Dreaming about the smell of smoke
Can you smell things in dreams?
Rarely, and this is one of the few places it happens, which makes it worth its own scenario.
Smell is the rarest sense in dream reports by a wide margin. Dreams are overwhelmingly visual, generate sound sparingly, produce pain almost never, and produce smell less often still. So a dream that includes one is doing something unusual.
Smoke appears here more than almost any other image, along with burning and occasionally food. Why those and not others is not established.
Check the room. A real smell reaches a sleeper as readily as a real sound does, and a dream will build an explanation around whatever it receives. If anything was genuinely burning, that matters considerably more than the reading.
Where this reads well
Verifiable against something external, and one of the rarer dream features to catch.
Where it is harder
Where something really is burning, this is not a dream to interpret. Check first.
Worth asking yourself
Was there a real smell? Did I actually smell it, or know it was there? Have I smelt anything else in a dream?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
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