Mind & behavior · 2009
Can pleasant or unpleasant smells during sleep change the mood of dreams?
Yes—in a small human experiment, pleasant and unpleasant smells shifted dream emotions in matching directions. Researchers studied 15 healthy volunteers with a normal sense of smell during REM sleep, comparing rose-like and rotten-egg-like odors with no odor stimulation. The emotional changes were statistically significant, but no instances of smelling something within a dream were found. The abstract does not report how large the changes were.
Details
Researchers delivered odors through participants’ noses during REM sleep. They used a rose-like odor as the pleasant stimulus and a rotten-egg-like odor as the unpleasant stimulus, along with a condition without odor stimulation.
The pleasant odor led to more positive dream emotions, while the unpleasant odor was followed by more negative ones. These changes were statistically significant. However, the researchers found no instances of participants smelling something within their dreams. The findings suggest that the sleeping brain can process odor information and that a smell’s pleasantness or unpleasantness can influence dream emotions without the smell being directly experienced in the dream.
The experiment involved only 15 healthy people with normal smell function, and the abstract does not give the size of the emotional changes. It therefore leaves unclear how noticeable the changes were. Whether pleasant odors could help with nightmares was proposed as a topic for future research, not demonstrated by this experiment.
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