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SUNDAY, Sept. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Can the smell of rotten eggs or roses change the type of dream you have?
Quite possibly, new research suggests.
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German researchers are reporting that when people smelled the scent of rotten eggs while sleeping, the nature of their dreams turned decidedly negative, while those who got a whiff of the scent of roses had more positive dreams.
"We were able to stimulate the sleeper with high concentrations of positively and negatively smelling odors and measure if the stimuli were incorporated into the dreams and changed the emotional tone of dreams," said the study's lead author, Dr. Boris Stuck, a professor of otorhinolaryngology at Heidelberg University.
"We found that the sleeper hardly ever dreamed of smelling something. Nevertheless, the emotional tone of the dream did change depending on the stimulation," he said.
Stuck said that previous research had shown that other types of stimulation, such as sound, pressure or vibration, could influence the content and the emotional tone of dreams.
The difficulty in conducting such research, he said, is finding the point where you can introduce a stimulus that's strong enough to influence a dream, but not so strong that it wakes the sleeper. Certain odors, such as peppermint, not only stimulate the sense of smell, but can irritate the nasal passages as well.
To overcome this, Stuck and his colleagues used chemicals that simulated either the smell of roses or the smell of rotten eggs.
The study included 15 young, healthy females. As the women entered rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, when dreaming occurs, they were exposed to either a non-odorous control smell, the rose smell or the rotten egg smell. Each woman underwent three REM "awakenings," so they were exposed to each test once.
Once awakened, they were asked to report the content of their dreams. In 40 of the 45 awakenings, dreams were reported.
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