Smell!
William Carlos Williams - 1883-1963
Oh strong-ridged and
deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What
tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always
indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring
flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet
earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our
desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not
be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less
unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue
in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know
everything?
Must you have a part in everything?
Something happened to me last night that has never occurred before. In a dream, I distinctly smelled a sewer. The smell was extremely strong, very distinct, and lasted just a few seconds before I suddenly woke up.
From past experience, I would describe the smell as a backup of sulfides, ammonia, methane, and other inorganic compounds. It made such a great impression on me that I immediately checked around the house to see if I could find a source for the nasty smell. None was there. Whatever I smelled must have been produced within the boundaries of my dreaming state.
The experience led me to research the occurrence of smells in dreams.
While human beings can and do dream of odor, it’s proven that only very few of them actually do. Reports claim olfactory and gustatory sensations occur in an extremely low percentage of all dream reports.
It's so infrequent that research on odors in dreams is choppy and incomplete at best.
The first study was done in 1893 when Mary Calkins, an instructor at Wellesley College analyzed dream diaries kept by two volunteers over a six-to-eight-week period. Her conclusions, then followed up in 1896, showed that odors show up in an estimated 15% of dreams.
(Mary Whiton Calkins. “Statistics of Dreams.” The American Journal of Psychology. April 1893.)
A long time would pass before anyone thought to study the subject again.
In 1956, psychiatrist Peter H. Knapp reviewed 544 dreams for his study “Sensory Impressions in Dreams” that was published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Knapp found the following:
“In general, a ‘sensory dream’ was scored if it could be established that the dreamer had had the actual impression of color; of kinesthesia in himself as dreamer, judged as one judges movement in a Rorschach response; of sound, including real acoustic awareness of words but excluding the mere impression of speech; or of smell or taste, both rare, and generally obvious to patients and investigator alike.”
(Peter H. Knapp. “Sensory Impressions in Dreams.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 25:3 1956.)
“Smell-taste dreams” according to the Knapp, “were decidedly rare. Only ten of them appeared in the entire study” He also concluded …
“There is abundant evidence that smell and taste, linked to the midbrain, are deeply repressed. We may be hungry but we seldom smell the dinner until we enter the kitchen.”
In other words, smell is quite difficult to conjure up even when awake. Can you think up a smell like you can a mental image? It is difficult. Mental imagery is not the same as dreaming; in the latter case, we are aware that the images are generated internally.
Another theory is evolutionary in nature. Some researchers speculate that the purpose of dreams (which is still very debated) does not require the use of smells in those dreams.
In this study published in Perceptual and Motor Skills (1998), researchers at McGill University and the University of Montreal found that approximately 33% of men and 40% of women recalled having experienced sensations of smell or taste in their dreams. A total of 3372 dream reports were collected and scored for unambiguous references to auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences.
Auditory experiences were reported in approximately 53% of all dream reports. Olfactory and gustatory sensations occurred in approximately 1% of all dream reports. A significantly greater percentage of women than men reported one or more dreams containing references to olfactory sensations. The results indicated that olfactory experiences are reported approximately twelve times more frequently in women's dream.
The authors conjectured that the imbalance might have occurred because women are more sensitive than men in detecting odors at subthreshold concentrations.
(Antonio L. Zadra, Tore A. Nielsen, and D.C. Donderi. “Prevalence of Auditory, Olfactory, and Gustatory Experiences In Home Dreams.” Perceptual and Motor Skills. 1998.)
I found some information about stinky smells like mine though it just seems obvious.
German researchers (Professor Boris Stuck and his team from the University Hospital Mannheim) are reported that when people smelled the scent of rotten eggs while sleeping, the nature of their dreams turned decidedly negative, while those who got a whiff of the scent of roses had more positive dreams.
"We were able to stimulate the sleeper with high concentrations of positively and negatively smelling odours and measure if the stimuli were incorporated into the dreams and changed the emotional tone of dreams," said Stuck.
(Rebecca Carroll. “Smells Influence Dreams, Study Says.” National Geographic News. September 23, 2008.)
In later research, Michael Schredl and his colleagues (2009) published in the Journal of Sleep Research that “external stimuli presented during sleep can affect dream content, thus reflecting information processing of the sleeping brain.” Olfactory stimuli should have a stronger effect on dream emotions because their processing is linked directly to the limbic system.
Schredl says ..
“To summarize, it was shown that the hedonic tone (characterized by pleasure) of olfactory stimuli are processed during REM sleep and affect dream content. In extension to previous work in the field, we showed the special status of pure olfactory stimuli in this context in contrast to other sensory modalities, i.e. a minimal effect on dream content and a strong effect on dream emotions.
“The minimal effect on dream content might be explained by the lack of arousals in poststimulation EEG, indicating clearly that pure olfactory stimuli are processed differently to stimuli of other sensory modalities. We hypothesized that the strong effect on dream emotions is due to the direct connectivity of the olfactory bulb (and not for other sensory modalities) to the amygdala processing emotional memory during REM sleep.
“Whether olfactory stimuli are presented directly in dreams is a question which has not yet been answered; it might be speculated that declarative material which is associated with the specific odour might be found more often. Studies with presleep learning sessions in which odour cues are associated with specific cues might shed light on memory processing and consolidation during sleep. In addition, it would be interesting to study nightmare sufferers, i.e. whether positively toned olfactory stimuli yield a significant shift in the emotional tone of nightmares.”
(Michael Schredl et al. “Information processing during sleep: the effect of olfactory stimuli on dream content and dream emotions.” Journal of Sleep Research. August 11, 2009.)
Conclusions
Research (2004) warns: “Phenomenological evidence for olfactory sensation in the absence of appropriate stimulation – imagery – is inconclusive and draws most support from reports of olfactory hallucinations.”
Therefore …
What am I supposed to think about the gagging sewer smell in my dream? Well, for one thing, there is still the question about whether self-reports like mine are trustworthy, and even more questions about how I could define a smell experience in a dream that is most likely not generated by external stimuli. It felt as if I had smelled the odor … I do know that my nose was on fire with it in my dream state.
If, then, I did really “smell” in my dream, just how and why and what exactly it was are very debatable. Let's say I am one of the male dream-sniffing minority. The stinky dream did clearly affect my emotions – I woke up and looked for the origin of the smell. However, I have absolutely no recollection of smelling something like a rotten egg or decomposing waste before the dream. That doesn't mean a whole lot to me because dreams are so unpredictable and capable of combining elements of the memory from long ago.
Dreams are confusing. But, have you ever considered just how difficult it is to accurately describe a smell? Even the expert super smellers like perfumers who possess hyperosmia, a heightened smell function, are extremely rare.
So, even talking about smells can feel a little like talking about dreams – tedious and vague and potentially inaccurate. Although human and constantly at hand, smell defies our expressive capacities in a way that other senses don’t. In our clumsy efforts at the ineffable, we lack the language of expression.
Harold McGee wrote a nearly seven-hundred-page new book, Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells (2020 Penguin Press), the result of a ten-year quest to name and categorize every noticeable fragrance on earth.
To close this blog entry, allow me to share New Yorker review of McGee's book that contains information about a common smell to illustrate the points that smells are complex and often misunderstood …
“Ever wonder why sweaty armpits stink? And, in the worst cases, why they stink of shallots in particular? McGee reports that the apocrine sweat glands, which kick into high gear during adolescence, do their best to hide the evidence of their own microbiomal bouquet. Sugars and amino acids bind to volatile, potentially rank molecules, thereby preventing the release of any foul smell. But when bacterial interlopers, such as bacillus and staphylococcus, break these bonds and “liberate” compounds like hydroxymethyl-hexanoic acid, then the full power of B.O. is unleashed: “rancid, animal, cumin-like.”
“McGee’s tangled web of fragrance families starts to reveal fascinating relationships. By charting the genealogy of the piquant invaders of teen-age underarms, he discovers that they are the 'very same molecules that scent goat and sheep meats, milks, cheeses, and wools.'
“This is no accident. Traditional cheese-makers cultivated their curds with a 'sweat-like brine' for weeks. Once humans realized they could mimic their own bodily ripeness in their food, they simply couldn’t help themselves. 'The smells of the human body may be socially embarrassing,' McGee writes, 'but for children, and privately for adults, they’re often irresistible.'
“The cozy relationships between natural secretions and savory foods, or accidental emissions and eros, are well known to anyone who has nuzzled the dirty scalp of a loved one, but McGee lays out the molecular evidence for these desires. We might like to think we are most drawn to lovely, “clean” smells – laundry, linden blossoms, a eucalyptus breeze – but more often than not our greatest sensory delight comes from our most intimate, and most odiferous, nooks and crannies.
(Rachel Syme. “How to Make Sense of Scents: Can language ever capture the mysterious world of smells?” The New Yorker. January 25, 2021.)
Sweat
Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.
Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
A landscape will bloom in that saturation.
My daddy's body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights. I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.
They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch song
had one refrain--oh the pain of loving you.
Friday nights they'd line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.
Babies have been conceived on sweat alone--
the buttery scent of a woman's breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor
of black lunch boxes--cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper--my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.
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