Thread: Other Senses in Dreams

I can not truly create the taste of salty or sweet while awake, but can stimulate some quasi-taste sensation that is weak. In dreams I often do not have a well developed sense of taste with foods being bland often enough or a little blurry if taste can be blurred. I have no luck with smell in dreams at all. I put very great effort into trying to smell things. Only a few times could I smell something vaguely. In one dream I summoned a skunk and picked him up and made him spray on a wall. I did not smell anything despite trying.

That is interesting. I never gave it much thought until recently if people differed in the capabilities of their senses. I cannot simulate taste or smell at all while awake, but I can taste and smell fine even better than I normally do while dreaming. But you are able to simulate taste while awake, that is pretty awesome. I just know that something vaguely taste good or bad in an abstract sense but I can't recall the taste until I am actually tasting it. Do you normally DILD or WILD?

We have more than five senses, we have plenty actually, like sense of time and temperature. maybe we can have even more in our dreams, who knows?

I've noticed my chromesthesia in a few dreams. Most specifically in a guy I call "The Green-Voiced Man" because the color of his voice is green (an unusual color for a human voice, which is almost always blue or brown).

No senses outside of the ones I have in waking, though.

Originally Posted by Kixerus

Is it possible to obtain sense beyond our five senses while dreaming? I'm asking because I realized that my senses while dreaming are heightened. I've noticed that while awake I can recreate sound and pictures I've seen before, but I can't recreate tastes, smells, or feelings. While dreaming I can experience all five senses. An additional question I'd like to ask is: can anyone taste something while awake by just thinking about it? I cannot.

This is a difficult question to answer because you need to define what you mean by a "sense".

We dream from our own human perspective, and this is inescapable. You might dream that you are a cat or an inanimate object, but your experience of this dream is very much human. You imagine yourself to be something else, and the world to have changed around you to suit this role, e.g everything looks huge because you are now the size of a cat. However, the way you think and feel is very much rooted in the way you process information as a human. You aren't actually experiencing what it is like to be a cat; nobody really knows what that is like (at least not experientially).

For this reason, I don't think you could experience a truly independent new sense, without your brain relating it to an existing sense. Abstract feelings are still explainable feelings. Being able to taste colour in a dream would be a conceptual abstraction of your ability to see and taste, but not in itself a new sense.

In the unlikely case that you were able to dream an entirely new experience, unconnected to previous information, I expect you would be able to explain it or relate it to some existing real world concept, as opposed to being entirely unable to convey what the sense is, which would be true if it were really a new sense (like explaining taste to a man with no taste buds).

It is possible to alter a persons perception of taste and convince them of phantom smells, but generally not at will. Hypnotists and illusionists are able to do this (Derren Brown convincing his TV audience they can smell mint for example) and there have been experiments on how colour, light, and sound affect our perception of flavour, and how restaurants can be designed to take advantage of this.

Conceptor

Thank you for replying to this thread
so that it appears on the front page of Dreamviews.
For me to find just now.

Somewhere else this was discussed. I cant remember where. There are soooo many Dream Facebook pages.

Sometimes I wake from dreamless sleep with a kind of smooth jerk.

And

There is a lot of information coming through ... like ... my filters ....

There is no memory of any dream. No memory of:

Sight or
Sound or
Smell or
Taste or
Touch and no
Thoughts (???)

But there is a ton of information.

My mind "metaphor's" it for me
through my own filters of vision, hearing, thought ...

I wonder if I dream with senses that THIS body does not have (!!!).

So then this body's mind, must find a way to translate the information through the "sense" filters of THIS body.

I think some of this dream infomation may come a place of formlessness.

Then has to be translated into a form or forms
comparable to "Me"

Edit:

Then has to be translated into a form or forms "compatible"
to "Me"

In dreams I can taste and smell but the senses are slightly diminished. When I do taste or smell things strongly it is the things that I don't like such as the taste of fish or vodka, or the smell of cigarette smoke. These are overpoweringly strong in dreams. I don't often eat or drink in dreams so these senses don't often come into play.

I have experienced senses in dreams that I have not experienced in my woken life. I have had 360-degree vision while lucid and it is its own indescribable feeling. I've felt my soul in dreams, felt it inside of the flesh suit of my dream body. A friend and I, a few years back, had a challenge to see who could orgasm in the most non sexual ways when when lucid and all kinds of weird sensations came from that. I won that challenge by the way. It still pops up in my lucid dreams sometimes, more like a reflex than anything, a thougth will come like, "I wonder if I stub my toe enough times if it'll create an orgasm," and I try it while lucid. But I digress.

The only things I can taste memory wise while awake are those same strong flavors i don't like. Just thinking about fish will make the back of my tongue taste fishy. And sometimes thinking about vodka will give me a faint flavor in my mouth and scent in my nose. Wish it could be the same with good smells and flavors.

Originally Posted by Methos

I have experienced senses in dreams that I have not experienced in my woken life. I have had 360-degree vision while lucid and it is its own indescribable feeling. I've felt my soul in dreams, felt it inside of the flesh suit of my dream body. A friend and I, a few years back, had a challenge to see who could orgasm in the most non sexual ways when when lucid and all kinds of weird sensations came from that. I won that challenge by the way. It still pops up in my lucid dreams sometimes, more like a reflex than anything, a thougth will come like, "I wonder if I stub my toe enough times if it'll create an orgasm," and I try it while lucid. But I digress.

I relate this back to my scepticism above.

360-degree vision isn't a new sense, but a different mechanism of vision. I firmly believe what we dream is mind-dependent, so your experience of 360-vision is firmly rooted in how you imagine 360-degree vision to work. After all, you don't really have eyes in your dream, so it isn't as if the 360 vision exists independently of you and you somehow managed to access it. Even to prove your claim is itself difficult, because humans don't see in 360-degree vision, so when you make this claim you can't meaningful distinguish it from what you imagine 360 vision is like, to what it is actually like in creatures with extended vision like the dragonfly.

The closest thing to 360-degree human vision would be to strap on a VR headset connected to a 360 camera and compress the image into our human field-of-view. Even so, we can't be sure it is experientially the same as the dragonfly. It almost definitely wouldn't be, because our brains are wired differently and our sensory organs work in different ways.

You might argue that your dream version of 360-degree vision is an entirely new experience that can't be related to living creatures, but I strongly doubt that. The difference between accidentally having a dream with a new sense, and imagining a new sense in waking life, is very slim. The former just seems more profound because it is experienced in greater vividness. We think about perception in human terms, and it's hard (and maybe impossible) to genuinely imagine a non-human experience, without relating it back to human perception.

Abstract feelings are still just feelings, but I do think you can experience indescribable emotions in dreams, which can spill out into real life after you have woken up. I've sometimes had very unusual dreams and I awake to a very strange feeling that hits me in my chest and stomach; I can best describe it as some strange mix of nostalgia, anxiety, euphoria, and a kind of "selflessness"-- but I don't feel any of those particular sensations in their lone form, as you would if you were naturally anxious or euphoric. I feel it as some weird alternate combination, and the feeling lasts for several hours. However, I don't see this as an alternative sense, because it is still processed through a physical capacity to feel. I am curious as to what is going on in my brain that creates these feelings, though.

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

There is a lot of information coming through ... like ... my filters .... there is no memory of any dream. No memory of:

Sight or
Sound or
Smell or
Taste or
Touch and no
Thoughts (???)

But there is a ton of information.

My mind "metaphor's" it for me through my own filters of vision, hearing, thought ... I wonder if I dream with senses that THIS body does not have (!!!).

So then this body's mind, must find a way to translate the information through the "sense" filters of THIS body. I think some of this dream infomation may come a place of formlessness.

That's a fun idea. The whole "form" thing is very Plato-esque, but you're taking a more spiritual route, suggesting you are experiencing information or forms that originate from some external source, and which you had no prior knowledge of. I don't see that as likely, because I haven't seen a compelling argument that demonstrates dreams go beyond our own minds. Unfortunately, dream experiences can't themselves be used as evidence of that; it's circular.

I would also be concerned about how much of your dream information is being lost in translation. If you are unsure of the sensory experience and thoughts from the dream, then you cannot say with any certainty that the dream ever actually happened. Anything you perceive after the fact is going to be conjecture, and it is possible (if not likely) that any information you "filter" is imagined when awake, and not dreamed. The accuracy of memory in dreams is very fragile, and there is a view that even the dreams we believe we can remember may be padded with inaccurate information that we falsely recall, and extra details that are assumed (e.g you remember dreaming about red pot so you add assumed information that it was shiny and glass, without realising the dream representation had no such detail). Again, this things are hard to prove or disprove, unless we could record the visual contents of a dream.

Just based on your description alone, I can't separate it from something as mundane as poor recall.

Conceptor

Thanks for your indepth and thoughtfull reply.

I love Psidreaming.

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Originally Posted by EbbTide000

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Neat! I'll take a look.

Conceptor, I agree with your view of 360 degree vison. I've been on that train of thought myself. But what if it wasn't 'vision'. What if it was a new way of sensing the environment that can only be expained by calling it vision because vision is the word closest descriptor of the sensation that I can use to describe it. I'm not saying that's what happened in my case... but what if?

I have all senses, but it seems food tastes good only in specific circumstances which I have difficulty determining.

Sivason, I’m the same. I smell things often in dreams but have only had a vague sense of smell a couple of times. Smell is a favorite waking sense. I love to eat in dreams but I think it’s more a texture thing. My sense of taste is somewhat vague probably due to missing a sense of smell. I assumed smell would come in time but I see you’ve had thousands of LDs and still experience this. Do you think this is common and do you have any theories about why this is for you?

Originally Posted by Azaleaj

Sivason, I’m the same. I smell things often in dreams but have only had a vague sense of smell a couple of times. Smell is a favorite waking sense. I love to eat in dreams but I think it’s more a texture thing. My sense of taste is somewhat vague probably due to missing a sense of smell. I assumed smell would come in time but I see you’ve had thousands of LDs and still experience this. Do you think this is common and do you have any theories about why this is for you?

I do not know why this is. The idea that taste is bland due to the lack of smell makes a lot of sense! Smell is tied to taste and a plugged nose creates the same bland taste issue in real life. A member once suggested that smell is very important to animals for waking when a predator is in the area. He thought somehow there was a need to keep the sense of smell separate from dreaming. I have no idea myself. It is just weird.