The question of whether people dream in colour or black and white, while not central to dream research, is an interesting
one to study. This is because it touches upon the issues of how experience and beliefs can change what we feel to be a fundamental
aspect of our life, namely visual imagery and dreaming. Interest in this question has been recently revived when a
surprising inconsistency in the results of the early and later studies was discovered by Schwitzgebel (2002). The research
conducted in the early 20th century unanimously concluded that the vast majority of people dream in black and white.
For example, Bentley (1915) reported that 20% of dreams contain colour; in 1942 only about 29% of college students reported
having at least occasional coloured dreams (Middleton, 1942; see also de Martino, 1953, and Middleton, 1933). The proportion
of people reporting coloured dreams even decreased in the 1950’s: Knapp (1956) claimed that as little as 15% of dreams
contain colour, while Tapia, Werboff, and Winokur (1958) found that only 9% of people who reported to a hospital in St. Louis
for non-psychiatric medical problems remembered having coloured dreams. Moreover, this figure was contrasted with a 12%
rate of reporting coloured dreams among psychiatric inpatients in the same hospital and the researchers concluded that vivid
and coloured dreams may be a sign of psychological problems. Overall, researchers and study participants agreed that
black and white dreams were the norm, and rare cases of coloured dreams were dubbed ‘Technicolor’ dreams (Calef,
1954; Hall, 1951), highlighting their perceived artificiality.
This tendency to report black and white dreams suddenly disappeared in the 1960’s. Kahn, Dement, Fisher, and Barmack
(1962) wrote that ‘‘with careful interrogation close to the time of dreaming, color was found to be present in 82.7% of the
dreams” and Herman, Roffwarg, and Tauber (1968) discovered that coloured dreaming was reported after 69% of REM awakenings
of their subjects. Similar results were reached in studies carried out by Berger (1963), Jankowski, Dee, and Cartwright
(1977) and Snyder, Karacan, Tharp, and Scott (1968). Most recently, Schwitzgebel (2003) replicated Middleton’s (1942) study
and found that only 17.7% of US college students say they rarely or never experience coloured dreaming....
There are two major differences between the two sets of studies that can possibly explain the changes in reporting of coloured
dreaming. The first one is related to the cultural background. When the first studies were conducted, black and white
cinema (and later TV) was already quite widespread. At the time Bentley had carried out his first study in 1915, over 20 black
and white feature films were produced every year. It was very likely that the average college student (the typical participant
in these studies) had regular contact with black and white media. The rise in coloured dreaming, on the other hand, coincided
with the rise of coloured media. In late 1940’s colour movies began to be more common and by late 1960, nearly
all movies were produced in colour. The first colour TV shows were broadcast in 1950 (to be viewed in public places) and
the first consumer colour TV sets appeared in 1954 and by 1972 the majority of USA households had a colour TV. Thus, it
is possible to stipulate that the period of reporting greyscale dreams was caused by intense black and white media exposure....
Contemporary research that supports that theory has been already carried out by Schwitzgebel, Huang, and Zhou (2006).
Their replication of the Middleton (1942) questionnaire, carried out in China, revealed that groups with more exposure to
black and white media report less coloured dreaming, at levels comparable to the original 1942 study. Contrastingly, exposure
to coloured media before the age of 11 was strongly correlated with reporting of coloured dreaming...
The second explanation requires that black and white media only influence people’s beliefs about their dreams, without
changing the dream form, so that people would not report the true colouration of their dreams. There are two variants of this
explanation. The weak proposition places the distortion source in the poor long-term memory for dreams. Thus, under a casual
examination, people would indeed claim to experience greyscale dreams, and only when questioned closer to the time
of dreaming they could realise their dreams are, in fact, coloured. The strong proposition states that the distortion imposed
by beliefs in the nature of dreaming is implemented much earlier and reconstructs the memories to match the beliefs. In
such a case, there is no way to say anything about the ‘true’ form of dreaming, except through methods that would tap into
the dream content directly. One possible method would be signalling from within a lucid dream to inform external observers
about the colour nature of the dream (see LaBerge, 1985, for examples of similar studies). However, this assumes that dream
lucidity does not interfere with normal dream form and content, which has not yet been established. While this second possibility
seems unlikely, it needs to be considered nonetheless. (WHAT! I wasn't even expecting lucid dreaming to be in there :D)...
Thus, it is possible to conclude that early access to black and white media (without any access to colour
media) is a key factor in the reporting of black and white dreams. It is worth noticing that even the group with black and
white media experience, the average percentage of greyscale dreams experienced in this experiment was much lower than
the proportions typically reported in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This difference is most likely due to the influence from colour
media, which has been the dominant media type for at least the last 40 years. Overall, it seems that the form of dreams is not
fixed in stone during that period....
