SLEEEPING on a bed of roses can sweeten your dreams, it seems.
While 15 volunteers slept, Boris Stuck of University Hospital Mannheim in Germany and colleagues released bursts of chemicals that mimicked the smell of either rotten eggs or roses.
The researchers waited until their subjects had entered the rapid eye movement phase of sleep, when most dreams occur, and then exposed them to a high dose of scented air before waking them up and quizzing them about their dreams.
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Asked to rate the pleasantness of their dreams, those who had smelled roses recorded positive feelings while those who had sniffed rotten eggs reported a negative dream experience.
Stuck, who presented his findings at the American Academy of Otolaryngology鈥檚 annual meeting in Chicago last Sunday, says the key is to sneak enough scent into the sleeping brain. Unlike many other smells, rose and rotten egg do not wake up volunteers by irritating the nose, so 鈥渨e were able to stimulate sleepers with really high dose of scent鈥�, he says.
The team now hopes to test their ideas on people who suffer from nightmares to see if the right type of scent can help make their dreams more pleasant.
The Human Brain 鈥� With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.
