Often when we recall our dreams, the primary recollection is a visual one, full of imagery and colour.  However, my clients usually report dreams where they recollect experiences from their other senses, perhaps recalling voices they heard or the taste of some food they ate in the dream.

Recently a client shared a series of dreams in which her most vivid sensation was a fresh and powerful scent.  As we explored her dream episodes, it became clear that she was experiencing this olfactory event when she was feeling anxious in the dream.  My client has suffered from anxiety and panic attacks since her early teenage years and we were exploring her dreams to find a way to reduce and eliminate these anxieties.   I asked her if she could find out what the scent was.  She spent some days trying to find it, and then the answer came to her while she was having a shower.  The scent from the dream was a shower gel from Boots by the name of Sea Kelp and Water Mint. 

I asked her what she experienced when she realised what the mysterious scent was, and she described a sense of relief at solving the mystery, but this was then followed by a feeling of anxiety and mild panic as she stood in the steam and spray of the shower.  I listened to the rhythm of her voice and the cadences she used when saying the name Sea Kelp and Water Mint, and remembered how she sometimes she used the phrase ‘Wait a minute’ when I invited her to relate a hazier part of a dream.  She usually pronounced the phrase as wait’r min’t and as I listened to her speak, the similarity to Water Mint emerged.  This is an example of a homophone, a word that has the same pronunciation as another word but differs in meaning.  Our language in waking life and our dream vocabulary are often intertwined, and we routinely use homophones in dreams to express what we might be feeling.

I suggested the solution to my client’s anxiety attacks was to ‘Seek Help and Wait a Minute’ as soon as she started to feel anxious.  She is a proud and independent woman, and does not like to show any vulnerabilities by asking for help.  So instead of feeling even more anxious at the first sign of anxiety and becoming involved in a spiral of tension, her deliberate action should be to voice her feelings of anxiety to others and to wait for sixty seconds to see if the anxiety trigger was really worth panicking about.  She has begun using this process, and is reporting far less anxiety episodes than she experienced previously.

Our unconscious will communicate with our conscious in whatever way it can, and as well as using homophones, my client’s unconscious self used synesthesia.  In synesthesia, we may experience a sensation usually associated with one sense through one or more of other senses.  For example, we may ‘hear a colour’ or ‘taste a sound’.  In this case, my client heard through her nose, and used her sense of smell to tell herself what she couldn’t hear with her ears.