Thread: Other Senses in Dreams

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.