: Re: How do I define smells I have never experienced? I am a lifelong writer, who was also born without an ability to smell. I have been trained to engage the reader by applying the five senses,

@Kaufman555

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The dilema you face actually has a term, "Qualia," which is a linguistic inability to describe a sense stimuli. The UR question of "Qualia" is "Describe a color with out using any comparisons to things that have that color". It's so difficult that even some of our words for colors are taken from things that have the color as an attribute (in the English Language, "Orange" is a very recent addition to the vocabulary, and derives from an Arabic loanword (by way of French, Narange) for the citrus fruit. Yes, the color is named for the fruit, and not the fruit for the color, and the word simply didn't exist prior to the 16th century (prior to this Orange was simply a shade of red or yellow depending on the shade).

That said, some of your assumptions about disabilities are not properly formed. Deaf people can still "feel" some musical components such as a song with a heavy beat or bass, and there's a wide spectrum of "blindness" that still allows for some "sight" (Legal Blindness is defined at 200/20 vision aka being able to see something 20 feet away as if it was 200 feet away. I have a family friend who is blind but can still watch Baseball games in the stadium at night (the stadium lights will help him identify the players on the field and he could read who played what position in the field, while batters were announced when they were up). If they weren't born blind but lost vision later in life, Blind people will often have sighted dreams (depending on how recent the loss occurred, they are mixed with "sound dreams" where they hear the elements of a dream.).

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