Most of us do not wake with a clear picture of what just happened in a dream. There’s face flashes, unfinished place outlines, and emotions that remain longer than images. An age-old question vexing scientists, philosophers, and anyone who has tried to unpack a dream—do we dream in color or black and white?
If you gathered larger populations of people today, color would be their confident answer. Bright blue skies, bright red dresses, emerald green fields—all appear ever so vivid and real. But as we step back a few generations, look at what is interesting. In the 1940s and 1950s, there was a lot of talk about dreams being predominantly black-and-white. What is responsible for this change? Did human beings wake up one day and start dreaming differently, or was it something else?
A Glimpse Into the Past
The study of dreams got a major thrust around the middle of the 20th century, by which time black-and-white movies and TV were the mainstay of popular culture. Psychologists began surveying people on their dreams, and to their astonishment, a large number of respondents claimed that they hardly saw any color in their sleep.
Several decades down the line, a reversal of that finding had occurred. The shift had raised compelling questions: had the nature of our dreaming changed, or had the nature of our memories changed?” In the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of experiment subjects avowed that they dreamed in technicolor, the most decisive variance being the introduction of color television.
Memory, Imagination, and the Mind’s Eye
It proves quite tough to study dreams. While dreaming, we cannot say what is happening until we wake. By that time, the brain has already gone about rewriting and smoothing over the details. Therefore, dream recall reports are really memories of dreams-and much more about remembering dreams.
It seems that, according to some psychologists, how we remember our dreams has been colored (literally) from what surrounds us. When black-and-white images-daily newspapers, television, and photography-were in society’s consciousness, it was then that people “remembered” their dreams in that sort of medium. Their waking life experiences were in turn responsible for the shaping of those memories.
To put it differently, it is not that the colored and mundane dreaming ceased in the 1950s; it was only that the very people who could not associate it with color had never thought much in vivid color their waking time and, thus, were unable to recall their dreaming with it.
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What the Science Says
With the help of empirical attempts to wake subjects in REM periods, when the most vivid dreaming occurs, researchers have painted a complex picture. Most participants narrate colorful dreams with soft hues, distinguished not very differently from waking life. The impression is not one of high resolution or clarity; it is more like one is viewing the world through slightly muted glasses.
Still, there are dreams that do look black and white, or at least those that have very weak color impressions. And they are typically dreams that are less vivid or less emotional. Vivid, emotional dreams tend to be awash in bright, sharp colors—the red of the stoplight, the gold of the sunrise.
Seeing Isn’t Always Believing
Dreaming does not involve the eyes. When we “see” something in a dream, our brain is composing the image from memory, emotion, and imagination. So while we may be inclined to say that we “see color” in dreams, it is probably more accurate to call it a mental impression-the archetype of color- rather than a sensory experience.
After all, the brain is an excellent storyteller and fills in the gaps all on its own. Just as easily as we can imagine a red apple without seeing it, we can dream about one. For it remains very loosely debatable whether we even see the apple’s redness/concept of color while dreaming.
So What Is the Answer?
The consensus amongst experts is that most people dream in color, albeit probably not in the same command-high-contrasting style that we perceive in the waking world. Dreams are less solid, more emotional than visual, and color is more readily evoked when it carries significance.
But your question gets to the crux of it: We can be never really sure. Our conversation about colors might be just a creation of memory after we wake. Then our mind, indeed, does not only recall; it reconstructs.
So, the next time you wake up from a dream, take a minute before the memory drifts away. Try to remember not only what you saw but how you saw it. Was it colorful? Was it dull? The truth is perhaps that we bring color onto our dreams—perhaps they are colorless.
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