Do we only dream in colour? A comparison of reported dream colourin younger and older adults with different experiences of blackand white media

Eva Murzyn

School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 14 December 2007Available online xxxx

Keywords:

DreamsColourMethodologyAge differences

a b s t r a c t

This study aimed to ﬁnd out whether differences in the reported colour of dreams can beattributed to the inﬂuence of black and white media or to methodological issues. Two agegroups, with different media experience, were compared on questionnaire and diary mea-sures of dream colour. Analysis revealed that people who had access to black and whitemedia before colour media experienced more greyscale dreams than people with no suchexposure, and there were no differences between diary and questionnaire measures of dream colour. Moreover, there were inter-group differences in the recall quality of colourand black and white dreams that point to the possibility that true greyscale dreams occuronly in people with black and white media experience.

1. Introduction

The question of whether people dream in colour or black and white, while not central to dream research, is an interestingone to study. This is because it touches upon the issues of how experience and beliefs can change what we feel to be a fun-damental aspect of our life, namely visual imagery and dreaming. Interest in this question has been recently revived when asurprising inconsistency in the results of the early and later studies was discovered bySchwitzgebel (2002). The researchconducted 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 collegestudents reportedhaving at least occasional coloured dreams (Middleton, 1942; see alsode Martino, 1953, andMiddleton, 1933). The propor- tion of people reporting coloured dreams even decreased in the 1950’s:Knapp (1956)claimed that as little as 15% of dreamscontaincolour, whileTapia,Werboff, and Winokur(1958)found that only 9% of people who reported to a hospital in St. Louisfor 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 vi-vid and coloured dreams may be a sign of psychological problems. Overall, researchers and study participants agreed thatblack 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 thedreams” andHerman, Roffwarg, and Tauber (1968)discovered that coloured dreaming was reported after 69% of REM awak-enings of their subjects. Similar results were reached in studies carried out byBerger (1963), Jankowski, Dee, and Cartwright(1977) and Snyder, Karacan, Tharp,and Scott (1968). Most recently,Schwitzgebel(2003)replicatedMiddleton’s(1942)study and found that only 17.7% of US college students say they rarely or never experience coloured dreaming. Interestingly, early

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e.murzyn@dundee.ac.ukConsciousness and Cognition xxx (2008) xxx–xxx

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descriptions of dreams and treatises on the nature of dreaming suggest that colour was commonly present in dreams beforethe 20th century (Schwitzgebel, 2003).There are two major differences between the two sets of studies that can possibly explain the changes in reporting of col-oured dreaming. The first one is related to the cultural background. When the first studies were conducted, black and whitecinema (and later TV) was already quite widespread. At the time Bentley had carried out his first study in 1915, over 20 blackand white feature films were produced every year. It was very likely that the average college student (the typical participantin these studies) had regular contact with black and white media. The rise in coloured dreaming, on the other hand, coin-cided with the rise of coloured media. In late 1940’s colour movies began to be more common and by late 1960, nearlyall movies were produced in colour. The first colour TV shows were broadcast in 1950 (to be viewed in public places) andthe first consumer colour TV sets appeared in 1954 and by 1972 the majority of USA households had a colour TV. Thus, itis 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 bySchwitzgebel, Huang, and Zhou (2006).Their replication of theMiddleton (1942)questionnaire, carried out in China, revealed that groups with more exposure toblack and white media report less coloured dreaming, at levels comparable to the original 1942 study. Contrastingly, expo-sure 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 stud-ies. The first one is through actually modifying the form of dreams. Although this line of reasoning might seem improbable ata first glance, it is nonetheless worth examining. While the content of dreams is not immediately tied to the events of theprevious day (Roussy et al, 2000; Schwartz, 2003) it is strongly influenced by current concerns and activities (Cartwright, Agargun, Kirkby,& Friedman,in press;Epstein, 1985;Erlacher & Schredl,2004; Schredl & Erlacher,2008; Schredl & 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 incor-poration of colour schemes into dream production (and would explain why static media such as paintings and photographydid not apparently impact dreaming).The second explanation requires that black and white media only influence people’s beliefs about their dreams, withoutchanging the dream form, so that people would not report the true colouration of their dreams. There are two variants of thisexplanation. The weak proposition places the distortion source in the poor long-term memory for dreams. Thus, under a ca-sual examination, people would indeed claim to experience greyscale dreams, and only when questioned closer to the timeof dreaming they could realise their dreams are, in fact, coloured. The strong proposition states that the distortion imposedby beliefs in the nature of dreaming is implemented much earlier and reconstructs the memories to match the beliefs. Insuch a case, there is no way to say anything about the ‘true’ form of dreaming, except through methods that would tap intothe dream content directly. One possible method would be signalling from within a lucid dream to inform external observersabout the colour nature of the dream (seeLaBerge, 1985, for examples of similar studies). However, this assumes that dreamlucidity does not interfere with normal dream form and content, which has not yet been established. While this second pos-sibility seems unlikely, it needs to be considered nonetheless.The second explanation for the difference in reporting of coloured dreaming is the methodology employed by theresearchers in the two sets o studies. Six out of nine studies in the early 20th century employed questionnaires to assesshow people dream. This method is fraught with problems: the questions are typically asked a long time after a personhashad a dream,whichcanlead to omissionsand misrememberingof various aspectsof the dream.Havingno reliablemem-ories of dreams to inform their answers, people might draw on their beliefs of what dreams should be like. Consequentlythey might give responses that are not related to how they actually dream, but to how dreams are perceived in that culturalmilieu—which revolved around black and white media for the first half of the 20th century. Also, people were usually askedto summarise their dream experiences from the last week or month, and these would often be heavily influenced by the fewmost recent or well-recalled dreams. Thus, people’s accounts of how they dream might not be representative of their actualdreams.On the other hand, the studies conducted after 1960 took advantage of the discovery of REM sleep and its relationshipwith 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 epi-sode and immediately asked to describe their dreams. The remaining four studies used dream diaries, where people wereasked to record their dreams just after spontaneous awakening. While this method is not without its shortcomings (forexample, only some of the dreams are remembered and dream saliency and intensity play a role in what is recalled inthe morning), it yields results comparable to REM awakenings and is much easier to administer to a wider population(seeDomhoff & Schneider, 1999for a discussion). Importantly, the rates of coloured dreaming arrived at with the two meth-ods were similar, and markedly higher than for previous questionnaire studies. Overall, the use of these techniques made thenew 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 blackand white media impacted only people’s beliefs about what dreams should look like, a change in methodology would un-cover the true form of dreams.Nonetheless, thereis no perfectmappingbetweenresearch methodused andthe rate of coloureddreamingachieved. Late20th century questionnaire studies have shown majority of people claim to have coloured dreams. Early 20th century psy-choanalysts, who trained their patients in careful attention to dream detail (and thus presumably overcame many of the lim-

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itations of the non-direct method), reported that most dreams are devoid of colour, andGarma (1961)even went as far as tosay 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 canbe 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 colouredand black and white media: people under 25 years of age (similar to the groups previously studied) and people over 55 yearsof 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 thisgroup.Fein et al. (1985)found that elderly people (aged 69–74) recalled dreams less often than young participants (in71% of REM awakenings, as compared to 90% for younger group) and the dream reports of older participants contained sig-nificantly 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 (Her-man & Shows, 1983–1984) although the drop-off in recall frequency appears at the age of 25–35, and is apparently not re-lated to aging (Funkhouser, Hirsbrunner, Cornu, & Bahro, 1999). Because of the apparent age-related decrease in visualimagery in dreams, any age-differences in the recall of colour in dreaming have to be taken cautiously, since poor visual re-call can lead to mislabelling dreams as greyscale.If media experience is indeed responsible for reports of greyscale dreaming, the following predictions can be made: peo-ple 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 thepresent design is that it makes the supposition that people who had such experience, and now are over 55 years of age, haveretained at least some of their greyscale dreaming patterns despite a long and intense colour media exposure. This is notcompletely unlikely if a developmental approach to dreaming is considered. Since dreams are in development until around12 years of age (Foulkes, 1999), it is possible that these early years are important in setting the form of dreams. Thus, a sec-ondary hypothesis can be stated: people over 55 will report still having greyscale dreams only if childhood exposition tomedia is more important than adulthood exposition.If methodological and belief issues are the only reason why people reported black and white dreaming, different pre-dictions can be made. Firstly, people who claim to have black and white dreams should report them more frequently whentested with a questionnaire than when asked directly after the dream takes place. Secondly, there should be age differ-ences in the type of dreaming that is reported—but only for questionnaires. This is because people brought up on blackand white media might harbour the concept that dreams should be in black and white, and consequently will claim tohave greyscale dreams. This misconception should be cleared (at least to some extent) by administering a more directmeasure of dream colour. In parallel to the previous set of hypotheses, older people will only report greyscale dreamingif the assumed beliefs regarding the nature of dreaming are quite stable in time. Finally, since misconceptions are morelikely 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 anydifferences in memory quality between coloured and greyscale dreams might also stem from the intrinsic qualities of these dreams.

2. Method

2.1. Design

The main variables investigated were the frequency of coloured and black and white dreams, measured with a question-naire and a dream diary, as well as dream recall quality. The independent factors were age, experience with colour and blackand white media and attitude towards dreams. Attitude towards dreams was considered important because in previousstudies it has been found to relate to reported dream recall frequency (Beaulieu-Prévost & Zadra, 2005) and quality (Wolcott & Strapp, 2002).

2.2. Participants

Participants were recruited through the University of Dundee and community centre advertisements as well as by con-tacting volunteers in existing research databases. All participants knew they were recruited for a study of dreams and dreamcolour, but they were not told about the specific hypotheses. This way of recruitment has the potential to introduce a biasinto the results, as volunteers will be more interested in dreams than an average person, and possibly have a higher dreamrecall frequency. However, a higher dream recall frequency would be in fact beneficial for the present study. If greyscale ormixed colour dreams are infrequent, obtaining more dream samples from each person will reduce the chances of missingthese dreams because of a narrow 10-day testing period. Also, recall frequency is positively correlated with better dreamdetail recall (Wolcott & Strapp, 2002) which can be beneficial to the present study.There were 30 males and 30 females in the study; half of each group were under 25 years of age (mean = 21,

= 2.5) andhalf were over 55 years of age (mean = 64,

= 8.0). The volunteers were paid £8 for their participation.

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