I was thinking the other day that upon reading my dream logs I had never come across any dreams where I could recall smelling something. Every dream consisted of visual and auditory experiences. Can anyone else remember ever having a dream where you distinctly remember smelling something in a dream?

I am a very avid and sometimes-lucid dreamer and I can't recall any dream where something was smelled.

lots of tactile experiences though. A recent one I was feeling cold in a skating rink full of Japanese people, one of which was wearing a t-shirt and I was trying to remember the Japanese word for cold because I wanted to ask him if he was cold.

Yeah, I do remember a dream I smelled the scent of... *drum roll* marijuana. That was back in the days when I had smoked all day every day for over two years, and then tried (and succeeded, by the way) in quitting cold turkey. I can't seem to remember any other dreams I have smelled anything, so I guess it is unusual.

Yeah I find it odd that smells can trigger memories quickly but it is from what I can tell in my own experience the only sense that is never triggered in dreams. If it is as in Evening Glory's report it's a rare phenomena.

I remember alot of my dreams, and now that you mention it, I have never remembered smelling anything. Very curious....

Pokey

That's funny, a few days ago I dreamed I was sniffing and drinking excellent single malt! Didn't cost me a penny
I smell things in my dreams regularly, mostly sweetish smells. It's certainly possible, like pain. It's a myth you can't feel pain in dreams!

SWIM had a dream on mushrooms once, a very powerful experience, where he believed for a moment that his sense of smell was increased to the point of being able to smell anything.

As soon as SWIM would lay his eyes on something he could smell it.

Then he began "smelling" things that were in the other room.

It was amazing.

Then he realized that he was under the influence of drugs. lol.

That he was tripping so hard that his brain was recalling the smells stored away.

A crazy and en lighting experience of how the brain works

Im guessing all of you have seen the movie "Waking Life"??

If not i highly recommend checking it out.

As for sensing smells in my dreams. i honestly cant recall a dream where that has ever happened.

the reason i mentioned "Waking Life" is because there is a part in there where they talk about small text/numbers being hard or impossible to read while dreaming. Also turning lights on/off is supposedly a good indicator that you are dreaming and both of these tests can be used to achieve lucid dreaming states...

so maybe in an attempt at lucid dreaming one could try to smell something that would normally smell really strong/bad IRL and that would trigger the lucid dream ??

I had an experience once where I gave birth to myself... and I smelled MY ANIMAL SMELL. Kind of like my cats smell like powdered cashews, they have their own weird animal smell... I smelled my own animal smell and realized that this is what we must unconsciously all smell like to some degree, all the time.

I get a lot of bodily smells, sweat, blood.

Dimethylspice, "waking life" is a really good film. I also really liked "a scanner darkly". Richard Linklater is a cool dude.

I have had lucid dreams since i was little, but smelling things in a dream is rare.

I havnt seen "A Scanner Darkly" yet, but im downloading it as i type this and will probably watch it later tonight.

thanks for the recommendation Kermit

No I can't recall having any dreams where I have had any remote sense of smell, sounds like it would be interesting though.

Maybe the reason that we rarely experience smell in our dreams is because it can trigger such strong memories, which could change the feeling or even the focus of the dream world that our subconscious has constructed for us, and send the dream down a different path, thereby negating the original point of the dream.
</wildspeculation>

Yes, there where a few dreams where i smelled something. But now that you mention it, it where only very pungent and unpleasant smells. I once had a nightmare where i was locked in some room with a smell that became increasingly unpleasant. In this nightmare it turned out i was involved in some bio-experiment where med students where experimenting some new ways of torturing people with smells and death-metal music an i was one of the people they tested their newly developped methods on.

I had probably heard on the news that day that in iraq and afganistan they where using unconventional method's of torturing. Exposing people to loud music being one of those new methods.

I recently had a lucid dream after reading this thread, and the result were interesting.

Here is a quote:

"then thinking of some things that I read about dreaming, that you can't smell stuff. this was cool because every time I sniffed I smelled my room, despite being in the nice spring air during a sunny day outside I just smelled my bed, which at least for me has very little smell. I heard a guy say something like "Who farted" I guess my mind trying to prove a point, still smelled my bed."

not sure if that is just when you are lucid though... or just for me.