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?
Does this mean no one speaks in your dreams?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
