Can YOU imagine the Tenth Dimension? Stupid people need not click here

Strangely I was actually lost trying to follow this up until the dimensions 7-10. (It's always like that with me; I get baffled on the easy stuff and make sense of the difficult stuff.)

What I don't actually understand is how something can be "in" a dimension. As a "3 dimensional creature" I don't quite understand how, theoretically, a conscious being of any kind could perceive these higher dimensions by observing the immediate surroundings using light and sound. Furthermore I didn't understand how a creature could NOT perceive 3 dimensions; even if you flatten 3-dimensional space visually, I'd imagine you'd still understand the 3rd dimension there. Isn't this obvious in say, an animation?

It seems like all of the other dimensions are just conceptual explanations, and while I understand them I don't see their actual practicality. I mean, sure, the fourth dimension being time makes sense, but how the hell does anything perceive the past/present/future in space, realistically?

Are other scientific concepts reliant on an understanding of these dimensions? I feel that there is an unseen simplification to all of this.

My original understanding of dimensions beyond the third came after I saw Cube 2: Hypercube. Admittedly a bad movie; it introduced the concept of a tesseract, or four-dimensional cube. I looked up the concept and saw a 4-dimensional cube get drawn. It's basically just drawing another a cube perpendicular to another cube and connecting the points; which in hindsight is what the flash animation tried to explain - the previous dimension merely becomes points for the next dimension. Drawing the tesseract was simplistic, but seeing it in motion was much more mind-boggling; because it wasn't until then that I could really see how it was more than just two cubes with their vertices connected.

Jam it back in, in the dark.