Thread: Other Senses in Dreams

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.