Dreaming in color

Last night the lad came home around 9:30, after a several hour stint at a nearby school, preparing for the weekend presentation of their Rose of Treason play at the annual DramaFest competition. He was tired when he walked through the door, but plopped down on the sofa and said, “Let’s talk.” That usually signifies that he wants to give conversation a free reign to end up wherever it wants to go.

“Okay,” I said, “Tell me about your day.” And off we went.

Shortly into our chatter, something he said triggered a thought. “Do you dream in color?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I always dream in color.”

“That’s interesting because there’s a lot of speculation about how many of us dream in color. A fairly high percentage of people have no recollection of color in their dreams.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s always color in my dreams, but sometimes my dreams are mixed media that include both black and white and color at the same time.”

“Fer instance?” I asked.

He described one of his recent dreams to me. He was inside a circa-1900 country store. Visually, the architecture and store setting were black and white. All items in the store were like pen and ink drawings, but the clerk behind the counter was a three dimensional, living-color, human being. The lad, as observer and participant in the dream, was without form, like a camera panning the scene. However, his companion was a brightly rendered cartoon character ("grandpa“ from the cartoon “Hey Arnold"). The dream was like a movie vignette, with ‘grandpa’ walking up the counter asking the clerk for Rudyard Kipling’s fishing rod. Which, I have to tell you, sent me into gales of laughter.

“I’d like to live in your head for awhile,” I laughed.

Color in dreams is an interesting topic, though. This morning I poked around the web, looking for some info. As far as I can tell, there is still a lot of inquiry into how many of us really do dream in color vs black and white and why some of us do and some of us don’t. I do dream in color, by the way.

Even more interesting is the concept that color vision is made possible by light of varying wavelengths impinging on the color receptors in our retinas. Which, obviously, leads to the question of how we see color in our brains with our eyes closed. How do we imagine in color or have colorful daydreams if light is absent. I can imagine in color in a dark room with my eyes closed. We can replay images from movies in our minds. We can replay living-color life experiences in our minds as if we were reliving them. Artists obviously think in color, too. Seeing color in our minds seems to be a fairly common human experience.

I ran across a brief summary/discussion of how we think/dream in color that says:

In his work The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud cited the suggestion by Max Wilhelm Wundt that objective (external) sensory excitations during sleep play a part in provoking dreams. An essential part is also played by the subjective (internal) visual and auditory sensations that are familiar to us in the waking state, in producing the illusions that occur in dreams. The internal excitations of the retina are considered to be especially important.  There is clearly a correlation between the mechanisms of color perception that operate during wakefulness and those that operate during dreaming. The idea of a color center in the brain can account for the fact that even though the sensory organs largely responsible for color perception during wakefulness are not subject to the same stimuli during sleep, the same effect is reproduced in dreams. Clearly, color perception is a result of the cooperation of both visual and neural processing and it is reasonable that this same kind of neural processing, largely aided by memory, is responsible for color in dreams.

I wouldn’t suggest that’s the definitive word on the subject, but it is kind of an interesting theory to think about. Apparently some research with stroke victims, who lose their color perception, supports the idea that both neural processing and memory play critical roles in re-creating color in dreams (or internal vision). But it doesn’t answer the question of why some people, who have color perception, have no recollection of dreaming in color. I guess it’s one of those “we know it happens, but we aren’t entirely sure why” situations.

In any case, do you dream in color?