Here's a random poll

[conuly]

[Poll #1341345]

Comments

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Whether or not I see in color strongly depends on the dream. I also dream in color more frequently the older I've gotten.

It's not exactly a sense, but I often read in dreams (sometimes passages from real books, sometimes not), which I understand is relatively unusual.

I dream lucidly more often than not, but it's not consistent.

I also find my nightmares and recurring dreams (which tend to be neutral, rather than bad or good, with the exception of one related to cheese that is simply odd) are more likely to be lucid dreams than my good dreams, which is somewhat annoying when you're entirely aware that it's "just a dream" but still unable to quite shake it off.

[catnip13.livejournal.com]

I have a love/hate relationship with dreams about my dad - he died of cancer 7 years ago. The ones where he is dying and in pain, I wake up relieved that it's over. The ones where he is well and whole and happy and we're together? Those are the hard ones. It's hard to even write about those, makes me cry.

[phoenixdreaming.livejournal.com]

I checked 'some sort of sense one doesn't normally have' for this, but it's not quite the right way to explain this. A 'narrative' feeling, where I perceive what's going on as a story I'm telling or a story being told to me rather than something I'm wholly experiencing, is usual in my dreams. And I 'see' the way I see when I read: as patches of feeling and blurs of imagery with occasional strong images. Which could be quite normal for dreams, but I don't hear them described this way by other people.

[lakidaa.livejournal.com]

Kinesthetic Sense == Balance?

I also can't read, but I know what the page means. I can't distinguish pages, only derive meaning.

They're also just plain weird when I DO remember them :U

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Usually if I have "extra" senses, it's psi-type stuff. Telepathy and precognition are the usual ones, but occasionally I can make a small effort and shift someone's moods or thoughts.

I have woken up from nightmares and found out that reality is worse. Most of my nightmares are wildly implausible: one that I remember best is being cornered in a grocery store with a horde of marauding zombie Cabbage Patch dolls.

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

I am able to fly (and extended-jump) so vividly in my dreams I sometimes wonder why I can't actually do it.

I checked "other" in the senses in that I sometimes have an ability in my dreams to sense when things are wrong and if they're going to turn out OK...but otherwise seem completely real. I also can tell if someone's watching me, sometimes so much as a vague telepathic ability. In nightmares, I usually wake up right as the scary climax is coming. Sometimes if I endure something that comes to my "death" I feel no pain, just a sudden jerk. I've often heard "urban legends" about the problems death-dreams may signal and even cause, but I don't know how worrisome mine should be.

Most of the dreams I remember are weird but pleasant. I do have a few recurring ones, like an old crush coming to ask me out, anachronistic-style in the place that would have been expected back in high school. However, I tend to also "remember" that I'm happily married and thus turn down my old major crush. And usually his reaction is an oddly cheerful mix of disappointment and humor that he asked too late.
/ramble

And blah, you get to feeling better!! Not fair on your day!

[pne.livejournal.com]

My dreams feel pretty much real -- I think I have all the senses I have in real life there, too, even though I've never thought about most of them (e.g. smell or taste).

And for good dreams, there might be a bit of disappointment of "oh, that was only a dream" when waking up, but there's often a "but at least it was a nice dream" you can still savour, balancing it out.

[neurotica0.livejournal.com]

I read in my dreams too! I didn't even realize it was unusual until someone told me that it was impossible. I also write in my dreams. (I dream that I'm an author a lot.) By the end of this conversation, the other person went away convinced that these things aren't possible with a "normal" brain and I'm "crazy."

[conuly]

Dreams are such personal things. I suppose researchers know what is and isn't normal, to an extent, but I don't think most people can claim to have that knowledge, not honestly.

[rachelkachel]

That's about how mine is. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the only 'real' sense I have is sight, and then the narrative feeling you describe so I know what people are saying.

As for good dreams versus bad - The other night I dreamed someone gave me $650,000. That was disappointing to wake up from, though not as bad as the time just after my dog died when I dreamed he was fine.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. I've never written in my dreams. I wonder if I could (and if I could remember what I wrote once I woke up.)

I want to try now. :D

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

My worst nightmare as a child was dreaming about a vampire knocking on my door, asking to borrow a cup of rice so it could make soup. I woke up terrified. Go figure.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

Some sort of sense you don't normally have: the ability to almost (yeah, frustrating) orgasm just by being near someone hot.

Also, this isn't a sense but an ability, I suppose, but fluency in foreign languages while dreaming! Of course, it only FEELS like I am, but it's still cool.

I know I dream sound, because sometimes if I wake up too fast, I can still hear my dream sounds fading away as if someone was slowly turning down the speakers until the dream-sound fades out. I dream in color, but never black and white. I don't think I have the sense of touch in my dreams. I really never touch things or people, except when I was fighting that one guy for hiding in Kira's closet and molesting her for a year. I could feel holding his shirt and punching his face in. Other than that, I don't FEEL things with my dream-body.

I like my vivid dreams the best, except when they're vivid nightmares. Bad dreams, like the one where the people brought a live dog over for their dog to eat, or where the people were chasing me to steal my tonsils, are just gross but entertaining later. The closet man one I just mentioned was a vivid nightmare, and I would rather never have those. It doesn't matter that I'm relieved they're not true; they're horrible. Then I have vivid good dreams, and those are fun too. Sometimes I wake up laughing aloud. I am frustrated by my non-vivid dreams, when I know I've been dreaming all night but can't even remember one image!

[conuly]

Some sort of sense you don't normally have: the ability to almost (yeah, frustrating) orgasm just by being near someone hot.

I'm not sure I'd call that an ability so much as an oh-why-god-why curse.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I can tell hot and cold in dreams. I didn't check it because I wasn't sure I had it. I've had dreams that clearly had color vision. I've had dreams that clearly had taste. I've had dreams that clearly have hearing. I've definitely had my sense of balance in dreams. But I can't off-hand think of a dream where hot and cold were relevant and I wasn't also reacting to the temperature my actual body was experiencing.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I wish people who didn't actually study dreams would stop saying things are impossible. I read in dreams regularly.

Now, I'm going to break my own rule. I haven't especially studied dreams beyond the bit in one psych class, but at least I have a degree in psychology and am giving this preface. What is difficult (but not impossible) to do in dreams is to write. And what is even harder than that is to read the same thing multiple times at different points in the dream, either by having written it down and then reading it or by reading it over and over. There's a very good reason for this. If the material isn't something easily memorable like a song or poem you already have memorized and your brain can store as a single chunk (e.g. for me Jabberwocky is written there, then that is enough for me to reproduce the entire poem) then it has to remember the whole note. In real life, paper is a memory saving device. You write it down and then you can drop it from your memory and you can bring it back by reading the paper. The problem is in a dream it isn't a memory saving device as the paper isn't real. So, you need to remember what is on the paper in order for it to be consistent. This is difficult to do and most people won't do it. However, you may not notice that the writing has changed.

I've also dyed in dreams. No, I didn't die in real life. I've also done one thing I was taught is impossible, but it didn't violate the spirit of the rule. While things in dreams change, there is (according to my psych prof) a logical consistency to the changes. That is things may turn into other things or people into animals, but things don't change between animate to inanimate. However, they did in one of my dreams, but it happened in a logically consistent way (a mad scientist did it) rather than in a random fashion.

However, I am very loathe to say ~anything~ is impossible to dreams. Especially as now I remember I need to add a ticky box to this poll to account for the dream where I watched the universe be formed and was watching the different forces freeze out (why yes, I did fall asleep studying astronomy). People can have amazingly bizarre dreams. Reading in a dream is not that freaky.

What makes me sad is when I read awesome stories in dreams and can't remember them when I wake up. Or when I read beautiful journals that I supposedly wrote and they are wonderful combinations of writing and illustrations I drew, often graphic stories, whereas in real life I cannot draw well at all. However, I did get one small comic strip from a line in a dream, so that's something I managed to bring back. And sometimes when I remember stuff from dreams they aren't actually clever or funny or good bits of writing.

[leora.livejournal.com]

There are actually two relevant senses that are sometimes called kinesthetic. Proprioceptive is also a relevant word and good for balance. Once is the sense of balance you get from your inner ear. The other is the sense of where your own body parts are; this is what enables you to close your eyes and touch your nose with your finger. They are separate senses because either can be damaged or lost separately. Oliver Saks wrote about a woman who lost her kinesthetic sense. She had to learn to walk by watching her own legs. It was horribly disabling and socially awful, because people didn't realize she was so disabled, would get annoyed with her for being slow (for things like getting onto a bus) and it's a lot harder to just say, I don't have a kinesthetic sense, and be understood than it is to say something like, I'm blind. Even though blindness is almost certainly ~less~ disabling than losing your kinesthetic sense. But it's so rare that we don't have good terms for it.

Balance is a problem because while I'm not aware of it generally being totally lost, it can often get damaged such that it provides false feedback. I've had episodes of severe vertigo and I am incredibly grateful both to have drugs that help me and that I don't experience that often.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Oh I have precognition in dreams all the time. I just didn't think of it as a sense. Although usually it's just memory. I get the same dream multiple times per night with small variations sometimes. So, sometimes I'll be fighting off the opposing army or whatever and I'll remember that someone on my side turned on me and it led to me dying last time, so I'll act to fix it this time.

I never question the fact that I remember dying last time within the dream. I feel like I should. But I never do.

[leora.livejournal.com]

You are either looking for the term blessed with suck or the term cursed with awesomeness.

[lakidaa.livejournal.com]

oh okay. <:3c I've had a few smacks of vertigo and it is seriously the worst thing. The worst.

[neurotica0.livejournal.com]

I don't think I ever remember what I've written in a dream. I just remember the sight of myself making words on paper.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Umm, and I meant died. I actually cannot remember ever having dyed anything in a dream. But I have been killed.

[masterflare421.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you chose to pick this question today, since last night I had an unpleasant dream which involved a sense that doesn't always show up in my dream. I guess the setting was that the snow outside had melted, and we found a corpse under the snow. Of course now it was in the sun and rotting, so there was quite a stench in the air. I don't usually have smell in my dreams, and in this case the smell was very light, but it still played a part.

I didn't mark another sense that isn't in real life, because the only sense I do have in my dreams that in different than the waking world is just from my lucid dreaming. It is like being two people. One is the person acting out the dream and fitting a role, and the other is the one looking at all the logical fallacies or trying to direct the dream. I haven't had a lot of luck talking to other lucid dreamers, so I don't know how common that sensation is.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Whether or not I see in color strongly depends on the dream. I also dream in color more frequently the older I've gotten.

It's not exactly a sense, but I often read in dreams (sometimes passages from real books, sometimes not), which I understand is relatively unusual.

I dream lucidly more often than not, but it's not consistent.

I also find my nightmares and recurring dreams (which tend to be neutral, rather than bad or good, with the exception of one related to cheese that is simply odd) are more likely to be lucid dreams than my good dreams, which is somewhat annoying when you're entirely aware that it's "just a dream" but still unable to quite shake it off.

[catnip13.livejournal.com]

I have a love/hate relationship with dreams about my dad - he died of cancer 7 years ago. The ones where he is dying and in pain, I wake up relieved that it's over. The ones where he is well and whole and happy and we're together? Those are the hard ones. It's hard to even write about those, makes me cry.