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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.
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Read More »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 et al., 1977, Snyder et al., 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. Interestingly, early descriptions of dreams and treatises on the nature of dreaming suggest that colour was commonly present in dreams before the 20th century (Schwitzgebel, 2003). 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. There are two possible ways in which black and white media could have created the divide between early and later studies. The first one is through actually modifying the form of dreams. Although this line of reasoning might seem improbable at a first glance, it is nonetheless worth examining. While the content of dreams is not immediately tied to the events of the previous day (Roussy et al., 2000, Schwartz, 2003) it is strongly influenced by current concerns and activities (Cartwright et al., 2006, Epstein, 1985, Erlacher and Schredl, 2004, Schredl and Erlacher, 2008, Schredl and Hofmann, 2003), and media (Den & Bulck, 2004). It is conceivable that repeated exposure to black and white media could have an impact on the form of dreams, especially that movies are emotionally intense and involving, which could promote the incorporation of colour schemes into dream production (and would explain why static media such as paintings and photography did not apparently impact 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.
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Read More »The second explanation for the difference in reporting of coloured dreaming is the methodology employed by the researchers in the two sets o studies. Six out of nine studies in the early 20th century employed questionnaires to assess how people dream. This method is fraught with problems: the questions are typically asked a long time after a person has had a dream, which can lead to omissions and misremembering of various aspects of the dream. Having no reliable memories of dreams to inform their answers, people might draw on their beliefs of what dreams should be like. Consequently they might give responses that are not related to how they actually dream, but to how dreams are perceived in that cultural milieu—which revolved around black and white media for the first half of the 20th century. Also, people were usually asked to summarise their dream experiences from the last week or month, and these would often be heavily influenced by the few most recent or well-recalled dreams. Thus, people’s accounts of how they dream might not be representative of their actual dreams. On the other hand, the studies conducted after 1960 took advantage of the discovery of REM sleep and its relationship with dreams, and were thus methodologically more reliable. Three of the studies (Herman et al., 1968, Jankowski et al., 1977, Kahn et al., 1962) used REM-awakenings, where people were monitored in a sleep lab, woken up during an REM episode and immediately asked to describe their dreams. The remaining four studies used dream diaries, where people were asked to record their dreams just after spontaneous awakening. While this method is not without its shortcomings (for example, only some of the dreams are remembered and dream saliency and intensity play a role in what is recalled in the morning), it yields results comparable to REM awakenings and is much easier to administer to a wider population (see Domhoff & Schneider, 1999 for a discussion). Importantly, the rates of coloured dreaming arrived at with the two methods were similar, and markedly higher than for previous questionnaire studies. Overall, the use of these techniques made the new finding more resistant to memory distortions caused by attitude or beliefs. Thus, finding out about the ‘real’ form of dreams became much more likely. This line of investigation meshes with the shallow media influence hypothesis—if black and white media impacted only people’s beliefs about what dreams should look like, a change in methodology would uncover the true form of dreams. Nonetheless, there is no perfect mapping between research method used and the rate of coloured dreaming achieved. Late 20th century questionnaire studies have shown majority of people claim to have coloured dreams. Early 20th century psychoanalysts, who trained their patients in careful attention to dream detail (and thus presumably overcame many of the limitations of the non-direct method), reported that most dreams are devoid of colour, and Garma (1961) even went as far as to say that ‘Dreams are like the old silent films, without sound or technicolour’. The present study was designed to investigate whether the differences in reported frequency of greyscale dreaming can be attributed to the differences in methodology used to find out about dream colour or to the actual differences in the type of dreaming experienced. This aim was achieved by comparing two cohorts with presumably different experience of coloured and black and white media: people under 25 years of age (similar to the groups previously studied) and people over 55 years of age. A dream diary method was adopted to find out about the colour qualities of dreams. The potential problem with using an older population lies in the different sleep and dreaming characteristics of this group. Fein et al. (1985) found that elderly people (aged 69–74) recalled dreams less often than young participants (in 71% of REM awakenings, as compared to 90% for younger group) and the dream reports of older participants contained significantly less visual imagery words. Waterman (1991) also found a correlation between dream length and visual memory, which decreases with age. Older people were also found to value their dreams less and recall dreams less frequently (Herman & Shows, 1983–1984) although the drop-off in recall frequency appears at the age of 25–35, and is apparently not related to aging (Funkhouser, Hirsbrunner, Cornu, & Bahro, 1999). Because of the apparent age-related decrease in visual imagery in dreams, any age-differences in the recall of colour in dreaming have to be taken cautiously, since poor visual recall can lead to mislabelling dreams as greyscale.
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Read More »If media experience is indeed responsible for reports of greyscale dreaming, the following predictions can be made: people who were exposed to black and white media should report more greyscale dreams than people with no such exposure. This difference should be evident both in dream diaries and questionnaires. The main difficulty with this hypothesis in the present design is that it makes the supposition that people who had such experience, and now are over 55 years of age, have retained at least some of their greyscale dreaming patterns despite a long and intense colour media exposure. This is not completely unlikely if a developmental approach to dreaming is considered. Since dreams are in development until around 12 years of age (Foulkes, 1999), it is possible that these early years are important in setting the form of dreams. Thus, a secondary hypothesis can be stated: people over 55 will report still having greyscale dreams only if childhood exposition to media is more important than adulthood exposition. If methodological and belief issues are the only reason why people reported black and white dreaming, different predictions can be made. Firstly, people who claim to have black and white dreams should report them more frequently when tested with a questionnaire than when asked directly after the dream takes place. Secondly, there should be age differences in the type of dreaming that is reported—but only for questionnaires. This is because people brought up on black and white media might harbour the concept that dreams should be in black and white, and consequently will claim to have greyscale dreams. This misconception should be cleared (at least to some extent) by administering a more direct measure of dream colour. In parallel to the previous set of hypotheses, older people will only report greyscale dreaming if the assumed beliefs regarding the nature of dreaming are quite stable in time. Finally, since misconceptions are more likely to arise when memory falters, poorly recalled dreams might be labelled as black and white more often than well-recalled dreams, because of a lack of detailed visual recall from the dream. Caution is needed here, however, because any differences in memory quality between coloured and greyscale dreams might also stem from the intrinsic qualities of these dreams.
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