Olfactory Hallucinations

I've written about olfactory hallucinations a time or two. This also could be called smell illusions, smell deceptions, sensory trickery, odor fantasies. They've been coming and going for me.

It started popping back up -- I'm no good with time -- like a week and a half, two weeks ago. Then it comes and goes, where it's not so bad. Today, right now it's somewhat worse. But nothing is as bad as it was last September and into October. If that ever happens again, I trust I will recognize it as such; in those months I thought it was objectively bacteria in the area.

There are weird smells that I'm smelling, and when I run them by my significant other she says she doesn't smell them. Like my hand, right between my thumb and first finger. It's a bad smell, which is hard to describe. I tried to see if she could discern anything and she said no. Later I said it smells like "a fart filtered through a metal comb," whatever that would smell like. You figure, though, the metal comb would give more of a metallic edge to whatever it comes in contact with. But it's still not descriptive, because who really knows -- there has to be a range of smells that would qualify.

I've been wearing a jacket quite a bit. I've noticed it smelling funky. So I took it and washed and dried it. It smells better, which tells me something. There is something objectively there. And my sense of smell is picking up on it. The tricky part is whether my brain is discerning it in any normal way, such as what the average healthy person would discern. I think that's where the difference is.

This is a subject I'm now interested in. I've read that one of the possible causes for this is brain tumor. Which sounds scary. But doesn't it seem like there'd be other indicators? I'm also wondering if the amount of sleep you get has anything to do with the intensity of the odors. Nothing's charted out. It's all anecdotal. So to speculate at this point would be just to be guessing with not much to go on.