Shapeshifting has been a facet of nearly every human culture, explored in art and literature through the ages. These human-animal entities can be glorious and divine, or sinister and grotesque. Typically, they exist symbolically—either the transformation or the resulting state is significant in some way. My own experience with shapeshifting was more clinically than artistically rendered, and I am still hazy on the message my experience was meant to convey.