SMELLING

Dream Meaning

Smell is the sense most intimately connected to memory and emotion, bypassing rational thought entirely, which makes it the psyche's most honest messenger in dreams. When a dream is dominated by scent, your unconscious is communicating something that words and images alone could not carry accurately enough — something felt rather than reasoned.

A beautiful, evocative fragrance arrives laden with memory and positive emotion, often the psyche's way of reconnecting you with a time, person, or quality of experience that holds something you currently need. An acrid or warning smell carries its caution in the most primitive possible language: this is wrong, dangerous, contaminated — turn away.

Trust the olfactory intelligence of your dreaming mind; it is drawing on layers of accumulated experience that your waking senses may have learned to rationalize or ignore.