Do We Dream in Color?

Just as some people claim never to dream, while others say they dream every night, there are those who rarely remember having dreams in color and those who always do. A survey of college students found that 51 percent of men never dreamt in color, compared with only 31 percent of women (Middle-ton, 1942). In Hall's (1951) monumentally large survey of dream content, only about a third of the total number of dreams reported contained references to color. In a more systematic study, the subjects were asked to match the colors they could recall with colors on a standard color chart - only about half the dreams contained color, and many of these were in pastel shades. Interestingly, fully saturated colors tended to be at the red end of the spectrum for the six subjects involved in this study, and only rarely were saturated blues, purples or blue-greens reported (Padgam, 1975).

When the subjects in another study were woken from REM sleep and questioned about their dreams, the incidence of reporting colors was 70 percent (Kahn et al., 1962). Another 13 percent of the reports were of 'vaguely colored' dreams. Of the 61 dreams in which color was reported, it was spontaneously mentioned in only 22 instances and was elicited by further questioning in the other 39. As the authors point out, color is not usually the most important aspect of a dream, and similarly might not be mentioned in accounts of events in everyday life. When dreams are recalled during the day, it is, therefore, the most salient points that will be recalled, and the color detail that would have been available if the dreamer had been questioned about it upon awakening will have been forgotten. In support of this argument (that colors are not well remembered in comparison with plot), Berger (1963) found that subjects woken from REM sleep reported color in their dreams far more frequently than did people asked about their dreams during the day -even subjects who claimed never to dream in color.

There are cases when there are black-and-white dreams. But most of the time in general we all dream in color. Hence a simple answer to the question 'Do we dream in color?' is that we generally do, but this aspect of the dream tends to be forgotten and rarely discussed.