Dreams are truly a deceiving entity. In all of recorded human history, our species has recorded and contemplated the meanings of these “sleep visions.” With all that scientists have been able to discover about the nature of the subconscious and what parts of the brain are active during sleep, associations can be made between the frequencies of color perception along the human timescale.Back in 1951, Scientific American reported that 29 percent of all dreams have some color in them. During that decade, people believing that they experienced their dreams in color were the minority. How were they to experience their dreams? Well, many reported that their subconscious spoke to them by means of black and white, much like the media that was prevalent during their time. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly that simple. Since there are multiple stages in the sleep cycle, experiments were conducted to see if patients awoken during REM sleep woke have a different response to the recollection of the visual aspect of their dream. The hypothesis was correct as 71 percent of the participants claimed to experience color. The experiment was conducted several times and most of the results claimed a similar number. It likely would have been even more useful if this experiment had been conducted in the 1950s alongside when people overwhelmingly believed that they perceived their dreams in black-and-white. That may have been a bigger indicator.
In addition, researchers were very interested in the social implications of the dream experience. It could be thought that media would have a lot to do with our experience of imaginary worlds. If one were to become immersed in television shows that were filmed in black and white, it could make sense that the brain would make that association and project that in one’s subconscious. Research was done on the percentage of people since the 1930s who reported dreaming in color. The results were not surprising. In 1935, 41 percent of people claimed to dream in color. This was an era before television was popular and way before color TV was popular and widespread. As the years moved on and alternate and more advanced forms of entertainment were introduced, media became more influential. In 1958, only nine percent of people reported that there was color to their dreams. Years later, in 1991, an astounding 74 percent of people reported color. Not only was color television by far the most popular, but people had long become accustomed to being exposed to imaginary worlds.
Again, there are thought to be many factors that contribute to the experience and recollection of color. Before the rise of scientific psychology during the late nineteenth century, scholars interested in dreaming generally stated or assumed that dreams contain color. For example, Aristotle includes color among the remnants that sense impressions may leave in the organs and which thus appear to us in sleep. Additionally, Descartes writes in his meditations about understanding the difference between sleep and conscious experience. In doing this he describes the color and other physical appearances of a piece of wax he melts by a fire. More recently, early psychologists were divided. One of them, Gustav Fechner, wrote, “I also never dream in color, but all my experiences in dreams appear to me as though proceeding in a kind of twilight or night.” This could be an indication that saying “color” isn’t necessarily an absolute quality. Perhaps there maybe be degrees of color experience and vividness or one may only experience certain colors and not others. Sigmund Freud stated that he experienced all colors except black, white, or gray. Of course, he and everyone else is limited to the few dreams that we can remember. Remembering specific attributes such as color may be a much more difficult thing to describe. In short, it’s not completely reliable to take people’s claimed experiences as gospel.
Looking at the time periods in which these people lived, we draw a similar conclusion to that of the color statistics over the years. Before scientific psychology, a consensus or assumption that dreams are colored was dominant. After that, there was a divided opinion into the early twentieth century and a consensus that dreams typically have little color from about 1930 to 1960; and then a sudden overturning of that consensus in the 1960s. Going further into this theory, it can’t be chance that this flourishing of black-and-white media coincided with the opinion that dreams are mostly black-and-white.
As these are intriguing statistics, Schwitzgiebel collected cross-cultural data with Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou, taking advantage of the fact that different groups in China had very different access to technology the time. Three different groups of students in China were studied with each group having a different socioeconomic background and consequently different levels of exposure to black-and-white and color media: low-status rural high school students, high-status students at an elite urban university, and intermediate-status students. Each of these groups was asked the same questions and the percentages reported in regards to color content were 29 percent for the lower class, 39 for intermediate class, and 52 for the upper class. Additionally, among the lower class, only 19 percent of the participants were exposed to color media before the age of eleven. For the upper class, that number was 76 percent. This evidence seems to favor the plausible conclusion that was drawn in regards to the color content claimed during the middle of the 20th century.
Black and white imaging in film and television media can alter and possibly dictate people’s dreams. Although such historical figures such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Freud claimed to dream in color, the average American during the 1950s dreamed mostly in black and white. However, color media today dominates, and as a result people more often claim to dream in color.
For example, after seeing a black-and-white film about Frankenstein’s monster, one might have a nightmare in which his black-and-white figure appears as one’s tormentor. And perhaps since most romantic movies seen by people living in English-speaking countries in 1950 were black-and-white, some of those people dreaming of themselves as romantic heroes would paint their dreamworld that way. Despite their cultural importance, photography, film, and television would seem unlikely to have so profound an effect on our cognition as to regularly transform our dreams of all the things we normally see in color to black-and-white, because although people’s opinions about their dreams changed as a result of exposure, the dreams themselves are not thought to have changed.
The profound changes in opinion about the coloration of dreams, then, do not appear to correspond to equally profound changes in the dreams themselves. It follows that at least some people must be pretty badly mistaken about their dreams. If dreams really are mostly in color, then an overwhelming percentage of those questioned must have been wrong about their recollection of their dreams. If dreams, in reality, are projected in black-and-white, then most of us around today are wrong. If dreams are projected in neither black-and-white nor color, then nearly everybody is wrong.
If one were attempting to defend the viewpoint that dreams actually are in black-and-white, he would argue that the failure of Aristotle, Descartes, and others to notice this feature of dreams was a result of the lack of black-and-white film or television media in their time. Despite what the implications of the media influence would be, it may have been natural to assume that since the things dreamed about are colored in real life, they are colored in dreams. Could it be possible that once black-and-white media gained prominence early in the twentieth century, people came to recognize that their dream images resembled the images in those media? And now that black-and-white media is becoming less and less influential, the masses have returned to mistakenly assuming that their dreams are full of color? This would likely imply that those who report their dreams in black-and-white are the observant ones. It could also be possible that people associate color to an object in a dream depending on what the identity of the object is. If I dream about a banana, I’m probably going to assume that the banana is yellow. Similarly, if I dream that I’m in front of my house, I’m going to apply the actual color of my house to the vision that I see in my subconscious.
In addition to this argument, the exact same argument could be made for dreams being in color. One would argue that the black-and-white media of the middle of the 20th century distorted our minds in such a way that we were deceived into thinking that our experiences were colorless. This does beg the thought that as media continues to develop and we are experiencing imaginary worlds more and more often, there may be other dimensions besides color that would require the proper consideration. As things around us become more vibrant and life-like, we are more elaborately deceived into subconsciously confusing reality with illusion.
Another important element to consider is the importance of psychiatric influence on the experience of dreams. It has been reported that fewer people in psychiatric hospitals report seeing their dreams in color despite such conditions as depression allegedly leading to more vivid dreams. Perhaps this could be considered evidence of lack of color. This would likely imply that people who claim to dream in color are not necessarily wrong about their experience but rather they are simply being deceived. On the other hand, there are studies that suggest that people who dream in color have more satisfying emotional lives.
Although the view that our dreams have color may seem more plausible to us today than the view that they are black-and-white, we should also consider the possibility that our dreams are neither color nor black-and-white, and that applying either of these categories is misleading. An analogy of this possibility is a novel. Novels themselves don’t necessarily contain color; rather, they use words to create colors and visions in our minds. Obviously, since our visual cortex is not receiving the ordinary input from the retina, different wavelengths of light are not exactly being perceived — although there remains a possibility that the mind still thinks that it is perceiving color, and projects accordingly. One might more naturally say that the images that a novel evokes in its readers are in color. Perhaps the novel is describing a car driving away, can we create a mental picture of this without attributing color to the car or its environment? It’s tough to say.
One thing that I find a little bit frustrating is the fact that neuroscience is not yet advanced enough to see exactly what sort of brain activity co-occurred with the conscious experience of color. We could see whether people showed this sort of brain activity while dreaming. But as things are, neuroscientists disagree about the neurological basis of color experience. This is something that we could look forward to in the future.
We still must give additional consideration to those who claim that their dreams are neither black-and-white nor color. Perhaps any media at all distorts what we experience during our sleep. If this is actually the case, then it is possible that we’ll never actually get to know or experience dreams in their “purest form” or a form without heavy influence of media.
To determine the coloration or non-coloration of the dreamworld proves surprisingly difficult — pending, at least, a lot more sophisticated psychological or neuroscientific research. All this thinking about the legitimacy of certain elements of our consciousness begs another question: is dreaming, in this respect, particularly elusive, or are we equally in the dark about other aspects of the stream of experience? One that includes all of our emotions, our waking imagery, our ongoing visual phenomenology? These are all big questions. As scientists are getting closer every day, it would seem quite magical to be able to completely know and “quantify” in a way. Although not knowing does give it a mysterious and wonderful nature that we who are alive currently can appreciate for the time being.
