Why do we dream in black & white when our lives are full of glorious colour?

EqUa Coaching
Aug 9, 2017 · 7 min read
http://jolizcoaching.com/dream-black-white-lives-full-glorious-colour/

Flying, jumping across rooftops, running from someone or “something” terrifying… being back in your old childhood house but it wasn’t quite your house, your teeth falling out, failing an exam you didn’t even know you were supposed to take… frantically hunting for something really important…red-nosed killer clowns (just us then?!)

These are a few of the “typical” and most common themes of our dreams. Weird and wonderful aren’t they.

While we can’t profess to be experts in the complex metaphors that make up dreams, a conversation with a client alerted us to the fact that not everyone dreams in full-on colour. Some don’t recall anything but the haziest of minor details the next morning, some think they don’t dream at all (although it’s been proven that they do, they just don’t remember), and some dream in black & white only.

So, what is a dream?

Let’s start with that first. Dreams are the experience we have when we are asleep and in a state of consciousness. They occur in a person who is sleeping and on the rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of the sleep cycle — around 90mins in. During sleep studies, dreams are indicated by high-frequency electrical activity in the brain.

A dream resembles in many ways a waking experience to us in that we hear, see, feel emotion etc. Generally speaking dreams feel real while we experience them, but are relatively easy to differentiate in the morning from “real life”. Which is a good thing because if we remembered our dreams as though they were the same as our waking experience, we would start getting very confused between dreams and reality.

Killer Clowns — the stuff that turns dreams into nightmares, and NOT real.

In 1895, Sigmund Freud had a dream that was to form the basis of his “wish fulfilment” theory as to why we all dream. Writing in The Interpretation of Dreams, he suggested that dreams were “just wishes that we have formed in our waking lives”. Actually he was widely criticised for this theory and yet decades later the “why” behind dreaming is still very much up for debate.

There are other hypotheses too — Antti Revonsuo — the Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher explores whether dreams are a function to practice survival scenarios while sleeping and unable to move / injure ourselves. “The body gets the rest it needs and we can live out simulations without putting it in danger,” a kind of virtual “The Island with Bear Grylls” then!

Most theories however seem to come back to the “filing cabinet” analogy — that the brain is going through a kind of nightly sorting process while we sleep. Are you Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin?!

It’s constantly sifting and shuffling through the events, sounds, emotions and sensory details of the past waking day. It rummages through all this information and decides what to keep (file) for later and what information to delete. It seems that our dreams have a starring role in this nocturnal act.

The filing cabinet of our minds

What do dreams mean?

Naked in your school assembly? Still can’t escape that killer clown? Breathing issues due to a Giant sitting on your chest while juggling three tabby kittens and singing Dolly Parton’s 9–5 in Russian?!
No matter which way you look at it, dreams are WEIRD!

Thankfully since ancient times, there’s been something called dream interpretation.

A lot of importance is placed on our dreams. More so than waking thoughts perhaps. A study once showed that more people were likely to cancel a flight if they dreamt of the plane crashing the night before, than if they thought of it crashing during their waking day, or even if the government had issued a warning!

Some Typical Dreams and Their Interpretations:

Stress & Anxiety

If you have dreams about free falling and plummeting down through the sky this could be your brain dealing with a situation that you fear is heading to the bottom. You might be involved in something that has got much worse over time, so you’ll feel as if it is spiralling downwards rapidly and there is nothing you can do about it. These stress filled dreams signify a lack of security and control. A relationship might be hitting rock bottom, or you might be about to be made redundant — if it’s consuming your waking moments with worry then it’s only natural that it overspills into your sleep too.

Avoiding Change

Are you constantly dreaming about running away from something? (there’s that killer clown again!) If so it’s usually taken to mean that you are avoiding something very big in your life — the running away part being a simple metaphor for not wanting to deal with a problem or a life change head on. Sometimes the interpretation is also based on what’s actually chasing you..

Tick-Tock: Dreams of running late

You might dream about constantly missing a flight or turning up late (or naked!) to school or missing an important meeting. If you have dreams associated with not being able to make it somewhere on time, it’s likely that you feel unprepared or completely overwhelmed about a major event or forthcoming change in your life. If you are going through some big changes you may well feel it’s difficult to live up to your own demands and expectations as well as the demands of others such as friends, family or peers. It’s natural therefore that your dreams will revolve around not making it on time.

So going back to the original question, why do some of us dream in colour while others are strictly black & white? Well, it’s possible it’s just a question of memory: we remember our dream as black & white because the vivid details from the night before fade throughout the day. Some suggest that dreaming in black & white is down to creativity — the more creative you are, the more vivid the colours and crazy adventures you have while asleep.

A recent study however had another hypothesis:…people who had access to black and white media before colour media experienced more greyscale dreams than people with no such exposure. Moreover, there were inter-group differences in the recall quality of colour and black and white dreams that point to the possibility that true greyscale dreams occur only in people with black and white media experience…

It’s reasonable to infer from that statement then that childhood exposure to black & white television is the common denominator and potential answer to it all.. Not as exciting as we had hoped when we set out to research the question!Lastly, we asked readers of our blog and our Facebook and Twitter followers to comment and here are the results.

Now, obviously it’s not massively scientific — there was no way of knowing the age of the respondents for example, whether they had access to a black & white tv growing up, and there was no way of recording if they started their dream in black & white and progressed into colour, or vice versa.

Still, we think it’s interesting to see!

Colour vs Black & White dreaming

So we know that we all dream when we’re asleep. We know why (sort of), how and when. We know that meaning and interpretation can be taken from our dreams no matter how bonkers they appear or how little detail we remember of them. We know that dreams are personal to our own circumstances, feelings and our individual state of mind. An anxious or worrying day can result in fraught dreams and we know that frankly nobody knows where the killer clowns come from! What we do know is; there’s no right or wrong way to dream.

“To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there’s the rub.”

~ Hamlet

If you would like to attend one of our upcoming workshops: ‘5 Ways to Kickstart Change’, ‘Change Your Mind About Stress’ or ‘Teenage Kicks’ then please visit the training section of our website.

If you are experiencing stress, anxiety, addiction, panic attacks, feeling over-whelmed or just simply want to talk, please get in touch to book a one-to-one session with either Jo or Liz.


Originally published at jolizcoaching.com on August 9, 2017.

EqUa Coaching

Written by

Life and Performance #Coaches. Creators of ‘5 Ways to Kickstart Change’ workshops, and ‘The EqUa Approach’. #NLP#LifeCoach https://equacoaching.com/

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