Transform the Lucid Dream Body

One of the many wonderful things about the lucid dream body is its ability to shapeshift. Many lucid dreamers have experienced themselves as different animals, plants, or geographical features. It’s quite something to feel your human shape transform into something else, and it can be startlingly realistic on a sensory and kinaesthetic level; as a lucid dream eagle I’ve felt the weighty flap of my wings at take-off and my body balancing on the air currents. In a lucid dream where I transformed into a dolphin, I experienced the powerful surge of my body underwater and the sun glinting on the tops of the waves as I leapt out of the sea.

I’ve lucid dreamed of being a bouncy ball, a point of light, an expanding star, and a floating eye, and I’ve had many entirely bodiless lucid dreams. Once while dreaming I recalled a friend of mine saying, “Freud says everyone has an inner tree.” Wondering what my inner tree looked like, I glanced down at my dream body and saw a vibrantly glowing green tree inside it! I breathed through that tree; it was a fully oxygenated, alive part of my body, inseparable from my cells and my blood. I was the tree and the tree was me. “Wow,” I thought. “Freud was right!”

On rare occasion, we can even find ourselves inhabiting two different dream bodies simultaneously. Once at university, I was working on an essay at my desk and felt so bored of it that I rested my head on my arms and began to fall asleep. After a bit, I forced myself to my feet and lay down on my bed instead, where I instantly fell asleep. But after minutes or hours, a curious feeling stole over me: I had two bodies! One was slumped at my desk, and the other was lying on the bed. I could feel the weight of my head on my arms and the coolness of the floor under my feet. Simultaneously, I could feel the length of the bed beneath my stretched-out body and the pillow under my head.

Had I really made it to my bed earlier, or had that been a dream—was I in fact asleep at my desk? For what seemed like many minutes, I experienced this dual-body awareness. I got flashes of imagery of my room, but from two different perspectives. Was I at my desk or on my bed? Intrigued, I experimented with tipping the balance and managed to become more my body at the desk for a moment, while the body on the bed lost reality slightly. Unable to decide where my physical body actually was, I dragged myself from this pleasant but perplexing state to find out. It was hard to wake myself up, as I was in sleep paralysis, but with a bit of concerted toe wriggling, I woke up to discover that I was … on my bed!

Who or What Am “I” When I Dream?

I’ve experimented with shutting off physical sensations in a lucid dream, moving from sense to sense and willing each to stop functioning so that first my vision went, then my hearing, and so on. Eventually my dream body vanished too, and I was a non-sensory, floating point of consciousness. I did this out of philosophical curiosity when asking myself, what is the dream “I”? Well, whatever the dream “I” may be, it’s definitely not the dream body. Just as in waking life we are more than our physical body, so it is in dreams, only in dreams this is much more easily verifiable.

Instantly I know I am dreaming. Then I realize that I am no longer myself—I am an earthworm crawling across a thick deep-blue carpet… Looking out through earthworm eyes, I feel the fuzzy pile of the carpet tickle my body.

Lucid dreaming can help us to expand our idea of who and what we are. It can dissolve the boundaries set up by rigid belief systems (“I am just a body and a brain; I cannot change; gravity exists as an absolute law even in the dream state; my thoughts have no effect on my reality”). Understanding that we don’t have to adhere to these beliefs is a step on the path to freedom—and a step towards becoming an experienced lucid dreamer.