Sweet Dreams are Made of Sniffs

It’s no secret that what we hear while we sleep, deprived of visual stimuli, is often incorporated into our dreams. A euphoric dream fueled by the sound of ocean waves and soft music can take a nightmarish turn for the worse if a wailing siren or barking dog enters the equation. But what about that that other sense which, like hearing, does not rest when we do? Does what we smell while we sleep have the power to guide our dreams?

Absolutely, according to new evidence presented at this weekend’s 2008 American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery Foundation (AAO-HNSF) Annual Meeting & OTO EXPO in Chicago. For their study, titled The Impact of Olfactory Stimulation on Dreams, German researchers Boris A. Stuck, Desislava Atanasova, Kathrin Frauke Grupp, and Michael Schredl stimulated sleeping subjects with either positive volatile odorants (such as roses) or negative ones (such as rotten eggs). The subjects were then awakened and asked to relate their impressions of what they had been dreaming. The dreams of those who had exposed to the unpleasant odorant were predominantly colored with negative emotions, while those stimulated with the pleasant odorant almost all reported sweet dreams.

As the impact of aromatherapy become more and more widely understood, this experiment marks the first valid study documenting the impact of olfactory function on dreams, say the researchers, and may open a whole new field of study into therapeutic intervention using nocturnal olfactory stimulation.