Symbols & Meaning
Do we dream in colour? A question that changed answer twice
In the 1950s most people reported dreaming in black and white. Today almost nobody does. The most likely explanation says something uncomfortable about how much dream reports can be trusted.
Surveys of dream colour produce a genuinely strange historical pattern.
Studies from the 1910s found that most people reported at least some colour in dreams. Studies from the 1940s and 1950s found the opposite — a substantial majority reported dreaming in black and white, with colour rare or absent. From the 1960s onward the finding reversed again, and contemporary studies find that the large majority of dream reports contain colour.
Something changed. The question is what.
The media hypothesis
Eva Murzyn's 2008 study is the most cited investigation. She surveyed participants across age groups in Scotland and found a marked difference: people who had grown up with black-and-white television and film before the age of about ten reported significantly more greyscale dreams than those who grew up with colour media.
The proposal is that the dominant visual media of childhood shapes the assumed visual character of remembered dreams — either by influencing dream imagery itself, or by influencing how ambiguous imagery is subsequently described.
The correlation is real. The causal interpretation is contested, since age and cohort are confounded with a great many other things.
Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher who has written extensively on the unreliability of introspection, offers the more deflationary reading. Dream reports are reconstructions, not recordings. Colour in dreams is frequently indeterminate — most dream imagery is not experienced as either coloured or not, in the way a half-remembered scene is not. Asked to categorise it, people fall back on whatever assumption their culture supplies. In an era of black-and-white film, the natural analogy for a remembered visual sequence was black-and-white film.
Why this matters beyond the trivia
Because it is a controlled demonstration that dream reports are shaped by the reporter's assumptions, and that people are confident about features of their own experience that they cannot in fact access reliably.
Schwitzgebel's broader argument is that introspection about the character of conscious experience — how detailed peripheral vision is, whether we think in words or images, whether dreams have colour — is much less reliable than we assume, and that the history of dream colour is the cleanest available case study.
The consequence for dream research is uncomfortable. Essentially the entire field depends on verbal reports collected after waking. If a feature as basic as colour is subject to cultural framing, the same concern applies to reports of emotion, of narrative coherence, of bizarreness, and of everything else that gets coded and counted.
What the laboratory adds
Studies waking participants directly from REM and asking immediately about colour find high rates of colour reporting — considerably higher than retrospective surveys. Awakening from REM produces reports mentioning colour in the large majority of cases when the question is asked directly.
This supports the view that colour is generally present and that its apparent absence in retrospective reports is a memory and reporting artefact rather than a feature of the dreams themselves.
It also raises a second-order problem: asking directly about colour may prompt people to supply it. The literature on leading questions in eyewitness memory is not encouraging on this point.
The neurological evidence
Colour processing in the brain is reasonably well localised, principally to area V4 in the ventral occipital cortex.
Cerebral achromatopsia — loss of colour vision from damage to this region — is accompanied, in reported cases, by loss of colour in dreams. Patients describe dreaming in shades of grey following the injury.
This is good evidence that dream colour is generated by the same machinery as waking colour perception, and it fits the broader principle established by the studies of dreaming in congenitally blind people: dreams are constructed from stored perceptual material using the ordinary perceptual apparatus.
Individual variation
Some genuine variation appears to exist independent of reporting artefact.
People with higher visual imagery ability while awake report more vivid and more colourful dreams. Artists and designers report more attention to colour in dreams, plausibly because they attend to it more generally. And there are consistent reports of a small proportion of people who describe their dreams as genuinely low in colour, in the absence of any obvious cultural explanation.
Whether these represent real differences in dream experience or real differences in how experience is attended to and described is, again, not answerable with the available methods.
The honest conclusion
Most people probably dream in colour most of the time, and always have. What changed over the twentieth century was almost certainly not the dreams but the vocabulary available for describing them — and the fact that nobody noticed this at the time, and that the black-and-white finding was reported as a discovery about dreams rather than about reporting, is the more interesting part of the story.
