This review is for the older version of The Dreamer, with the nebula cloud on the box, as opposed to the even, star-patterned packaging of the re-release. Not that it matters much, as I hear the new version is pretty faithful to the original, with perhaps a touch more tobacco in the opening. This is a very nice fragrance. It's a unique concept, executed with loving directness, possessing an intelligence and three-dimensional intellect few designer releases strive for. I've read all sorts of comparisons and analyses of The Dreamer, and almost none of them do it justice. It wouldn't be surprising if mine fell grossly short as well. This 1996 creation is not an easy fragrance to wear, especially on a daily basis, and isn't by any means your typical, saccharine, tonka-heavy nineties masculine. In fact, it doesn't smell of any one decade's style at all, but instead has a strangely timeless character.
The Dreamer is basically a soapy green fragrance overlaid with the smell of un-smoked cigarettes. You know that first whiff of a freshly-opened pack of Marlboros? That's the tobacco note in here. It's treated tobacco, not the raw leaf. It has a very brownish, almost raisin-like hue, with a tender balance between sweetness and spice. It smells at once clean and sooty. Framing that is a little ditty of muguet, lavender, pine, and orange citrus. It's perhaps not the intended effect, but to me this facet of The Dreamer smells like Zest Aqua soap. It's a snappy, partly floral, partly herbal affair. When patched to the tobacco, it creates the essence of a freshly-scrubbed guy who just stepped out into the woods for a moment of absent-minded solitude with his ciggies, that precious moment before lighting up in the wilderness ever-so-lucidly captured in perfume.
People complain about The Dreamer's "cacophonous" opening. The opening is a bit unusual, with its green top note vying for attention over an otherwise-linear tobacco accord, but I don't find it to be especially over the top. It's sharper and less defined than what follows, but it smells clean and strangely refreshing. Comparisons to JPG's Le Mâle also abound, but I smell no similarity. Le Mâle has no tobacco, and precious little green-soapiness (it does have a more powdery-vanillic lavender soapiness), so I can't find the connection between these two. But I do admire The Dreamer's ability to replicate the physical space surrounding a hypothetical, wilderness-bound smoker who leans against oak trees before lighting up. I'm not sure I want to smell of that headspace often, but when I do, I'll wear this one-of-a-kind EDT from a brand that usually dabbles in commercial dreck. At least there's one Versace worth wearing, and it's a real dream.