✨What Dreams Are Made Of
A brief tour through the wonderland of sensory perception and dreams
I spy with my little mind’s eye 👀
Last week, I had the following Twitter thought:
For me, that’s enough to get lost in a rabbit hole of increasingly odd questions for a while. So, let’s head to wonderland, shall we? And in a beautiful bout of wordplay, that wonderland is our head. Cheshire cat would purr with pride.
The trip to wonderland begins with consciously flexing our imagination - we’re not in dream town just yet. The ‘easy’ sense first: vision. I can easily remix visual items (shapes, colors, objects) into new combinations I’ve never encountered before. Centaur? No problem. A cat-sized pink elephant running through a golden cathedral while being chased by an army of shape-shifting robots with a terraformed Mars peeking through the crystal windows? Blink, and I’m there. Easy peasy. (Then again, I’ve been told my imagination goes into overdrive sometimes…)
I can even hear the echoing pitter-patter of the poor thing’s stocky little feet. Sound seems to be remixable in my head as well, though less extensively than vision. Almost as if the number of sounds I can imaginatively recombine is much more limited than the number of visual objects/aspects I can mentally play with. It’s similar for touch. I can imagine feeling hot and cold; I can imagine fingers running across my arms and other tactile sensations. Again, new combinations are possible but much more limited in terms of sheer diversity than for vision.
This brings me to the two senses that give me pause: taste and smell. I can imagine tasting/smelling things I’ve tasted/smelled before but not new combinations. There is a wee bit of research supporting this. Olfactory imagery exists but is (probably) subjected to the same constraints as ‘real’ odors. From this review:
The psychophysical properties of odor images are similar to those of real stimuli.
Random thought: could this have something to do with the compositional complexity of our perception of different senses? Is vision in our brain made out of more different (types of) components than our other senses (color, shape, perspective, lighting…)? Smell is just, well, smell. In my head, I can’t really deconstruct it into different components unless those are other smells (even though a huge number of molecules might be involved). Smell is smell is smell. Perhaps saliency or intensity is such a component, but that still depends on the (idea of) the specific smell being present in the first place. For taste, I suppose you can deconstruct it into the basic tastes. Sweet, sour, etc. But those are still tastes.
(Question: If there are any perfume connoisseurs or hyperosmics reading this, how do you typify smells without referring to other smells? Are there basic components you fall back on?)
Dream town 💭
Stop two in our wonderland wanderings: the realm of dreams. Maybe my conscious imagination is not developed enough to truly let my brain fire on all cylinders. Maybe dreams - a form of involuntary imagery - can open more perceptual doors.
Interestingly, we find similar sensory remix differences in dreams. There’s not that much research on it, but this older paper finds that dreams - for the average person, which is a key point - almost always have a visual component. A little over half of the reported dreams (3372 reports in total) had an auditory component. Only around 1% of reported dreams also had an olfactory or gustatory component (slightly higher in women than in men). More recent research finds that smells in dreams are rare, brief, and similar to ‘real’ smells. (Dreams with an olfactory component also tend to be limited to people who have a keen sense of smell in real life.)
Perhaps the cliché that we are visual creatures is true even in our dreams.
Wait. We are not all visual creatures, though.
Dreams of people who are blind, this study suggests, have:
… no visual imagery and a very high percentage of gustatory, olfactory, and tactual sensory references.
Another study suggests that the longer people have been blind, the smaller the visual component in their dreams.
(Extra: Ever wondered what octopuses dream about? I’ve got you covered.)
Sensory superheroes 🦸🏽
Blind people might be sensory superheroes, but there are other sensory perception variations that could fit this category too.
The final two brief stops on our tour through wonderland: the towns of aphantasia and synesthesia.
People with aphantasia don’t engage in voluntary visual imagery. They know elephants, the color pink, the gleam of gold, and the structure of a cathedral but no tiny pink elephant runs through a golden cathedral in their mind. This doesn’t seem to be the case for involuntary visual imagery in the form of dreams. Most aphants report having visual dreams (small sample size, though), but those reports also indicate that their (remembered) dreams are fewer and farther in between than for the average person.
Anecdotally, someone with aphantasia told me that she indeed rarely remembers her dreams, but the ones she does remember tend to be lucid and vivid ones.
That’s intriguing. People experiencing a lucid dream know that they’re dreaming during the dream. Trained lucid dreamers can even have ‘agentive control’ in their dreams (which really makes me want to learn lucid dreaming). Talking about a cool superpower to have. There’s very little real data on lucid dreaming in aphants that I could find. This recent philosophy paper suggests that:
Currently, no cases of lucid dreaming in subjects with aphantasia have been reported.
If we listen to people with aphantasia, however (in addition to the above, Reddit is a treasure trove of anecdotal support), it doesn’t strike me as entirely uncommon. Come on, science, keep up.
There’s a(nother?) group of people who have an above-average chance of experiencing lucid dreams (here too, small sample size): people with synesthesia. Synesthesia is the perceptual phenomenon where different senses ‘mix together’. For example, seeing sounds (or chromesthesia) is one of the more common types. Synesthetes tend to be above average in terms of creativity and vocabulary richness. And now they’re dreaming superheroes too. Synesthetes also - anecdotally and not unanimously - have synesthesia in their dreams.
Our unique individual mode of sensory perception bleeds through in our dreams, it seems. (If I start paying more attention to smells, will my dreams be smellier? An experiment waiting to happen.)
Thank you for joining the tour. Take a flyer and tell your friends.
I’ll leave you with the words of one of my literary heroes:
"I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours."
- Cheshire Cat 😺
See you soon.
Question time. I am very interested to hear your thoughts and experiences, whether you’re a regular ‘senser’ or one of the superheroes. (Don’t worry, if you’ve read this far, you're a superhero in my book anyway.)
Especially:
Is your imagination mainly visual? Is it easy for you to imagine new tastes/smells?
Are your dreams mostly visual? Do they sometimes have clear non-visual components you can remember after waking up?