Two records together
Smelling somebody who has died
Smell is the rarest thing in dream reports by a wide margin. Where it appears in a grief dream, people describe it as the part that made the dream feel real.
What the combination adds
This is the most striking claim in the sensory material and it comes from the dreamers rather than from us.
Smell appears in a small fraction of dream reports, far below sight and sound, and taste is rarer still. When it does appear it is nearly always familiar rather than novel: a perfume, a house, a hospital, cut grass.
So a grief dream carrying a smell is unusual twice over. And dreamers who report one describe it as more convincing than any image in the dream, over and above seeing or speaking to the person.
Olfactory memory is unusually durable and unusually tied to particular episodes, which may account for it. This database cannot establish that from reports and will not pretend to.
Whether such a dream is contact with the dead is not a question this site can answer. What can be said is that these are common, are a normal part of grieving, and are described afterwards as valuable far more often than as distressing.
The two records
Each is a full entry in its own right, and each covers ground this page does not.
- Dead relative
Dreams of the dead are extremely common in bereavement, are frequently reported as comforting rather than distressing, and are taken seriously by grief researchers as part of how mourning proceeds. What they are not is evidence of contact.
- Smell
Smell is the rarest sense in dream reports by a wide margin, which makes any dream containing one worth recording. Where a smell does appear, dreamers almost always recognise it, and it is almost always connected to a person or a place.
Worth asking
What was the smell? Did I recognise it immediately? Did it feel more real than the rest of the dream?