Lucid Dreamers Tried to Become Wolves. Some Say They Grew Fur and Felt Animal Instincts in a Strange New Study – ZME Science

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The study probes how flexible the dreaming body can feel.
In a new study, nearly 100 lucid dreamers were asked to do something more radical than fly or walk through walls. They were told to become wolves.
“I don’t know how wolves feel in real life, but according to my feelings, it’s power and aggression and a complete absence of fear,” one participant said.
Others were asked to shift into the body of the opposite sex.
“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,” one female lucid dreamer said.
The aim, the researchers wrote, was to probe how far the dreaming mind can stretch a person’s sense of embodiment.
Consistent, multiple-times-a-week lucid dreamers represent a small subset of the population, as few as 1% according to some estimates. These new findings suggest lucid dreamers can alter not only how their dream bodies look, but how they feel, move and even behave.
But the study relied on self-reports from volunteers. The authors also note that the work did not receive institutional ethics approval because it was conducted by an independent research company.
So, bearing all of that in mind, here’s how it feels to morph into a wolf in dreamland.
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Lucid dreams occur when people realize they are dreaming while still asleep. Researchers have studied them for decades, often focusing on the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep phase, the sleep stage most closely associated with vivid dreams.
In this experiment, the researchers recruited volunteers through Project Elijah, a lucid dreaming research website. Ninety-eight participants completed the “wolf transformation” task, and 99 took part in a second task involving opposite-sex embodiment.
According to the instructions, once lucid, participants in the wolf task had to run on all fours, imagine fur covering the body, and attend to the details of a wolf body: paws, head, ears, mouth, tongue, smell and sight.
Thirty-two of the 98 participants reported successful wolf transformation. The researchers said 85 percent reported at least partial bodily change, though only one person described a full transformation across all target features.
“I felt aggression. I felt an ‘animal’ mood for a while; that was something wild and unpleasant,” one participant said.
“There was an internal uncontrollable desire to rush at someone and tear him to pieces,” said another.
The most striking accounts perhaps involved the accompanying sensation. Some participants reported sharper hearing, altered vision, and, in a few cases, smell — a sense that usually manifests far less often in dreams than sight or sound.
“I ran on all fours and felt the mood — wild, animalistic, aggressive,” one participant from the wolf lucid dreaming task said.
While all of this may sound a bit too wild to believe, the brain can simulate bodily sensations with surprising force. People with amputated limbs, for instance, can experience phantom limbs (the sensation that the missing limb is still there spatially in place and functioning) both in dreams and waking life.
The second part of the study asked participants to change into a body of the opposite sex. Seventy-nine of 99 reported some form of success, either physical, emotional or both. Thirty-seven reported genital transformation.
“I saw that my hands had become really masculine and very hairy (I went too far). The muscles were huge, and my legs were big,” one participant said.
Some participants later called the task awkward, foolish or difficult. Others described partial transformations, with bodies that stopped somewhere between categories. The authors suggested that social conditioning may have made this task particularly more challenging than morphing into a dream animal, though the study could not test that claim directly.
Another male participant described seeing a changed body in a mirror, touching breasts and then genitals, but experiencing the transformation as incomplete.
“Firstly, I felt a change in my gait (hips swaying), and I felt heels (however, I walked confidently). I felt the elasticity of my hips in a tight dress,” said one participant.
What’s important to note is that all of these reports of dream experience were self-reported. On the other hand, although “sleep science” has advanced in recent years, there is no brain scan technology that can independently verify the contents of a person’s dream.
Such a technology might not ever even be possible (which is reassuring). The bottom line is that you have to take the participants’ word for it. It’s impossible to verify their claims objectively. So, while the findings are extremely intriguing, take them with a grain of salt.
With this caveat out of the way, if at least some of these experiences are genuine, these findings suggest that lucid dreams may offer a rare opportunity to study how the brain constructs the feeling of “me” inside a body. Neuroscientists already know that body ownership can be manipulated in waking life through illusions, virtual reality and phantom sensations. Lucid dreaming may be another, stranger way to study the same machinery from the inside of the deep psyche.
The findings were reported in the International Journal of Dream Research.

Tibi is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines. He has a B.Sc in mechanical engineering and an M.Sc in renewable energy systems.
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© 2007-2025 ZME Science – Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

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