wrap your troubles in dreams

September 20, 2005 9:45 PM

Do you dream in black and white or color or both at different times? If both, is there any pattern to when?

I almost exclusively dream in color and the limited number of people I've asked also seem to. Yet I've heard it suggested that most people dream in black and white. So I'm curious as to how mefites dream.

I said almost exclusively in color as I had one recurring nightmare as a child that was in black and white. I had the dream many times but it probably stopped at about age ten. But it wasn't a real life type dream. I was in a house with this family who almost looked like Edvard Munch characters. Everything looked like it was almost drawn with a cross hatch style. The house had lots of corridors and a sunken living room. The family kind of followed me but weren't malicious. Just very creepy for a kid. Every other dream I remember has been color.

I did a search of the site but didn't find anything addressing this question. Limited internet searching didn't turn up much concrete. A reference to woman dreaming in color but men in black and white (I'm male BTW). One site had a paper suggesting people dream in color and the idea of black and white arose in the 20th century with the advent of B&W film and tv.

posted by 6550 to health & fitness (22 comments total)

Always color. (I can't provide any other input, sorry)
posted by null terminated at 9:47 PM on September 20, 2005

Color as well for me.
posted by Dean Keaton at 10:09 PM on September 20, 2005

Always color here too.
posted by ordu at 10:12 PM on September 20, 2005

Always vivid color. I've had recurring nightmares and they're always color, too.

But I dream 'words', both written and conversations, much more than I do images. So, sort of vague background images that focus much more on words.
posted by LadyBonita at 10:18 PM on September 20, 2005

it's not black and white as in the silver gelatin kind of b/w, it's mostly the lighting that washes out the colors. so yes, I go from Black Hawk Down's sparkling, blinding mid-day scenes to washed-out, almost nonexistent colors in diffused light like a gloomy fall's day. it's the lighting that affectrs that colors, sometimes bleeding them out

I wish I could have dreams lighted by Chris Doyle
posted by matteo at 10:19 PM on September 20, 2005

oh, and my sex dreams are always harshly lit, like late-80's pornography
posted by matteo at 10:20 PM on September 20, 2005

ive never had a black and white dream
posted by Satapher at 10:39 PM on September 20, 2005

I remember my dreams almost all the time. Of the thousands and thousands of dreams I've remembered, I've had exactly one in black and white. And there was some color at the end, IIRC. That particular dream basically emulated an old-black and white movie in a lot of other ways too.

Other then that, always in color, always in three dimensions.

I think the 'people dream in black and white' came from a time when most people got most of their visual stimulus in black and white, from monochrome movies and TV.
posted by delmoi at 10:51 PM on September 20, 2005

I dream in faded out colors most of the time, too - not black and white but not vivid.
posted by ruevian at 11:00 PM on September 20, 2005

Your dream sounds like that "Take On Me" video from the 80s by the band Aha.

I always dream in color, but oddly enough... there are never any shadows.
posted by idiotfactory at 11:27 PM on September 20, 2005

all color, on ocassion vividly so...I can remember as a child being chased by a Chinese Dragon that was half "real" / half parade float (not sure what the real name for it is)...It was super bright and colorful (and scary) and seemed to be infinitely long.
posted by mmascolino at 11:28 PM on September 20, 2005

If forced to give an answer, I guess I'll say color. But I don't really know if I dream in either.

Here's a philosophy paper that contains a bunch of interesting statistics on how dream color reports have changed over time. This may be the paper that you mentioned having found already.

Abstract: In the 1950's, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming presume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected with this change in media technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the phenomenology of our own dreams is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be.
posted by painquale at 1:07 AM on September 21, 2005

Same as delmoi. Always colour, once only in black and white (more like sepia, actually) in which I was Anne Boleyn (and dreamed an exact representation of Hampton Court despite never having been there or seen a picture) and woke up when I was beheaded.
posted by corvine at 4:59 AM on September 21, 2005

Back and forth, no discernable reasoning.

I like old movies, so that may have something to do with it.
posted by Pollomacho at 5:33 AM on September 21, 2005

Always color, although it's often faded.
posted by rxrfrx at 5:42 AM on September 21, 2005

Always in color, sometimes I can smell and touch things too.

A long time ago I read that blind people dream with their other senses.
posted by brujita at 6:13 AM on September 21, 2005

always color ... like delmoi, i think the whole black and white dream thing was because of movies and tv being in black and white
posted by pyramid termite at 6:50 AM on September 21, 2005

Another for faded/selective color palettes. I have had some vividly colored, beautiful dreams, but it's generally earth tones and greys or forest colors.
posted by rebirtha at 10:06 AM on September 21, 2005

Always in living color, but one time it was literally like a mid-40s Disney cartoon. I was in an attic bedroom in an old row-house with a thatched roof in some European town, and the only illumination was from moonlight and the fireplace. The colors were glorious, and I can still picture the room today, some 20 years later.
posted by kimota at 12:27 PM on September 21, 2005

I always dream in muted colour - never vivid colour and never in black and white.
posted by deborah at 1:12 PM on September 21, 2005

Vivid colour - though I probably have had parts of black & white once in a while. They're very cinematic.
posted by divabat at 2:57 PM on September 21, 2005

Thanks for the responses. Seems people overwhelmingly dream in color but maybe washed out colors for some. For myself, I can't recall colors being any different from real life.
posted by 6550 at 3:21 PM on September 21, 2005