Body hopping

Body hopping is the fictional ability and desire to possess people in quick succession. A body hopper can transfer quickly from one physical body to another physical body with little or no resistance and few conditions on moving on to a new body, and usually without getting stuck in said body for a long period of time. Although this idea is very unlikely, scientific studies suggest that this process would result in significant trauma. The motif is closely related to body swap, soul transfer, and the walk-in concept of late twentieth-century New Age and ufological literature, in which an extra-physical being is alleged to inhabit a host body, sometimes in succession.

Origin in fiction

This fictional occurrence can be seen in some media. This popular scheme has been portrayed in a multitude of fantasy films and novels. One of the earliest known examples of body swapping in literature is seen in the 1882 book Vice Versa by Thomas Antsey Guthrie, who wrote under the pseudonym F. Antsey in the 19th century.

Types

Same-sex or same body type — people of the same biological sex and typically the same build swap bodies (e.g. The Change-Up — both white males above the age of 30).
Different sex — people of different biological sexes swap bodies (e.g. It's a Boy Girl Thing — two teenagers, one male and one female, have to live in each other's bodies for a short period).
Child-to-adult / adult-to-child — a child transforms into an adult body, or vice versa (e.g. Big — a 12-year-old boy turns into a 30-year-old man and must live an adult life with a real-life job).
Human to animal — humans turn into animal form (e.g. Sabrina the Teenage Witch — the cat Salem was once a boy who was cursed into living the rest of his life as a cat).

Examples

Alleged extraterrestrial and exopolitical accounts

In exopolitics and ufological literature, "body hopping" overlaps with the related concepts of walk-in souls, alleged soul transfer technologies, and the Reptilian/Archon possession motifs documented in researchers including David Icke and Stewart Swerdlow. According to these accounts — uncorroborated by mainstream science — certain non-human intelligences are said to be able to displace or override the consciousness of a human host either through technological means (purported soul-transfer devices in alleged secret space programs) or through ritual/spiritual mechanisms (possession).

The "20 and Back" program described by alleged secret space program whistleblowers including Corey Goode and Randy Cramer reportedly involves a "consciousness transfer" or memory-blanking step in which a participant's mind is allegedly relocated into a different (often younger or cloned) body for the duration of a multi-decade off-world deployment, with the original body retained in stasis on Earth — a claim that researchers in the field treat as a structurally similar concept to body hopping in fiction, and that mainstream cognitive scientists treat as scientifically unsupported. See 20 and Back and Consciousness transfer for full coverage.

The Cassiopaean and Pleiadian channeling traditions also describe alleged soul exchange and "walk-in" phenomena where a single body is said to be inhabited successively by different souls, sometimes presented as a benevolent transition (the original soul "graduating" and being replaced by a new arrival from a higher-density realm) and sometimes as malevolent displacement.

Reception and analysis

Mainstream cognitive science and neuroscience treat body-hopping and walk-in claims as variants of dissociative identity disorder, confabulation, or culturally shaped narrative identity phenomena rather than literal transfer of consciousness; reviewers including Dean Burnett in The Guardian have argued that even if such transfer were possible the brain–body interface would produce severe dissociative trauma rather than the seamless experience depicted in fiction.

References

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Body hopping", as of 2024-11-06, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.