Do you dream in smell?

Last night I had a dream where I ran into an old friend from high school. Actually, rather than calling him a “friend,” it would be more accurate to call him a “drug-dealing acquaintance.” It was in a restaurant kitchen. He was waiting tables and bringing back a load of dishes. I don’t know what I was doing there. 

He stopped, and we said “hey,” in the surprised way you say it to someone you haven’t seen in years. After only a couple seconds of pleasantries, he excitedly offered me some cocaine (man, he hadn’t changed a bit!). I hesitated, so he grabbed a bag of it out of his breast pocket and offered to let me smell it. In my dream world, evidently, smell is an adequate test of the quality of coke.

So I took a whiff, which inadvertently became a half-snort. It smelled exactly—exactly—the way I remember cocaine smelling: mediciney, with a touch of sweet spiciness to it. What’s weird about it is that I haven’t smelled that smell in almost seven years. But in my dream it was perfect.

I think it’s the first time I’ve smelled anything in a dream. I can’t say for sure I’ve never had a dream that wasn’t somehow informed by smell—like, “Hey, I smell smoke, so maybe I should try to find where the fire is!”—but I’m pretty sure this is the only one I’ve had where a smell took center stage. This whiff of cocaine was so striking and true to life that—obviously—I was thinking about it long after dream’s end. In fact, it even took me a while to realize that the sensation was only imagined. I woke up thinking about the smell of cocaine, and it was only after I got out of the early morning quasi-reality that I remembered I hadn’t actually snorted cocaine since I was 18. 

This got me thinking about which of our senses are present in dreams, and to what extent. I think most people would say their entire sensory selves are present in their dreams. I don’t think this is true, even though I’m only extrapolating from my own experience.

How many dreams have you had where you smelled something distinct? How many dreams have you had where you touched something and really noticed its texture? Or what about the more complicated parts of sight: patterns, optical illusions, light sources and shadows? How often are you aware of those things in your dreams? 

It’s common in conversations about dreaming to ask people if they dream in color or in black and white. I’ve always thought this was sort of a bogus question, derived from a mistaken analogizing of dreams and movies (If you asked someone from the pre-film era if he dreamed in black and white, he’d probably ask where you came up with such an absurd question.). Still, the question illustrates our basic uncertainty concerning what we actually sense in our dreams.

I think people ask the question in the first place because they’re unsure of their own answers. They want other people to help them decide. I’ve never really believed the people who claim to dream in black and white. It seem ridiculous that anyone’s dreams would conform to a convention of cinematography that existed for only 50 years. But I don’t doubt that these people see no color in their dreams. I think the explanation may be that they don’t really see anything at all. 

In some of my experiences with psychedelics, I felt that I wasn’t “seeing” the kaleidoscopic patterns unfolding behind my closed eyelids, but rather that I was just imagining them so intensely that it was pretty much the same thing as seeing them. I think something similar is going on in dreams. 

Everything we “sense” in dreams is, of course, just a product of imagination, and it’s only through our unconscious laziness that we convince ourselves that the sensory parts of our brains are actually being engaged. Only in rare, rare instances (for me, at least) are the senses involved in any way I can point to. It takes something as odd as a forgotten acquaintance pulling out some high-quality blow for my imagination to reach all the way to my olfactory nerves. 
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P.S. This essay doesn't really contradict my lucid dream one, because that lucid dream was a total anomaly.