Synaesthesia

Hey, guys!

I’m still not lucid in my dreams (and to be honest with you, I started remembering them on an almost daily basis a month or so ago) but I think this was worth sharing.

I’m a synaesthete, and in my dreams, I reach even higher levels of synaesthesia.

But first I have to explain how it feels like in waking life. Synaesthesia is not about feeling more than other people. When I see my best friend, Nana, I don’t see her green, or visualize green while seeing her, I just know she’s somehow green. When it comes to looking at myself in the mirror, that colour thing gets even funnier as I know myself in a grayscale tone of yellow. I have my skin colour, I see it as you see it, but I look at me and I know myself not only yellow, but greyscale yellow. Go figure.

Also, reading a book’s chapter some days ago, I knew it smell just like whisky, even though I didn’t feel or remind the smell of whisky.

I don’t think know is the most appropriate verb to describe the feel, but I think it helps you get what synaesthesia is not.

So, on to the dream part: when I’m dreaming, I don’t just knoe, I feel. I look at my dreamsky and I feel something silken touching me. I look at Nana and she’s not green, but there IS green, not only knowingness of green, but the colour, manifesting aitself all around.

So I would like to ask how does this synaesthesia thing work with you guys (even if you’re not waking life synesthetes).

Regarding synaes. in dreams or l. dreams…
Well, first of all I would classify myself as someone with slight syn. tendencies in waking life. Music produces intense visual accompaniment, different instruments seem to possess textures of very specific things, metals, cloth, liquids, etc. Smells also are accompanied by impressions of color and texture.
That said, I have not experienced your increase in these things while dreaming/l.dreaming.
However, I have noticed some oddities about the senses while dreaming. In all of my dreaming, the visual sense is utterly dominant. I would say that I am a very visual person in waking life, but this is even more so in dreams: all sounds, voices, music, are muffled. Also, many dream events that would normally have intense or loud sound don’t…car crashes, guns, etc., will have no significant audio. Also, I might be attending a concert, in which a large crowd and the band make no noise, and I hear only the conversation with the person I am with, as if she/he and I were alone in a silent room. (Also I would add that I never see people’s lips move when they “speak.” There is usually a intense expression on the face, and the audio of their voice “plays” from a sourceless place. Another strange audio-visual effect of dreams, I guess.)
Smell also is muffled: smells that would nauseate me in w.l., such as a dead animal, or harsh chemicals, do not have much effect in dreams. I identify these smells, but they do not affect my whole body and nervous system the way they would in w.l.
Don’t know if this info is of use, but there it is. I always like new info on the subject of the senses in dreams.

i know a synaesthete and i think i understand what you mentioned.
In dreams sometimes i just know the plot or a reason as to why i am doing something without deducing it from my surroundings or previous actions. I am guessing that synaesthesia is like this, where you just know that something is a certain colour.
Have you thought of using this a sort of dreamsign to help you either remember your dreams or become lucid?
To help you remember your dreams you could concentrate on certain colours to try to bring back a memory of the dream.

I’d never heard of synaesthetes until just now when you mentioned it and I read the wikipedia article. Interesting - I’ve always seen letters and numbers in colour, but I always thought everyone did that. Aside from this, though, I’m just plain old normal. Sounds do make me think of textures, but I’m pretty sure that’s just a logical connection from where I think the sound’s coming from, rather than synasthesia. (For instance, nails scraping across a blackboard makes me think of the horrible dusty texture of a blackboard and the horrible dusty feeling of having one’s nails filed… but that’s just association.)

In dreams, my senses don’t really change. I see as normal, hear as normal, feel as normal - although I think my smell and taste suffer a bit, come to think of it. I have had many dreams, however, where I can be reading a book and at the same time be living the story just by reading it. I don’t know enough about synaesthesia to know if that’s similar - I doubt it, it’s probably just a weird dream thing.

Wow I asked this same question on a drug forum about colour association with certain things, objects people etc. I thought it was a weird effect lsd left me with

I think I understand…I am like this when it comes to my hobbies like music and gardening.
In music, when I play the guitar, I don’t just feel the notes…I experience the notes, as if the music I’m playing is tangible. Some sounds even have ‘physical’ qualities to them…some as if I was feeling the notes in a tactile sense…it’s hard to explain.

Wow! I never knew this was to such an extent. I get this alot. I’m reminded when I ate Harry Potters’ Berty Bots Every Flavor Beans. You eat some of the jelly beans that they have magically gotten to taste like “grass” and whn you eat it. Yuck! It tastes like grass!

Anyways for me I mostly just link senses of smell with taste.

Also, Stormthunder, as far as textures and sound, I believe that means like if you heard a loud garbled static-y sound, a synthaesesete(sp?) would feel a rough or sharp texture in correlation with the sound. If they heard some nice melody filled calming music, they would associate a smooth texture with the sound.

I know I already do this a little bit as well because, in describing the second sound, I wanted to add smooth to my list of music qualities , except that’s a texture quality!

I had never heard of it either, so please exuse me if I ever refer to it as synasomethingwhatsits.

As for what Stormthunder wrote, that’s exactly how I feel, so I consider myself to be lucky not to have to write all of that. Is it possible to try this out in dreams? Perhaps I could experiment in my next lucid dream.

I suggested it for the quest (I think that’s why this topic is brought up again (I gave a link) ; hence the date)

You can always try and see what comes up; it seems pretty interesting in my opinion.

I know about it for a while now, since I ever saw someone meantening over there on the Dutch side. That’s why I always think of it as ‘synesthesie’ and forgot the English name. However when I just wanted to say that I said ‘synesthesia’ which is actually the correct form in English = )

Since that time I found it pretty interesting.
A quesiont for every synaesthete; what senses do you mix? All senses or only a few like color and names, days.

I was wondering, is there a way to induce or “learn” Synaesthesia?

I associate music (and learning musical theory really helped a lot understanding why the choices), vision, taste, even texture. I’m a big crazy mess. I usually make associations that are more resonable than most synæsthetes’, so I associate a nickname with the colour of it’s avatar, for example, and when I read the nick again, I kind of feel the colour. (I did that recently, that’s why I’m giving the example.)

Apparently, there are many different types of synæsthesia, and mine is quite a logical one, a kind of intuition mechanism—that means my feelings are often associated with concepts, rather than concrete stuff.

Some people have it wilder, so they just associate letters with colours, and feel the same colours about the same letters all the time (that’s a nice way of spellchecking, it enhances the power of your gestalt intuition).

Also, some things stand out in all my senses. It’s like I had another sense, that highlights stuff. A second image in my head that stops in what’s significant, a sound that is held while I listen to the rest of the phrase, and calls for my attention when it’s finished. It’s like a second mind that only keeps significant things and bring them to me later. I call those things that stand out in my sight and audition echoes.

I hope I’m not sounding confusing or alien to anyone.

I don’t think it’s been tried…

I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess I do do this. I’ve just really gotten used to it.

The way I associate things is really pretty complicated, everything is interconnected. Sound has a combination of light and color to it - the sharper or more abrupt the sound, the more light it has, and color goes along with tone and vowel sounds. This is how I work with letters - it’s really not the letter that has the color with it, it’s the sound that goes with the letter, which is why I don’t do numbers. A is a red sound, E is a yellow sound, U is a blue sound, etc. S and T are bright letters, L and M are dark letters. It’s really pretty reasonable. The only really strange thing that I notice about this is with the light, in that if it’s very dark and quiet and there’s suddenly a very abrupt sound, I’ll actually see the light for a second.

People and tastes also have associations, but those are trickier to work out. For example, I have an orange friend; and swedish fish taste exactly like the color they are, which has always amused me. There are probably some things I’ve forgotten too.

I decided to merge this into an older topic on the same subject. You may also like to read Tasting colours? (synesthesia) in the lounge forum

I have mild synesthesia (a cross-association between senses) - I associate letters and numbers with colors, and sometimes sounds with colors. It used to be a lot stronger when I was really little but its been fading. However, I’ve experienced intense synesthesia in my dreams. Whenever I see letters or numbers, they appear vividly in the colors I associate them with; for example, I recently had a dream where I saw a price tag marked $32. Also in a dream I smelled a strange fruity scent that was orange and fuzzy looking, although I’ve never associated scents with colors or textures IWL.

I find that sometimes just as I’m about to fall asleep, words and objects and feelings that I think about have really bright colors, often somewhat different from what they would normally be IWL.

So I was wondering, are there any synesthetes here who have had similar - or totally different - experiences in NDs or LDs? And are there any non-synesthetes who have experienced anything vaguely synesthetic in a dream?

I heard about this about a year ago and I think I have it, too. Don’t know how I feel about Indigo Children, seems like people are trying too hard to be special, but go figure.

Every letter in the alphabet has a color to me, and if you asked me what color 6 was today and then asked again five years from now, I would still say that it was red. I see those numbers in my head as those colors, but sixes don’t show up red on paper or anything. I just know that it’s red - it’s like very extreme spontaneous association!

Don’t know how this would affect dreams, tho. Might not do anything really. I think for most of us it wouldn’t be uncommon to have a dream every once in a while where everything had an unusual color, anyway.

i think i might be slight syn, i totaly understand when u say that your frind isnt actually green but just is also, just wondering, if the lasst name klein had to be a color, what color do u think it would be?

Interesting, I’ve never actually thought of it but I think I’m kinda a synesthete. I see certain letters and number as colours, like o is dark blue, r is red (go figure), v is purple, etc. I think some of them are just because of the colour names, like y is yellow, r is red, b is blue, and all kinds of them, so that might not be anything. I should think of my sense more when dreaming because truthfully, I don’t really remember much except for what I see and hear when it comes to they. Of course that’s only in NDs, in my half, kinda LD, I could feel the ground and motion, but it felt pretty normal.

Yea, I have Synesthesia too.
It’s mainly in numbers, but I can sense it in other fields too. (letters, weekdays, etc)
When I was younger, I could sense certain FEELINGS,
it’s hard to explain, but for instance, if I saw a movie, so a certain scene had a certain feeling.
Not simple and common feelings like happiness and such, but nameless feelings. XD
I think it faded away for me, (and I actually miss that)
But in my dreams, I think it still happens.
So yea, I think so.

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Okay okay. I have Synesthesia too. Always have.
Would you believe I was in denial about it? It was unbelievably obvious to all my friends as I would play certain pieces and exclaim, “This piece is SO blue!” or playing D minor and saying “It’s like an emerald green. If emeralds were a key, they’d be D minor.” or describing the smell of the piano modules, “It’s like a maroon smell.”
My reasoning for my denial was well, I’m already faceblind, ADD, get psychosis under stress (which has been mistaken for schizophrenia) and other things… What are the odds that I’d have Synesthesia on top of all of that?
Different musical keys have different colors and sometimes different personalities (in the exception of F major for some odd reason). Days of the week have different colors, tastes can sometimes have colors, shapes, and sometimes smells.
Every letter has a color and this influences the colors of words as a whole. There are certain dominant letters that can influence the color of the whole word more than others. Some letters are very passive and take on the dominant letter’s color. Some letters when next to another will change to a completely different color. So, usually words have one color or a color that fades into another. Or two distinct colors. It’s rare for a word to have more than that. I can only think of one.
Banana or banana. (It’s actually bugging me that I can’t find the right pink for that “b”)
B and b happen to function differently. “B” is both red and blue at the same time without being purple (so are squares). “b” is red but has a bit more of a passive quality. When letters are at the beginning of a word dominant or not, they will have a bit more influence on the overall color of the word; however, in this case we’re dealing with two other dominant letters and no passive ones. N and A are (uppercase and lowercase) are dominant therefore their colors remain. I’m not sure why b changed colors. Probably because it’s passive and overridden by dominance, but since it’s at the beginning of a word, its color didn’t change completely.
I did not make these rules, these are mere observations, and unchanging ones at that. Now if I write the rest of my post in colors, you can see for yourself.

There’s much more to it than that, but I can go on all day.
On the subject of dreams. Yes, it can get more intense. Especially in the case of music. Not overwhelming though. You’re immersing yourself in the senses and it feels absolutely wonderful. HH can be interesting as well (though not always wonderful, but that’s due to other issues.).

hmm, I think I hgad the wrong idea about Synaesthesia I thought you actually SAW sounds and such…

…so is it possible to have synaesthesia just a bit?
I wouldn’t say I have it, but maybe I did a bit when I was younger? Is that possible? because I have a vague feeling that I’ve been through the whole “that number’s that color” thing

Although I am not synaestetic in the proper sense, since I was young I have always been fascinated with synaesthesia, among many apparent “oddities” of the human mind.

Mattias, there are such people - I read of one who would see IE triangles moving in midair when someone rang her doorbell, and couldn’t exit her house because of the image overflow she would receive from all the sounds of the city. It’s quite an umbrella term, grouping different kinds, at different levels.

I once read a intelligence test which was based on identifying numbers and shapes with colours - was deeply fascinated by it, since association between senses does allow one to form new, interesting thought patterns that the majority didn’t think of.

I played a bit last year with my friend, trying to associate sounds, colors, textures, smells and tastes with each other - was very fun, and also quite interesting, since our answers weren’t so different form each other. Turns out we’re all a little synaestetic (I’ve yet to find one who guesses that Kiki - Buba shape association wrong), but it’s surely quite different for those who are diagnosed as such