I am curious to hear people’s thoughts and experiences seeing color in dreams and daytime visualizations. It never crossed my mind that color in the dream state might be different until I consciously tried to visualize particular colors and found I couldn’t…or at least could not without great difficulty. This has made more sense to me as I’ve delved into it a tiny bit, as it appears most visual processing in our brains is independent of color. As we access that in our dreams, we draw on the bulk of what’s in our grey matter, focussing on shape, position and movement rather than color.
What is your experience? Is your eyes-closed world in color or b/w?
Interesting, @amorsesomtelcom. My dreams are (almost) always in color as far as I can tell or recall. But this is not something I’ve focused on. What do things look like in your dreams? Are they in black and white, or are colors sort of undefined, or…?
This is a compelling line of inquiry. The majority of my dreams are in color, though I haven’t experienced any colors that I haven’t seen before, though I have experienced very vivid colors in dreams.
This reminds me of several dreams I’ve had that have been purely “animated” - in that they are actually cartoons! No live action environments or characters. And I’m always a witness, as if watching an actual cartoon. One of those animated dreams was a black and white line illustration animation of a giant bird in the shape of a turnip. It was very cool, very creative.
This makes me realize I’ve never actually had a black and white “live action” dream!
I’ve asked a bunch of people in my family and at work if they dream in color. My sister said no, but everyone else was a yes. Must be genetic.
Had to chuckle when I asked a woman in my office…prefacing the question by mentioning lucid dreaming. She asked, “What’s lucid dreaming?”… but the next day reported that she asked herself in a dream that night if she saw color and then directed her way through observing different hues in her dream so she could report that back to me the next day. Turns out she’s a natural, frequent lucid dreamer, but never gave it a second thought or put a name to it! (She must be about 40…not a kid!)
After writing the original post, I made a concerted effort to dream in color for a couple of nights…because I was po’d that everyone else did. No dice, but the third night my b/w dream paused momentarily and my entire “field of vision” flashed bright green for an instant…randomly…irrelevant to “the action.” I took that as my dream world sticking its tongue out at me. I’m going back for revenge!
I remember discussing this in a retreat. The response from the speaker (or someone else) was that because movies and TV used to be B&W this question was more of a vestige from those days, and that we naturally dream in color. We just don’t think about it (fish in water?). If the dreams are barely recalled perhaps we don’t recall vibrant color, but since there is no sun in our dreams, perhaps we don’t see it with the same light?