I think people with a more vivid imagination can experience things in their dreams that most people don't. I was always annoyed, as a kid, reading books by "experts" who said people can't experience pain or die in their dreams.
I have always felt real, sometimes excruciating pain in my dreams when such appear. Sometimes the pain is the memory of a similar experience; sometimes it's transferance from pain felt by my sleeping body and manifesting itself in my dreams. But sometimes, it's simply how I imagine such pain would feel.
One of the dreams that spurred me into researching was when I was a young teen. I dreamed I was walking across a train trussel. I was very high off the ground and couldn't get out of the way of an approaching train and I was squashed. My body became a glob of goo under the wheels of the train and when I looked around I realized I was dead. The dream then became black and I woke up.
In another dream, I had my head squashed by a train when I was thrown out of a car and into the path of a derailing train. I heard and felt the bones of my skull snap and woke up with a headache
I've also been stabbed, shot, have drowned, been lost in space, fallen off cliffs onto the ground, bitten by snakes falling out of trees on me etc. I had pain with each of those dreams, but I think the pain I haven't really experienced in life was a muted sort.
Memories of specific pain, though, were just as vivid and powerful as the real thing.
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