You May Not Remember Exact Color of Your Dreams: Check Out For Some Facts Here!

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Aditya, one of my schoolmates used to ignite my curiosity regularly during our childhood days! Once he casually asked me an interesting question, “Do you dream in black and white, or your dreams are always colored? Though he was asking me directly, needless to add we may ask this question to anyone around us. Well, I started my search and received three types of reply: (i) B/W (ii) Colored (iii) Don’t know/ Can’t say! Before going into deep of the query let’s quickly discuss some basic facts (may be, you already know some or all of them) here!

1. Meaning of a dream: Actually, dreams do not have any meaning. They are mainly electrical brain impulses that generate random thoughts in our subconscious mind. Dreams are basically stories and images our mind construct while we sleep. Dreams may occur anytime during sleep, but most vivid ones occur during deep, REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep, period when our brain becomes most active. Anyone normally has several dreams during sleep but rarely remember them. Theory suggests, humans construct dream stories after they wake up which can be classified as a natural attempt to make sense of it.
2. Color and Age Correlation: A study published in 2008 found that people of age 25 or younger almost never had dreams in black and white, while people above 55 years who grew up with little access to color TV reported dreaming mostly in black-n-white! So, more correctly it can be correlated with TV. In the age of high-definition TV and vivid cinematography it might be peculiar to think that anyone would experience colorless dream.
3. Color and Physics: Ask your physics teacher about it, who knows well that black & white are two colors only. Black is the color your mind produces when your eyes can’t detect light. Black is not absence of color. Absence of color is ‘transparent’ like air, glass or water. You see white when all seven monochromatic colors are present.
4. Do blind people dream? : Yes, blind people do dream! Blind people were directly asked about it and then scientists reached to this conclusion. What they see in their dreams depends on how much they could have ever seen in life. People who are blind since birth can have only auditory dreams. People who became blind years after their birth have a measure of sight and they can dream as if they could see in real life, colors included. One who became blind during his childhood days submitted, “for people I’ve met since, their faces blurs or how I imagine they look. To me someone like my mother looks forever 30.”
5. Meaning of Bad Dreams: Psychologists usually define a nightmare as a ‘terrifying dream’. They are result of anxiety or vivid dreams, mostly because the anxiety we feel in dream is so vivid that makes it easier to dream. In this connection, we came to know that ‘insomnia’ can naturally heighten dream of recall and also leads to more stressful and disturbing dreams. Depression and anxiety are more likely to be present in people suffering from insomnia.
6. Dream State: For many of us, dream state can be the most turbulent, emotionally intense part of the day. Falling, flying, failing exams and being chased or attacked are among most frequently reported themes. Yet for a small segment of population, drifting off at nights means reverting to a world of monochromatic hues.
7. Dreams Are Not Always Monochromatic: While 80% of all dreams are in color, there is a small percentage of people who claim to have only black and white dreams. In studies where dreamers have been awakened and asked to identify colors seen from a chart that match those in their dreams, soft pastel colors are more frequently chosen. It is observed that it varies from person to person as some people dream in multiple colors, some dream in two colors. At least two contrasting colors are needed to produce a visual perception.
8. Conclusion: We can conclude that most dreams are in color. Although people may not necessarily be aware of it, either because they have difficulty in remembering or because color is such a natural part of their visual experience. People who are much aware of color while awake, probably notice color more often in their dreams! So, nothing to worry. All of us can enjoy colorful dreams irrespective of our age. At the end of the story let me cite one interesting sharing by a college student in this context. She informed that it was vivid in an early morning dream where she had seen herself in a mirror. She woke up excited, rushed to bathroom to have a look of herself in the mirror. Her brother came inside the bathroom with a textbook in hand to hit accidentally on her head. He asked, “Why did you scream?” Can you guess why she screamed? She could not recognize herself because in her dream she had blue eyes, what she didn’t have in real life! May be a heart-breaking experience for her but scientifically speaking, she reached a point where finally she could declare that dreaming in color is definitely true!