Lucid dreamers can rewire their minds to experience life as an animal

During a lucid dream, a state where a person realizes they are asleep, individuals can intentionally alter their perceived physical form to experience life as an animal or another gender. Researchers recently explored how deeply the mind can simulate these alternative identities by asking volunteers to transform into wolves and opposite-sex versions of themselves while dreaming. The experiments, published in the International Journal of Dream Research, suggest that the subconscious mind is highly adaptable and capable of generating entirely new physical sensations and emotional states.

Lucid dreaming occurs when someone becomes aware that they are dreaming but remains physically asleep. This phenomenon typically happens during the rapid eye movement phase of the sleep cycle. By maintaining conscious awareness, the dreamer can frequently control their actions, alter their surroundings, or change their own body.

Modern culture frequently treats dreams as random neurobiological noise. Historically, however, indigenous cultures placed great importance on the dreaming state. In Mesoamerican traditions, shamans practiced a specific form of dreaming that involved transforming into an animal spirit guide. Anthropologists refer to this concept as nahualism. These ancient practitioners believed that adopting an animal form allowed them to access hidden knowledge and connect with nature, blurring the boundaries between waking reality and the dream world.

Elena Drøm, a researcher at the California-based company REMspace, led a team to investigate the limits of this practice in a contemporary setting. Drøm and her colleagues wanted to know just how far modern practitioners could push their mental boundaries. They designed an experiment to test whether average people could consciously alter their deeply ingrained sense of self while dreaming. They specifically focused on physical transformations into non-human forms and different human genders.

Drøm and her team recruited nearly one hundred volunteers for the first part of their investigation. The participants received instructions to enter a lucid dream using established techniques. Once aware they were dreaming, the volunteers were told to drop to all fours and attempt to transform their dream bodies into wolves. The researchers asked the participants to focus on sprouting fur, altering their limbs, and activating animalistic senses.

If a person lost their dream awareness before changing forms, or if they only visualized the change without actually feeling it physically, the researchers recorded the attempt as a failure. A successful transformation required a deep sensory identification with the new body form.

Out of the original group, about a third of the volunteers achieved the wolf transformation. Many participants reported a sensation of their spine curving and their muscles bulking up to accommodate four-legged running. Some volunteers noted that their breathing changed to match an animal panting.

Other participants experienced unusual shifts in their sensory perception. In regular dreams, visual and auditory sensations are common, while smells and tastes are incredibly rare. During the wolf experiment, however, some participants experienced a sudden, intense onset of olfactory perception. The volunteers successfully simulated the tunneling vision of a canine and the amplified ability to distinguish scents in a forest setting.

The emotional and behavioral changes reported by the volunteers surprised the research team. Beyond simply feeling like they occupied an animal body, several participants stated that they adopted a completely wild mindset. Some volunteers described a sudden urge to bite objects or growl at other dream characters. These accounts suggest that altering one’s physical dream form can temporarily override basic human psychological patterns.

For the second phase of the study, the investigators asked a similar number of volunteers to transform their dream bodies into the opposite sex. The participants were instructed to focus on acquiring the corresponding physiological and psychological characteristics of another gender while walking around in their dream environment. As in the first experiment, a successful trial required the individual to experience genuine internal sensations rather than merely imagining a visual change.

Seventy-nine participants reported at least some degree of success in this gender-shifting exercise. Both men and women managed to alter their physical characteristics at roughly equivalent rates. Several male volunteers described the sensation of walking in an altered physical frame, including the feeling of a different center of gravity. Female participants similarly reported changes in their muscular structure and walking strides.

One female volunteer successfully triggered both a physical and psychological shift. She relayed her experience to the researchers, noting, “While walking around the apartment, I began to imagine myself as a man. Almost immediately, my back became wider, my gait became masculine, and I felt more confident inside, as if I was no longer afraid of anything.”

Despite the high rate of partial success, the researchers observed a high level of mental resistance during this specific task. While the wolf transformation felt natural or exciting to many volunteers, the gender shift often provoked internal discomfort. Many participants found it difficult to complete the physical transformation entirely, frequently getting stuck in partial states of change. The research team suspects that strict social conditioning around gender roles creates a mental barrier that is hard to bypass, even in the fluid environment of a lucid dream.

The researchers note that the brain maintains a constant mental map of the physical body, known as a body schema. This mental imagery is what allows amputees to sometimes experience phantom limb sensations while awake or asleep. In the context of a lucid dream, the body schema becomes highly malleable. The experiment demonstrates that dreamers can forcibly update this mental map to include non-human appendages like tails or animal ears.

The study relates to psychological concepts proposed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He suggested that all humans share a collective unconscious mind populated by universal symbols. Jung proposed that every person possesses an innate, subconscious representation of the opposite sex within their own mind. The varying degrees of success in the gender transformation experiment might reflect how comfortably a person connects with this hidden side of their inner identity.

Similarly, the ability to adopt a wild, animalistic mindset may tap into ancient evolutionary traits buried deep in the human brain. The researchers reference theories positing that memories of early evolutionary stages might remain accessible beneath our waking awareness. While this idea remains highly theoretical, the vividness of the volunteers’ experiences provides a fascinating angle for exploring how consciousness develops.

The study includes a few obvious limitations. The exploratory data relies entirely on the subjective reporting of the participants after they woke up. Assessing internal dream experiences objectively remains a huge hurdle in sleep research. Additionally, the participants were individuals who actively sought out a lucid dreaming experiment. This self-selection means they might be more predisposed to these types of intense experiences than the general population.

Going forward, Drøm and her colleagues recommend conducting broader studies on how conscious awareness functions organically. They suggest that lucid dreaming could eventually serve as a therapeutic tool for the wider public. By allowing individuals to confront fears or step outside their everyday physical identities, dream transformations might help people process psychological blocks. Until then, these early experiments outline just how adaptable the human mind can be when the physical rules of waking life no longer apply.

The study, “Dream-body transformation in lucid dreaming: Revealing the plasticity potential of the subconscious “self-image”,” was authored by Elena Drøm, A. Nav Popenko, Michael Raduga, Zh. Zhunusuva, and Andrey Shashkov.