3w ago

Do you experience smell or sound in your dreams?

Clearly my eyes aren’t* open and I cannot take in external visual stimuli in my dreams, however I experience them similar to the visual experience in my minds eye or imagination or whathaveyou. Similarly I feel like I experience something akin to touch or feel (like the occasional flying or falling dream, or the feel of grass or something).

I don’t recall having anything similar to smell or sound in a dream though (except occasionally hearing a real sound while waking up that wasn’t actually part of the dream) What’s your experience?

39 comments

In the past I only remembered having dreams about 3-6 times a year and very little what they were about. I only needed 6,5 hours of sleep.
Then I had COVID something broke.
Now I dream almost every night and remember more what they are about. Compared to the previous it's like whole another reality with all the bells and whistles. Now I need 7,5 hours of sleep.
I'm actually happy with the change.
- Are you able to picture things in your imagination normally in your waking hours? For example, if I said picture a ball, how deeply could you describe it? Could you see the colors? Could you see the reflections? What is the material made of?
  
  You mean do I have aphantasia? No. On the contrary. My parents tested me as a child, because I was a really introverted, emotionally calm and had trouble with writing. They were afraid that I was on the autism spectrum.
  Turns out that I was just a calm kid with severe case of dysgraphic dyslexia with high average IQ. Only thing I was gifted in was spatial perception.
  So yes, I can visualuze things in my minds eye and do 3D-sculpting, however I don't think the reflection are really reflections. Just something I fool myself with. I can do some reflective designing if I focus, but something simple and nowhere in the "raytracing" level.
  Dreams however tend to be more on a conceptual level, even graphically. You just don't mind because your consciousness level is lowered. When you reminisce your dreams after you're awake, you automatically reconstruct it and fill the blanks to make it more compatible with your awakened state.

A couple nights ago Jeff Jarrett gave me a large freezer sized Ziploc bag full of cocaine in order to help pay my rent.
I opened it up to make sure it was real and sneezed into it, getting all over me and my shirt.
Taste and smell were profound.

I don't know if I experience smell, if I do I don't remember it, but sound is very vivid in my dreams. I usually remember the dialogue pretty well as soon as I wake up, and the people in my life sound like themselves even if they're talking about total nonsense.
Also once I dreamed I was SpongeBob having a stroke so I had to hear everyone in Bikini Bottom speaking what sounded like gibberish to me :( m
- Dying @ the spongebob dream (nightmare?)
  
  Given the timing, I think it was inspired by the ending of the soap opera comic Apartment 3-G. The finale involved one of the main girls having some kind of psychotic break, but for whatever reason it coincided with the art style degrading horribly, so it was an incredibly confusing read. People appearing and disappearing from scenes at random, location changing from panel to panel, and everyone drawn so crudely you couldn't always tell who was who. It was really hard tell when the character was supposed to be confused and when I was the one confused.
  I guess the helplessness and horror of trying to follow a soap struck me so much I projected it onto SpongeBob.

Smell, not that I remember. Sound, all the time. I'll have conversations or hear people saying things, sometimes in different languages. Sometimes a word comes to mind that seems totally real, but usually it's not. Some of the more detailed dreams have had storms, sirens, earthquakes (that eerie rumbling they have). Or even music.

Yes to both, and I can also read in my dreams as well, which is popularly thought to be impossible. It's not gibberish either but cohesive headlines in a newspaper or something. I am most likely abnormal in this sense since I also appear to have hyperphantasia, so what applies to me may not extrapolate to the general population!
- I can read to, but the text changes each time I read it.
  
  Same and also it makes perfect sense in dream but after waking up it is clearly wrong like equations won't be balanced or units will be completely wrong.

I don't remember my dreams very well in general, so I don't remember hearing sound in them either but I'm pretty sure I can hear sound. Somehow I'm able to talk with people in my dreams, after all. When it comes to smell, I have no idea, I don't remember smelling anything in my dreams at all.
I think hearing and smell might just be things we simply don't remember well from dreams. We get the vast majority of information from what we see, so that's the first thing we'd remember. The only times I remember feeling something in dreams is when I got stabbed with needles, shot and that one time I dreamed that I smoked when I was a kid (even though I've never done that before). The reason I remember those is just that they left an impression of some sort. With hearing or smell, I think it just doesn't leave an impression or is special in any way, so we simply don't remember it.

Sound yes smell no

All of my senses are as functional in dreams as they are awake.

I've recently been trying to train myself to lucid dream frequently. The first thing anyone will tell you is to keep a dream journal, and holy shit does it help. Started journaling them on the 2nd of January, and even just a week later I started having very vivid dreams every night. All senses included; and as of a couple days ago, fairly critical thinking (mental math). I haven't managed to have a "lucid dream" yet, but I'll get there.
For the sake of completeness, a lucid dream is a dream in which you've become aware that you are dreaming. Whether you can control the dream or feel that it's vivid is a separate concern.
Pretty cool stuff.

I've had the odd dream where I've vividly smelt something putrid, but I'd say every dream I have includes sound. I've had a couple of dreams where the world ended suddenly and I remember the almighty rushing noise and the sound of my never-ending sigh. I've dreamt a good few times about people I know speaking other languages they wouldn't normally speak, too.

I rarely remember my dreams, like very rarely. But I'm pretty sure there is sound in them because there's a weird thing happening to me: I don't dream exclusively in my native language, the rare occasions in which I remember a dream, I can tell in which language people were speaking. And I can recall the voices and the sounds happening in them.

Can't experience smell on dreams or IRL and I cannot recall a time where I've experienced sounds from around me outside of the dream, so I'm gonna have to say no. Definitely do have sounds in the dream, but they most certainly aren't related to the real world at all. Touch also isn't something I can ever recall feeling in a dream, so couldn't say I've had that morph my dreams either.
Though I definitely have had those little dream like thoughts from when you are about to fall asleep and end up jerking your body plenty of times, even a few when I've been awake in the middle of the night. Not fun to have when your phone is held in hand and it just suddenly jumps into the air and you know you can't catch it.

I don't dream much, but I have definitely had sound involved when I do. Never had smell in a dream that I can recall.

Does this mean no one speaks in your dreams?
- I don’t recall a dream conversation! I will add that I’m not particularly in touch with my dreams (I know some people keep a journal and such). None of the handful of ones I can recall include speaking though.

Sound, definitely at times. More commonly when outside sounds (traffic, construction, etc) get incorporated into my dream. I feel like sometimes I experience knowledge of sound in my dreams (responding to things that would require hearing it in IRL, like speaking) but don’t actually remember hearing anything, because dream logic.
Smell is more rare in my dreams, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any very lovely smells in my dreams. But I have smelled a horrible rotting smell in my dreams before.

I’m sure on everything except smell. I was surprised too.

Yes, smell and sound.

Smell and taste are pretty similar, right? I like eating in my dreams, so I dream about various malls and parties where I eat stuff. Today I dreamt about eating Fufu, fried rice, pizza and more

I can feel taste, smell and sound during dreams. i I don't remember if i can feel touch though.

No smell in dreams for myself but yes sounds, although if being honest most the times the sounds are from voices ( not always).
Visuals are always there, and I don't say sight because I sometimes see my dreams in 3rd person.
I've experienced touch but it's selective, often more some kind of proprioception while I fall, fly, swim etc.
I've tasted things in dreams though, very few times but it's there.

Yes for sound. But the times I remember, the sound usually is something real that was integrated in the dream.

I don’t actively recall smell or taste being a feature so I guess probably not. Every other sense I definitely have, though.
On the general subject of things people say can’t happen in dreams beyond senses, I can also read, feel pain, see color, urinate without doing so in real life, and die.

Yes and in fact my dreams feel more real than my waking life. Don't get me wrong, I know the difference, but my experiences there are just deeper. Not something I can explain with a few words.

I don't smell but there is sound and feeling, and the visual experience is generally very realistic like if I were going about my day to day life, I can imagine fine but the visualizations in my dreams are often like ray tracing on ultra graphics. One that especially comes to mind, I dreamt I was in a dog fight and doing a bombing run in a space ship, and I looked behind me and watched each bomb explode in vivid detail one after the other. It was like better detail than in a movie in a way.

I have never thought about it for smell and sound but I cannot see in my dreams and feel like my eyes are glued shut. Sometimes during a dream I will try really hard to open my eyes and it causes me to wake up. I have aphantasia so it is probably related. I think my dreams are mostly in concepts
- Very interesting! What about others sensations like falling or feeling a surface?
  
  As a kid I’d have nightmares about falling off a cliff and definitely remember feeling it. I haven’t had a dream like that in a while though

It is IMPOSSIBLE to feel smells while sleeping! This is human nature and the reason why people die if there is a fire in a room while they are sleeping. Learn biology at school... though. A biological fact, if you will.

I sure do! Just last night I woke up from a dream in which my downstairs neighbors were yelling only to discover they were actually yelling.

It's different for different people. This is a "Do you have an internal monologue?" question.
- That’s why I asked, wanted to hear people’s varied experiences

For me dreams are just like an alternate life. I usually have entire like memory sets in them. Ill be in some other world sometimes similar to ours sometimes really different and ill know things about my life there. Going about it as if it is my life. I never know its a dream i have no memory of my real life while im in them. I have all my senses. I have even eaten things in dreams and woken up wishing those foods were real. One that sticks with me is this really spicy drink. It was an amber color and tasted warm, and spiced but also sweet. It was very good. I can experience most things i would while awake but if its too intense ill wake up.

39 comments