Dreaming in Color vs. Black and White: What the Research Found

By Ron van Cann · June 2026 · 6 min read

Ask someone whether they dream in color, and they may say yes immediately. Ask an older person the same question, and they may pause. "I think so — mostly. But sometimes black and white." And some elderly dreamers will say definitively: their dreams have always been in black and white.

This is one of the stranger patterns in dream research: the color of dreams appears to vary by generation. Not by culture, not by personality, not by geography — by generation.

The explanation, once researchers found it, was almost comically simple. And it tells us something important about how the dreaming brain uses what it has experienced.

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What People Actually Report

Until the mid-20th century, many psychologists and dream researchers believed that most or all dreams were in black and white. Freud's case studies do not mention color. Early 20th-century surveys found that the majority of dreamers reported either no color or uncertain color.

By the late 20th century, surveys were finding the opposite: roughly 80–90% of people reported dreaming in color, with only a small minority describing black-and-white dreams.

Something had changed. The question was whether the change was in dreaming itself, in how people described their dreams, or in something about the dreamers.

Eric Schwitzgebel at UC Riverside examined this question systematically, reviewing the historical survey data and conducting his own inquiries. In a 2002 paper in the journal Dreaming, he documented the striking shift between mid-century and contemporary dream color reports, and raised the question of what could explain it. He considered several hypotheses: that people in the early 20th century had simply been less attentive to dream color; that color had always been present but unreported; or that something genuinely different was happening in the dreaming experience of people from different eras.

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The Black-and-White Television Finding

The clearest answer came from a 2008 study by Eva Murzyn at the University of Dundee, published in Consciousness and Cognition. Murzyn recruited two groups of participants:

• Adults under 25, who had grown up with colour television and colour media environments throughout their lives
• Adults over 55, who had spent formative childhood years (approximately 3–10 years old) watching black-and-white television before colour became standard in UK households

Murzyn then compared the proportion of black-and-white dream reports in each group.

The results were striking. In the under-25 group, approximately 4.4% of dreams were reported as black and white. In the over-55 group who had watched a significant amount of black-and-white television as children, approximately 7.3% of dreams were black and white. Crucially, within the over-55 group, those who had grown up primarily watching black-and-white TV had significantly more black-and-white dreams than those who had spent their childhoods with colour TV (the over-55 group was split by this experience).

A parallel finding: over-55 participants reported that in their childhood dreams, black and white was far more common — consistent with the idea that childhood media exposure had shaped the dream experience of that period.

The implication was clear: the colour of dreams reflects the colour of the media environments that shaped the dreamer's early visual experience. Children who grew up watching a black-and-white world on screen dreamed more in black and white. Children who grew up with colour media — and this is essentially everyone born after the early 1970s in most Western countries — dream almost entirely in colour.

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What This Tells Us About Dream Construction

This finding fits a broader principle of dream neuroscience: the dreaming brain generates experience from internal neural representations built from waking experience. It does not access raw reality or apply independent standards. It uses what it has.

During REM sleep, the thalamus and visual cortex activate in patterns that generate visual dream experience. But this visual generation is not like a camera recording the external world — it is a reconstruction from stored visual representations. The visual memories and patterns that are most deeply encoded from waking experience are the raw material from which dream images are built.

For people who spent formative visual years — years during which visual processing systems are still developing and highly plastic — watching a black-and-white world on screen, that experience became part of the stored visual template. Not exclusively (the real world was always in colour), but significantly. Black-and-white became a familiar visual mode, woven into the representational store.

For people who have never experienced sustained black-and-white visual media, the representational store contains essentially no black-and-white content. Dreams built from those representations are consequently almost always in colour.

This is the same principle that explains why people blind from birth have no visual dream imagery (no visual representations exist) and why late-deafened adults continue to hear voices in dreams for years (the auditory representations are well-established). The dreaming brain draws from what is stored — and what is stored reflects what was experienced.

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Is Dream Color Vivid or Muted?

A second question that researchers have explored is not just whether dreams have colour, but what quality that colour has.

Survey respondents frequently note that dream colour is not always equivalent to the rich, high-saturation colour of waking daylight experience. Many people describe dream colour as somewhat washed out, muted, or inconsistently saturated — present, but not always vivid. Some objects in a dream are brightly coloured; others seem desaturated or uncertain.

This is consistent with what neuroimaging tells us about REM sleep visual processing. The primary visual cortex (V1) is active during REM, but some of the higher visual processing areas involved in colour discrimination and contrast enhancement are less reliably active. The colour experience in dreams may reflect this partial activation: a colour-present but colour-inconsistent experience that is registered more as a background property than as the precise, saturated quality of waking colour perception.

It also explains something that many dreamers report: the uncertainty about whether a dream was in colour. On waking, they cannot be sure. This uncertainty is not a failure of memory — it may reflect the genuine ambiguity of the dream colour itself.

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The Schwitzgebel Challenge: Can We Trust Dream Reports?

Schwitzgebel has made the more provocative argument that dream color reports may not be reliable guides to dream experience at all. His position is that people's introspective reports about dream content — including color — are shaped by their beliefs and expectations about what dreams should contain. Early 20th-century dreamers, living in a black-and-white media world and exposed to early psychological literature suggesting dreams might be colourless, may have reported black-and-white dreams because that is what they expected dreams to be like.

By this reading, colour has always been present in dreams, and the historical change in color reports reflects changing expectations and cultural frameworks for dream reporting rather than genuine changes in dream experience.

This remains genuinely contested. Murzyn's finding — that childhood black-and-white TV exposure predicts black-and-white dream reports even in elderly dreamers who are fully aware that color dreaming is the contemporary norm — is difficult to explain by expectation alone. If the effect were purely about expectation, all contemporary dreamers should report color dreaming regardless of childhood media history.

The most likely resolution is that both mechanisms are partly at play: expectation shapes reporting, and early media exposure shapes actual visual representation — and both factors have changed in parallel as colour media replaced black-and-white.

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A Practical Note for Dream Journalers

For people who keep dream journals, color can be worth recording deliberately. Most dream journals focus on narrative content — who was there, what happened, where. But noting color (or its absence) as a deliberate observation when recording a dream can surface patterns over time.

People going through periods of emotional depression sometimes report that their dreams lose color saturation — greyer, more muted. People in periods of high emotional engagement sometimes report more vivid dream color. These are anecdotal patterns without robust controlled research behind them, but they are common enough that recording color as part of the dream diary is a worthwhile habit.

It also just forces a useful act of attention: pausing to notice what the visual quality of the dream actually was, rather than treating the narrative as the only dimension worth capturing.

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