Do You Actually Dream in Black and White?

Ask someone born in 1960 whether they dream in color, and there's a real chance they'll say no. Ask someone born in 2000 the same question, and they'll almost certainly say yes. Same species, same sleeping brain, wildly different answer. That gap alone should make you suspicious of how confident anyone is about what actually happens in their own head at night.

The short version: somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of people today report dreaming in color, not black and white. But that number used to be flipped. Before the 1950s, most survey respondents said they rarely or never saw color in their dreams. Something changed, and it wasn't human biology.

The myth: dreams are naturally black and white, color is the exception

This belief was mainstream science for a while, not just folk wisdom. In 1942, psychologist Warren Middleton surveyed 277 college students and found that 70.7 percent said they rarely or never saw color in their dreams. Dream researchers through the 1950s largely treated black-and-white dreaming as the default and color as unusual, worth commenting on when it showed up.

Then the numbers flipped, and flipped hard. When philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel replicated Middleton's exact questionnaire in 2001 with a new set of students, only 17.7 percent said they rarely or never saw color. A 2017 study found participants reported color in nearly half their dreams, black and white in only about 10 percent, and couldn't recall either way for the rest.

What the research actually says

Schwitzgebel's explanation, laid out in his paper "Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?", points at media, not memory. The rise and fall of the belief tracks almost exactly with the rise and fall of black-and-white film and television. People who grew up watching monochrome movies and TV were more likely to describe their dreams the same way. Once color television took over households, color dreams became the reported norm.

The age gap holds up in direct comparisons. A 2008 study by Eva Murzyn at the University of Dundee compared dream color reports between older adults, who grew up with black-and-white media, and younger adults, who didn't. People over 55 reported color dreams only about 34 percent of the time. People under 25 reported them 68 percent of the time, exactly double. Their sleeping brains aren't different. What's different is what was on TV when they were kids.

Schwitzgebel's own conclusion is more unsettling than "TV changed our dreams." His real argument is that people are bad witnesses to their own dream experience, full stop. He doesn't think black-and-white TV literally rewired anyone's dreams. He thinks most people never had a firm, reliable sense of their dream colors in the first place, and whatever cultural assumption was floating around at the time filled in the blank. In other words: we didn't misremember our dreams because of black-and-white TV. We just don't know what color our dreams are, and we borrow an answer from whatever seems plausible.

Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett offers a more mundane version of the same idea. She's compared forgetting dream color to not remembering the color of a server's shirt after dinner. The color was there. You just weren't paying attention to it, so it never got encoded as a detail worth keeping.

Why this is hard to pin down for good

Dream research runs into the same wall no matter what question you're asking: nobody can climb inside another person's sleeping brain and check. Researchers depend entirely on what people say after they wake up, and waking memory is a lossy, editorializing process even for things you saw with your eyes open. Add REM sleep's own weirdness (fragmented recall, emotional distortion, details that dissolve within minutes of waking) and color becomes one of the easiest details to lose or invent.

There's a competing theory worth taking seriously here too: that black-and-white dream reports were never really about color at all, but about attention and memory load. If you're not asked to notice color, you might not encode it, whether the dream had color or not. The media-exposure theory and the memory theory aren't mutually exclusive. Both point to the same underlying fact: color in dreams is one of the least stable, least reliably reported parts of the whole experience.

The colors that show up most, when people do remember

Among people who do recall color, it's not evenly distributed across the rainbow. One AP-syndicated science piece covering the research found that black, white, and red are the most frequently mentioned colors in dream studies, with red often tied to intense content: blood, fire, flesh, love. That lines up with a broader pattern in dream research, where emotionally loaded dreams tend to be remembered in more vivid, more specific detail overall, color included. A dream about an argument or an accident is more likely to come with a color attached than a dream about waiting in line at a pharmacy.

That's a small clue toward the memory explanation. If color were a fixed feature of every dream, mundane and dramatic dreams should report it at similar rates. They don't seem to. Color shows up more reliably exactly where attention was highest.

What this means for your own dream journal

If you journal your dreams, this is a genuinely useful thing to test on yourself instead of taking someone else's word for it. Next time you wake up mid-dream or right after one, before you write anything else down, ask specifically: was there color, and what color was it? Most people never ask themselves that question in the moment, which is exactly the gap Schwitzgebel is pointing at.

You might find you remember color vividly for some dreams and not at all for others, and that inconsistency is itself informative. It suggests color isn't some fixed baseline setting your dreams operate at. It's a detail that survives or doesn't depending on how much attention you gave it, same as remembering what your coworker was wearing yesterday. Write it down anyway, even if it's a guess. Do that for a few weeks and you'll end up with better data on your own dream color than any study out there, simply because it's actually yours.