I have a theory but I need other people's help in testing it.

First of all, if anyone HAS heard of this or if this is proven to work, forgive me for a useless post but I have personally never heard anyone mention it, so I decided to post it.

My theory is simple. It basically is that if your waking life is vivid, so are your dreams. By this I mean that by exciting your senses during waking time, you will likely have more vivid dreams.

Whether it's examining things closer, looking at things you've never seen, or just looking at vividly colored images/videos, your vision in your dreams will be more vivid. I assume that this could apply to all senses too.

The common person doesn't go around sniffing every object they can, instead we look at them or touch them. This is why I believe people hardly ever smell things in their dreams, and when they do, it's only food because food is the only scent we pay attention to in waking life.

Perhaps instead of just looking at the environment you are awake in, you should try to use all five senses as much as you can to really stimulate them.

If someone has feedback or already knows this works, please post!