I’ve been suffering from phantom smells for several years, but in the past few weeks it’s become pretty distressing.
The basic phantom smell is smoky; the closest comparison I can draw is cigarette smoke. Sometimes it’s so intense that I spray cologne on a cotton ball and huff on it through the day. This really helps a lot, not just in the instant of sniffing cologne, but for several minutes afterwards. Perhaps it temporarily overloads the sensors.
There’s a new problem though. I’ve long suspected that the basic smoke smell is not quite a hallucination, but rather how my nose/brain interprets, specifically, the combination of ordinary household smells: self, cat, carpet, cooking, flowers, whatever. All combine into what I perceive as smoke. The new problem is that the combo smells are becoming a complete nightmare.
Example, more than 1 food cooking at a time. One level of my perception can pick out the pot roast smell and the cherry pie smell separately, but they combine into very strong smoke. Open the window at dusk to let in some fresh air, and the sweet-smelling night blooming flower scent comes in, making the combo smell like a raging housefire. It’s intolerable.
My doctor shrugs; my shrink shrugs. I think my next stop is an ENT, and meanwhile a Neti Pot several times per day. Any other ideas? Fellow sufferers?
(Final notes: my actual sense of smell is generally not very good. I smoked cigs for years, and may have had Covid at some point. I have trouble with smelling real things, but man-o-man, I do smell the not-real things.)
My wife has powerful olfactory hallucinations of smoke as a symptom of her menopause. I, uh, presume this does not apply to you.
Edit to add: the set of suggested threads below seems to imply that smoke is a very common phantom smell. I find it curious that this specific odor would predominate; I mean, why not roses or dirty shoes or sea water or anything else? Why smoke? It makes me wonder if there’s a basis in common for this specific smell.
(btw you’re correct; I am not menopausal nor was nor will be.)
To the extent that the phantom smell is purely psychological, nothing to do with nasal nerves or olfactory receptors, I can tell you why smoke in my case. The smell started out 100% real, during the Oregon wildfires of 2020. The smoke where I live got into everything – the whole house smelled of wildfire smoke for weeks after the air had cleared. Over the coming weeks and months, I never stopped smelling the smoke in the house, but at some point my partner – who has a very sensitive nose – gently broke it to me that the house no longer smelled, it was just me thinking that.
And I do still smell it; the unshakable perception that the house is filled with smoke or its residue hasn’t stopped since 2020 but I must accept it’s all in my head, one way or another. The transition from real smoke smell to imagined smoke smell was 100% seamless; I couldn’t tell you if the house stopped “really” smelling like smoke in late 2020 or Spring 2021 or what. I trust his nose, and he says the place just smells like the dog who lived here 15 years ago.
I ought to add: I’m grateful the smell is no worse than smoke. I can think of so many worse things.
And if I ever start smelling oranges, I will definitely look out for some kid in Colorado trying to send me a message. Maybe it’s some different kid who hasn’t got it quite right. Hope he’s OK.
First thing that comes to mind was this - I can smell burnt toast - but while Wilder Penfield was a doctor, I am not him, nor am I a doctor, and diagnosing epilepsy based off of TV is not best practice.
Speculation: Because smoke is a potential sign of great danger, we’ve evolved a built-in bias to notice it lest we fry in a forest fire or the like. Which in this case is glitching and “noticing” smoke that doesn’t exist.
Sort of like the well known tendency of humans to see faces in random shapes.
