Dreaming about colour in dreams
Most people report dreaming in colour, and most dream reports never mention it. Both are true, and the gap between them is why a colour you remember clearly is worth a line in the journal and a colour you had to think about probably is not.
Also searched as: do we dream in colour, black and white dreams, dreaming in colour, greyscale dreams, vivid colours in a dream
Asked directly, the large majority of people say they dream in colour. Asked to describe a dream, most never mention colour at all. Colour is present and unattended, which is also how it works awake.
That matters for interpretation. A colour that announced itself, that the dreamer noticed inside the dream and remembered without prompting, is a real feature of the report. A colour reconstructed on waking, in answer to the question "what colour was it", usually is not.
A minority report genuinely greyscale dreams, and a smaller minority report unusually saturated or impossible colour. Both are worth keeping a note of.
Colour is also unstable in the way text and fine detail are. Dreamers who look twice frequently report a different colour, which makes it usable as a reality check.
Common associations
- Salience, which is the only question that matters before any other.
- A property rather than an object.
- Generational exposure, which the evidence genuinely supports.
- Instability on a second look.
Positive readings
Vivid colour is reported in a distinct and pleasant group of dreams, frequently alongside lucidity, and dreamers describe it as one of the more beautiful experiences they have had.
Colour is also a workable dream sign for anybody practising reality checks, because a second look often returns something different.
Difficult readings
Very little in itself. The cost here is interpretive: dream dictionaries assign confident meanings to colours that most dreamers never actually noticed, which manufactures significance out of a reconstruction.
Psychological perspectives
The generational finding is the substantial one. Studies comparing age groups have found significantly higher rates of reported black-and-white dreaming among people who grew up with monochrome media, and much lower rates among those raised with colour television.
That is a rare and valuable result. It suggests media exposure shapes the form dreams take rather than only supplying their content, which is a stronger claim than the usual continuity finding.
The under-reporting of colour is consistent with how dreams generate detail generally: elaborated where attention falls and not otherwise. There is no colour until something looks.
Cultural and historical
Colour symbolism is the least transferable material in this database. The same colour carries opposite readings in different traditions, frequently around the most serious events a life contains.
That is why each entry in this category names the tradition rather than stating a meaning. Presenting one culture's colour scheme as the meaning of a colour would be the clearest possible failure of this database's standard.
What the sleep science says
Well documented: the large majority of people report dreaming in colour when asked directly, while colour goes unmentioned in most spontaneous dream reports.
Supported by comparison studies: markedly higher rates of reported greyscale dreaming in generations raised with black-and-white media.
Not established: any fixed meaning for any colour.
Your own context
- Did you notice the colour inside the dream, or work it out afterwards?
- Was anything unusually saturated, or absent of colour?
- Did it stay the same when you looked again?
- What does that colour carry where you grew up?
If this recurs
Record colour only when it announced itself. A journal that asks for a colour every morning will manufacture one every morning, and after a year the record will be of your reconstructions rather than your dreams.
Emotions often reported
- wonder
- fascination
- calm
- curiosity
- awe
- detachment
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Did I notice the colour at the time?
- Was anything unusually vivid or unusually flat?
- Did it change when I looked again?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Gender Differences in Dream Recall: A Meta-AnalysisPeer-reviewed research
Michael Schredl and Iris Reinhard (2008) · Journal of Sleep Research
Cited for: Dream-recall frequency as a measurable, individually stable trait, and the factors that move it.
- 2.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 3.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
- 4.Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical ResearchAcademic book
Jennifer M. Windt (2015) · MIT Press
Cited for: A modern philosophical treatment of what dreams are, including the immersive-spatiotemporal-hallucination account and the status of dream reports as evidence.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of colour in dreams have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- ColourRedThe colour most often noticed spontaneously in dream reports, which is the first thing worth knowing about it. Where red is present, dreamers tend to mention it without being asked, and that salience is real even where the meaning is not.
- ColourBlackBlack in dream reports is usually an absence rather than a colour: a figure with no detail, water with no visible bottom, a room with no light. What dreamers are describing is most often the failure to resolve something.
- ColourWhiteThe clearest case in this database of a colour that cannot have one meaning: white is the colour of weddings in much of the West and of mourning in parts of East Asia. Any entry that picks one is describing a culture and calling it a dream.
- SymbolMirrorMirrors in dreams are almost never about vanity. Dreamers overwhelmingly report the reflection being wrong (delayed, aged, a stranger, or absent) and it is the wrongness, not the mirror, that carries the meaning.
- ColourGreyGrey is the colour dreamers report when there was no colour, which makes it the most interesting entry in this category and the one with the best evidence behind it. It is also where the generational finding lives.
- ColourBlueBlue is rarely reported as a colour in its own right. It arrives attached to sky and water, which have their own entries, and dreamers almost never mention it unless something was blue that should not have been.
Records that mention colour in dreams
These pages link to colour in dreams, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.