Do You Dream In Color? (2024)

The curious history of black and white dreams

The question “Do you dream in color?” is one that most of us have probably been asked, or have considered at some point. If so, what would you answer? Do you remember what your dreams look like? Are they in color or are they in black and white? If you think about it, there is something slightly odd about this question and its implicit assumption. In other words, why would we not dream in color? The world, and our experience of the world, is full of color, so why wouldn’t our dreams also be colorful? Why would we ever assume that we dream in black and white, or grayscale? The question, as it turns out, reveals a lot about how we think about and remember our experiences, and might even be a product of having lived in the technological age. At the beginning of the 20th century, our dreams changed color, or to be more accurate, our descriptions of our dreams changed — and then, in the 1960s they changed again! Why?

Accounts of dreams by people living before the 20th century often contained descriptions of color. People like Aristotle, Descartes, and Freud, to name a few, often described the presence of color in their dreams. Then, around 1900 something happened. Dreams, all of a sudden, became black and white, or rather they began to be remembered as black and white. By mid-century, researchers believed that dreams were by default, grayscale.

Then in the 1960s things changed again, and researchers began reporting a higher incidence of color in reports of dreaming, and the popular question, “Do you dream in color?” was born.

But why, at the beginning of the 20th century, did reports of dreaming, show a conspicuous lack of color, and why, half a century later, did color seem to reappear? One of the most popular explanations pins the cause on the popularity of black and white film, television, newspapers, and photography. Though invented earlier, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that such media became commonplace in technologically advanced societies. Before then, no one had experienced life in ‘grayscale’, and it is hypothesized that the widespread exposure to black and white media ‘colored’ our dreams (pun intended).

One of the earliest and most influential studies of color in dreams was performed by W.C. Middleton in 1943 — of the 277…