environment seemed to melt away. The perceived distinctness of their bodily boundaries dropped from 83.8 in the everyday state to 36.5 in the trance state. At the same time, their feelings of oneness with their surroundings rose from 28.4 to 75.9. In contrast, participants’ sense of being their body and of being at the center of the scene did not differ meaningfully between the two conditions, although their sense of self became less tied to one specific point, dropping from 85.7 to 50.4.

These shifts in self-awareness were accompanied by higher well-being ratings. Overall happiness scores rose from 50.5 during the meal to 74.2 during the trance. The difference came mainly from the “inner peace” dimension, which jumped from 44.3 to 74.7; contentment also rose, but that difference was not statistically significant.

The researchers then checked whether the self-related changes tracked happiness during the trance. Only two correlations were statistically significant: participants who felt less at the center of the scene, or whose sense of self was less tied to one specific point, tended to report greater happiness. Weaker, nonsignificant links appeared for softened body boundaries and oneness, and changes to the narrative self, such as reduced mind wandering, showed no reliable association.

The overall pattern, softened body boundaries alongside greater well-being, is in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that immersive virtual exposure to spacious natural environments reduced perceived body boundaries, and that this, in turn, was linked to greater selflessness and positive emotions. In the new study, however, the specific correlation between boundary changes and happiness was not statistically significant, and the 2023 study examined virtual reality nature exposure in students rather than trance states in trained practitioners.

Altered states do not always feel good. The new findings stand in some tension with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that while most people who had experienced non-drug altered states described positive effects, about 13 percent reported moderate or greater suffering afterward. That earlier study surveyed a broad population experiencing varied states, whereas the current study examined a small group of trained practitioners.

“The main misinterpretation to avoid would be to conclude that trance makes people happier or that it is a form of therapy,” De Oliveira cautioned. “Our participants were recalling a past experience, and our study can neither establish cause and effect nor tell us whether any such effects carry over into everyday life.”

“Second, these experiences are not always pleasant and may not suit everyone,” he continued. “Some participants described moments of fear or oppressive sensations, and research on meditation shows that alterations in the sense of self can also be experienced as destabilizing.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on a very small sample of 17 individuals, most of whom were highly educated women, many working in health professions.

“These results should nonetheless be read cautiously,” De Oliveira noted. “This was a pilot study with a small sample, which tends to overestimate the size of effects. In terms of practical significance, our data at this stage describe the intensity of a transient nonordinary state of consciousness, not a lasting benefit.”

Another limitation relates to the study’s reliance on retrospective recall. Asking participants to remember past events can sometimes introduce memory distortions, especially when describing emotionally intense or hard-to-explain experiences. Participants also chose one of their most intense and memorable trance experiences, which was compared against an ordinary meal, a contrast that could magnify the differences between conditions. Recalling a meal might also have drawn participants’ attention to their bodily sensations, making the everyday state seem more body-centered than usual.

The participants’ common training could also have shaped what they reported. All of them were trained by the TranceScience Research Institute, with which one of the study’s co-authors is affiliated.

“All our participants had been trained by the same institute and likely shared common expectations about what trance would feel like,” De Oliveira said. “These expectations may have shaped their accounts, and our study cannot separate them from the effects of the practice itself. This is why we believe it is important for research to examine more closely the psychological and social processes underlying these practices: practitioners’ expectations and dispositions, the setting in which the practice is taught, and how these experiences are later integrated into everyday life.”

The cross-sectional design of the study means the researchers cannot determine if practicing these trance states leads to permanent trait changes in a person’s baseline well-being. It remains to be seen whether regular engagement with these practices translates to lasting psychological flexibility in everyday life.

“Our long-term question concerns regular practice: can these self-transcendent experiences, repeated session after session, have lasting effects on the sense of self?” De Oliveira said. “Our hypothesis, drawn from research on meditation, is that these transient states could gradually loosen the way people perceive themselves. They would come to experience themselves a little less as a fixed, separate entity and a little more as connected to their surroundings.”

“According to our model, this less self-centered way of functioning would foster a form of inner peace, because people would be less driven by the need to protect the self,” he explained. “But this process is not automatic; it probably depends on how people integrate these experiences and on the story they build around them afterward. The same experience of dissolving boundaries can become a source of openness or, on the contrary, of destabilization, depending in part on the meaning given to it.”

“It is genuinely exciting to be able to study, within a scientific framework, practices that remain largely unexplored,” De Oliveira concluded. “We would also like to thank the participants, who agreed to put into words experiences that are often hard to describe.”

The study, “From the attenuation of self-boundaries to inner peace: how nonordinary states of consciousness modulates self-experience and subjective well-being,” was authored by Pierre De Oliveira, Hélène Meunier, Audrey Breton, and Michael Dambrun.