“Do people dream in color?” is a question that most of us have asked. Do they come in color or black and white? Why should our dreams be any different? The world, and our experience of it, is full of color, so why shouldn’t our dreams be? The question of “do we dream in color” turns out to indicate a lot about how we think about and remember our experiences, and it may even be a result of living in the modern age.
History Of Dreaming In Color
People’s accounts of dreams from before the twentieth century frequently included descriptions of color. The color was frequently mentioned in the dreams of philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Freud, to name a few. Then something happened around 1900. Dreams became black and white suddenly, or rather, they began to call them as black and white. Dreams were thought to be grayscale by the mid-century, according to academics (1). Things changed again in the 1960s, when researchers discovered a higher occurrence of color in dream reports, resulting in the common query, “Does everyone dream in color?”
Statistics Of Dreaming In Color
W.C. Middleton conducted one of the oldest and most prominent studies of color in dreams in 1943, with 70.7 percent of 277 college students reporting “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams, compared to only 10% reporting “often” or “very frequently.” Many dream psychologists believe that dreams are grayscale by nature, as evidenced by studies like these (2). The color was uncommon, appearing primarily when emotionally charged events occurred or when psychologically repressed and excremental materials were present.
People began to remark that their dreams were vivid again after the widespread availability of color television and color photography in the 1950s and 1960s. Our dream life turned from black and white to color, just like Dorothy entering the Technicolor Land of Oz! Middleton’s research was duplicated in 2001 by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, using a comparable sample of students. Only 17.7% of people said they “never” or “rarely” saw color, while 56.5 percent said they saw colors “often” or “very frequently.” Similar findings have been reproduced in other countries, such as China, where researchers compared populations with access to colored television and media against communities with limited access to colored television and media and found similar results (4).
Well, do we?
In response to our questions, we most likely dream in color, but it’s also possible that dreams have no fixed hue like the novels and stories we tell. Because most of us don’t pay attention to color in our dreams, it’s difficult to determine whether they’re in the same all-over-technicolor as our waking lives. These studies show that there is a significant disconnect between our lived experiences and how we report on them. We are hardly the most dependable of witnesses when it comes to perception. We’ll need to conduct some significant phenomenological investigation to find out for sure. If you are interested in the topic of colors in dreams, you can try writing down your dreams in a dream journal. If you are looking for a digital dream journal, try the Dreambook. It’s an easy to use app that you can use daily to record your dreams.
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