The senses come richly alive in certain dreams. My last dream on Thursday morning was ablaze with color. After walking a long path under an overcast sky, I paused on a terrace overlooking green woods. Suddenly the trees and bushes were aflame with pink and purple, magenta and orange, great living trellises of brilliant blossoms. When I rose and walked in the gray morning, those colors stayed with me. I felt sad for those who think that dreaming in color is an exotic experience, and rarely or never remember doing it themselves.

This morning, towards the end of a rich cycle, I drank a cup of excellent French roast coffee, enjoying the taste and also the fineness of the china against my teeth. This might, of course, have anticipated my first cup of coffee (not yet brewing) a couple of hours later, yet the experience was more vivid than it commonly is in waking life, and perfectly in place in a sequence in which I was taking a break at a conference before giving my own presentation. The taste of coffee did not compare to my favorite dream taste (so far): raspberry juice on my tongue and on my lips, in a drama of love and danger when my dream self kissed a beautiful woman at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the eve of the Occupation.

The ancients set high value on dreams in which senses beyond sight and sound come vividly alive. In the dreams of the early Christian martyr Perpetua, it was the taste of a mouthful of cheese, delivered by an unusual shepherd into her cupped hands so fresh and dripping that it seemed to have been milked directly from the ewe, that promised paradise after suffering.

On a secular level, more than a few dreamers, especially women, have reported to me nights of sensual pleasure beyond anything they had previously known on the physical plane, extending to full-body orgasm.

When we experience things so vividly in our dreams, we are learning something  essential about energy anatomy. We have inner senses as well as outer senses. We can know pleasure and pain intensely, in an energy body that can operate outside the physical body and which survives physical death; this is known in Sanskrit as the kama body, or body of desire.