Bernardo Fleming. Dreaming in Smell.

A man who dreams in smell

Most dreams are images and sounds. Smell rarely appears. The exhibition text cites a 1998 Canadian study: only a minority of people ever smell anything in a dream.

Bernardo Fleming is one of that minority. Born in Argentina, he has spent more than twenty years in the scent industry and is global director of trends and strategic foresight at IFF, one of the world's largest flavour and scent companies. In other words, he lives among smells all day. And at night, smells follow him into sleep.

Dreaming in Smell was his first solo exhibition, at IAO Gallery in Los Angeles from 12 November to 2 December 2021. It was also among the first shows when the Institute for Art and Olfaction relaunched its gallery.

A notebook by the bed

The method starts simply. Fleming keeps a notebook next to his bed. Each morning he writes down the dream and the smells in it, before they fade.

He then took those notes to senior perfumers at IFF. Each received one dream and translated it into scent. The translation is not easy. A dream smell has no label. It is tangled with feeling, with place, with someone who just walked past.

The result is four fabric sprays. Each carries the name of a dream and its date, and most also the place where it was dreamed: Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

Four dreams

Dentista, May 2016, by Ricardo Moya. A dream of his mother coming home from her dental clinic. The scent is built around Cabotine de Grès, the perfume she wore every day, with clove, basil and eugenol, the familiar molecule of a dentist's room. Warm and clinically clean at once.

Departures, 23 February 2021, by Anh Ngô Nguyễn Việt. An empty casino, anxiety, the smell of damp carpet. Then a sudden flood of flowers and hairspray from other guests. Tuberose, jasmine, orange flower, over an animalic, musky ground.

Dýer Mak'er, 18 September 2021, by Meabh Mc Curtin. Named after a Led Zeppelin song, tied to a moment with a cassette tape and the feeling of stepping into adulthood. Built on palo santo and sage, with juniper, armoise, pepper, cedar and amber.

Cana, 6 October 2021, by Birgit Sijbrands. A strange traffic stop by the police, dreamed. Built around a red wine accord captured with IFF's technology for sampling the air around an object, with orris, violet, rose and musk.

Out of the bed, and back into it

In the gallery the four scents are not behind glass. They are sprayed onto sheets and pillows, hung on clotheslines and stacked on shelves. Visitors are invited to touch the fabric and lean in.

This choice closes the circle. The dream is born in bed. It is written on paper, passes through a perfumer's hands, becomes a liquid. Then it returns to fabric, where someone else might lie down and carry it into their own sleep.

Fleming says smell has a force unlike the other senses. It works directly through association and memory, without passing through language. Perhaps that is why a dream smell is so hard to retell.

The work is kin to devices that try to record memory through smell, such as Cyrus Clarke's The Anemoia Device. But Fleming needs no machine. Only a notebook, a morning, and a memory quick enough to catch the dream before it leaves.