I think Mary’s right that more attention to the neurophysiology of vision and the cultural/technological changes of modernity will be helpful in making better sense of this question.

Also, Bob Van de Castle reminded me that his 1994 book Our Dreaming Mind has a good discussion of color dreams (pp. 253-256 and 298).  After reviewing several experimental studies, Van de Castle concludes that “color appears in dreams with much greater frequency than is generally acknowledged.  The saturation or intensity of color in dreams seems to vary along a continuum.” (p. 255)

Bob Hoss is another IASD member who has done especially detailed investigations of color in dreams.

I’ve just read Eric Schwitzgebel’s longer paper, “Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?” in 2002, and I’m grateful for his extensive research on this topic.  He admits that he has larger philosophical fish to fry–he says “I write in service of the broader thesis that people generally have only poor knowledge of their own conscious lives, contrary to what many philosophers have supposed.” (p. 649), an argument he elaborates in his recent book Perplexities of Consciousness (2011).  I don’t think I’d want to argue with him about that general idea.  And I agree that “our knowledge of the phenomenology of dreaming is much shakier than we ordinarily take it to be” (p. 649).

But I suspect Schwitzgebel views this as an insoluble problem because of the fundamental limits of introspection and conscious self-knowledge.  I see it as a problem that can be solved by better empirical research that builds our knowledge of dream phenomenology on  firmer foundations.

Looking at some of the initial data I’ve drawn from the SDDb, it seems clear that most people dream fairly often, but by no means always, of colors and black and white.

Here’s a link to an SDDb search for reports of 25+ words with references to achromatic colors.  472 reports show up, out of 5193 reports of that length.  White appears most often, black next, gray third.

And here’s a link to an SDDb search for reports of 25+ words with references to chromatic colors.  476 reports show up, out of 5193 reports of that length.  Red appears most often, followed by blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple.

In studies of people who have kept long-term dream journals, I’ve found lots of variation in this area.  Some people have more chromatic color references in their dreams, and other people have more achromatic references.  Some people have very high overall frequencies (e.g., Merri, whose dream series of 315 dreams is available on the Dreambank, has by my count 44.4% of her dreams with at least one chromatic reference and 40% with at least one achromatic reference) and others quite low (Paul, whose series of 136 dreams is available on the SDDb, has 0% chromatic and 1.47% achromatic references).

I don’t know of any theoretical perspective that can encompass all this data.  Isn’t it paradoxical to think about the colors we see when we’re asleep and our eyes are closed?  Perhaps we need a new paradigm entirely to make adequate sense of the visual qualities of dreaming experience.

But I still hold to my “Dorothy Hypothesis”: This whole question in mid-20th century psychology of whether we dream in color or black & white was generated by the 1939 release of The Wizard of Oz, with its dramatic contrast between the drab black & white (sepia, really) of Kansas and the gaudy, transcendent technicolor of Oz.

Note: Schwitzgebel’s article appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002), 649-660.

The Wizard of Oz

Recently I found an article I wish I had known earlier, by Eric Schwitzgebel: “Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from 1942.”  Schwitzgebel says, “In the 1940′s and 1950′s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were primarily a black & white phenomenon…However, by the 1960′s, most researchers reported a high incidence of color in dreams” (p. 25).  To investigate this strange psycho-cultural shift, Schwitzgebel replicated a 1942 study by W. C. Middleton in which college students were asked about their dream recall and colors in their dreams.  His results from a 2001 sample of students found a big difference: “The undergraduates in the present study reported much more colored dreaming than Middleton’s undergraduates in 1942.” (p. 28)

The exact question was, “Do you see colors in your dreams?”  ”Very frequently” was the answer of 3.3% of the 1942 students (N=277) and 26.6% of the 2001 students (N=124); “Frequently,” 7.0% vs. 25.8%; “Occasionally,” 19.0% vs. 22.6%; “Rarely,” 30.8% vs. 13.3%; and “Never,” 39.9% vs. 4.4%.

Schwitzgebel ends his paper by saying, “If it is plausible to suppose that dreams themselves have not changed from black and white to color in this interval, we may conclude that one or another (or both) groups of respondents were profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences” (p. 29).

This seems too harsh to me.  As I mentioned at the outset, this color vs. black & white question is not a natural one.  The participants in Middleton’s 1942 study would have been high school students when The Wizard of Oz came out three years earlier.  I wonder if they interpreted the survey question as meaning, do you ever dream like Dorothy did in the movie, in fantastically vibrant technicolor?  In the cultural shadows of World War II and the Great Depression, it may not be surprising that most of the students answered “no.”

Another finding in Schwitzgebel’s study, which he doesn’t discuss, is that dream recall in general seems to have risen.  The participants in both studies were asked “How frequently do you dream?”  ”Very frequently” was the answer of 13.4% of the 1942 students and 27.4% of the 2001 students; “Frequently,” 24.9% vs. 33.9%; “Occasionally,” 41.5% vs. 25.0%; “Rarely,” 30.8% vs. 13.3%; “Never,” 0.3% vs. 0.4%.  Based on these findings, it seems that not just color in dreams but dream awareness overall is greater now than in 1942.

However, Schwitzgebel’s study was performed in 2001, with students who passed their formative years in a decade of relative peace and prosperity.  Would we find the same results today if we replicated the questionnaire a third time, with students in 2012 who grew up in the cultural shadows of the War on Terror and the Great Recession?

Note: Schwitzgebel’s article appeared in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2003, vol. 96, pp. 25-29.

Prospero: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

The Tempest, IV.i.156-158

“All days are nights to see till I see thee/And nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.”

Sonnet 43, 13-14

Gloucester: “My troublous dreams this night doth make me sad.”

Duchess: “What dreamed my lord? Tell me, and I’ll requite it with sweet rehearsal of my morning’s dream.”

Henry VI, Part II, I.ii.22-24

Romeo: “I dreamt a dream tonight.”

Mercutio: “And so did I.”

Romeo: “Well, what was yours?”

Mercutio: “That dreamers often lie.”

Romeo: “In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.”

Mercutio: “Oh, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.  She is the fairies’ midwife…”

Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.52-58

Horatio: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”

Hamlet: “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Hamlet, I.v.164-167

Hamlet: “To die, to sleep–No more–and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.  ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.  To die, to sleep–To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

Hamlet, III.i.60-68

Puck: “If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumber’d here, while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.”

Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.425-430

Here’s a link to the search page for the OpenSource Shakespeare website, where you can type in “dream” and find all references to dreaming in Shakespeare’s works.

Animals: I searched the SDDb for many different types of animal-related words, but I’m sure I missed some, so this is an area needing improvement.  What I found in this study [of 2087 total dreams, 1232 female and 855 male] was 16% of the female reports and 14% of the male reports including at least one animal reference.  Consistent with what previous researchers have found, the children’s dreams in my sample have a higher percentage of animal references (24% for the girls, 20% for the boys).  Does this mean children are “closer” to nature than adults?  Perhaps.  It does seem that a higher proportion of animals in children’s dreams (or should we say a diminished proportion of animals in modern Western adults’ dreams?) is a stable pattern across many studies.

The animals that appeared most often were, in order, dogs, cats, horses, bears, fish, snakes, birds, and insects.  The first three—dogs, cats, and horses—are among the most familiar domestic animals.  Bears are NOT domestic animals, and they actually appear most often to be aggressive, threatening creatures in dreams.  Among different types of fish, sharks appear frequently like bears, as frightening predators, putting the dreamer in the harrowing position of prey, the hunted.  In other dreams, however, ocean dwelling creatures like whales and dolphins reveal an amazing intelligence that teaches the dreamer something new about the natural world.

I start the talk by briefly mentioning some of my early writings about the interplay of dreaming and nature: a 1991 article “Quest for Transformational Experience: Dreams and Environmental Ethics,” my doctoral dissertation/1994 book The Wilderness of Dreams and its notion of “root metaphors,” Herbert Schroeder’s chapter on dreams and natural resource management in my edited 1996 book Among All These Dreamers, the study of politically conservative and liberal people’s dreams and views of the environment in 2008′s American Dreamers, and Dreaming in the World’s Religions, also in 2008, with several stories of the inspirational roles that dreaming play in the nature awareness of indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.

The main focus of the talk is the findings I’ve made about the statistical frequency of nature references in dream content, using the word search methods of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb).  For this presentation I created a baseline sample of 2087 dream reports of more than 50 words but less than 300 words in length, from a total of 1232 females and 855 males.  The sample includes children, college students, and adults.  All are American and all are educated and/or computer literate.

Using tools on the SDDb that anyone can access, I studied these 2087 dream reports for references to the following categories of nature content: Weather, fire, air, water, earth, flying, falling, and animals.  (Can you guess which of the four classic elements (fire, air, water, earth) appears most often in dreams?  Can you guess which animals appear most frequently?) After laying out my findings I discuss the technological and political issues involved in bringing the insights of dreaming to bear on waking world environmental problems.

About halfway through the talk, our cat Strauss makes an appearance over my right shoulder.  It was a sunny day by Portland, Oregon standards, and the local birds were very active outside my window.  It was hard not to look at what he was looking at!

“Dreaming is an expression of human nature, and of humans-in-nature.  Dreams reflect the deepest instinctual energies of the unconscious psyche and the greatest physical powers that shape our embodied reality.  They teach us about the inner world and the outer world.  This presentation will explore the many dimensions of nature that open up in our dream experiences.  Combining religious and cultural history with new developments in cognitive science and database technology, I will discuss recurrent themes in people’s dreams about animals, the four elements, weather, and gravity.”

A brief report on the study just appeared in the “Week in Ideas” section of the Wall Street Journal.

The results of this new study are consistent with my previous findings suggesting that American liberals tend to be worse sleepers and more expansive dreamers than American conservatives, who tend to be better sleepers and relatively minimal dreamers.

Abstract: This report presents findings from a survey of 2992 demographically diverse American adults who answered questions about dream recall and questions about their political views. Participants who described themselves as “liberal” or “progressive” (n = 802) were compared to people who described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” (n = 1335). Previous studies have suggested that political liberals tend to have higher dream recall than political conservatives. The results of the present survey provide new evidence in support of this hypothesis. On all 11 questions asked about different types of dream recall, people on the left reported higher frequencies than people on the right. The same pattern was found when the two groups were divided by gender: Liberal males reported consistently higher dream recall than conservative males, as did liberal females compared to conservative females. These findings indicate that political ideology is at least one of the cultural factors influencing dream recall frequencies among American adults.

2008.  American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon Press).

2006. Sleep and Dream Patterns of Political Liberals and Conservatives. Dreaming, vol. 16(3), pp. 223-235.

2002. Dream Content and Political Ideology. Dreaming, vol. 12(2), pp. 61-77.

1995. Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election.  In Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society (State University of New York Press).

“Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.”

It would be easy to interpret this dream as a guilt-driven fantasy, a classic Freudian wish fulfillment.  We don’t know for sure, but we can fairly assume that Mary felt deeply saddened and somehow personally responsible for her child’s death.  The dream, in this view, satisfies her desire to defy death and magically restore her child’s life rather than tragically losing it.

The limits of that interpretation become apparent when the dream’s waking life impact is taken into account.  The dream did not diminish or obscure Mary’s awareness of what had happened.  On the contrary, the dream made Mary more aware of the reality of her child’s death and more conscious of her agonizing feelings of loss.  Far from a soothing delusion, this dream’s message to Mary seems almost cruel in its stark honesty: “Awake and find no baby.”

A better interpretation, I believe, starts with the dream’s emotional impact on her waking life. Mary’s dream marks a significant moment in her mourning process, her psyche’s way of making sense of a devastating loss and trying to reorient towards future growth.  Mary’s dream does not hide or disguise her child’s death.  When she wakes up, her first thought brings a fresh sense of loss and sadness.  But the dream also introduces a spark of vitality into Mary’s awareness.  Warmth, fire, and vigorous activity do indeed stimulate the creation of new life.  Mary’s dream is not delusional about that piece of primal wisdom. Mary may not have been able to bring her baby back to life, but she still had the drive, desire, and knowledge to create again.

Out of her mourning Mary did find new creative energies.  In January of 1816 she bore a healthy son, William.  That summer, she and Percy Shelley visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her first novel: “Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus.”

“Frankenstein” surely reflects the same wishful fantasy as Mary’s dream of the previous year, i.e., bringing the dead back to life.  But the differences are significant: In her dream, a mother tries to reanimate her daughter, whereas in “Frankenstein,” a male scientist tries to animate a creature stitched together from many different bodies.  The dream portrays a natural human desire for a personal relationship, while the story presents an unnatural and inhuman desire for impersonal control over another’s life. In “Frankenstein” Mary adds to her dream a dimension of horror and madness, along with a prescient critique of the self-destructive hubris and masculine grandiosity of modern science.  I don’t know much about her relationship with Percy Shelley, Byron, and other male poets, but I would guess that “Frankenstein” also reflects Mary’s feelings about gender, sexuality, and literary creativity.

Mary’s dream of her baby daughter did not simply inspire the “bring the dead back to life” plot line of “Frankenstein.”  The dream prompted a transformative deepening of her awareness about the creative tension between life and death, an awareness that enabled her to infuse “Frankenstein” with critical insight, emotional poignancy, and existential wonder.

1. “I heard the church organ playing as at a funeral. When I looked to see what was going on, a grave opened suddenly, and my father arose out of it in a shroud. He hurries into the church and soon comes back with a small child in his arms. The mound on the grave reopens, he climbs back in, and the gravestone sinks back over the opening. The swelling noise of the organ stops at once, and I wake up.”

Quoted in Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Penguin, 1980), p. 18.  Nietzsche had the dream at the age of 5, at the end of January in 1850, six months after his father, a Lutheran pastor, died from a long and painful “softening of the brain.”  Nietzsche’s description continues: “In the morning I tell the dream to my dear mother.  Soon after that little Joseph [Nietzsche's infant brother] is suddenly taken ill.  He goes into convulsions and dies within a few hours.”

2. “He saw the parsonage lying in ruins and his grandmother sitting alone among the debris. Waking up in tears, he was unable to sleep any more.”

From Hayman, p. 32.  Nietzsche had this dream the night of August 2, 1859, when he was 14 years old, after a big family party celebrating the 70th birthday of his grandfather, a Lutheran pastor like his father.  Hayman’s account continues: “In the morning he told Elisabeth [his sister] and his mother, who said neither of them must talk about the dream.  Always robust, their grandfather was still in good health.  But before the summer was over he caught a bad chill, which developed into influenza.  By the end of the year he was dead.”

These two dreams prefigure Nietzsche’s later philosophy in several ways.  They express a profound appreciation for the terrifying power of the unconscious, a tragic sense of fate and mortality, an openness to insights from “irrational” sources of knowledge, and a spiritual struggle with the death of God, the church, and His representatives on earth.

Hayman’s biography helps us see how Nietzsche’s early dream experiences gave fuel to the coming explosion of philosophical creativity.  In 1870, as a 25-year old professor at Basel University, he wrote in his notebook, “In one half of existence we are artists—as dreamers.  This entirely active world is necessary to us.” (p. 135)

These notes served as the basis for The Birth of Tragedy (1871), Nietzsche’s first published book.  The opening section of this work lays out an understanding of art, philosophy, and history that centers on the creative power of dreams.

“The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is truly an artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art, and, as we shall see, of an important part of poetry also.  In our dreams we delight in the immediate understanding of figures; all forms speak to us; there is nothing unimportant or superfluous.  But even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance; at least this is my experience, and for its frequency—indeed, normality—I could adduce many proofs, including the sayings of the poets….And perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the dangers and terrors of dreams they have occasionally said to themselves in self-encouragement, and not without success: ‘It is a dream! I will dream on!’ I have likewise heard of people who were able to continue one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights—facts which indicate clearly how our innermost being, our common ground, experiences dreams with profound delight and a joyful necessity.” (Translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp. 34-35)

This is not the place to explore the influence of dreams on The Birth of Tragedy or other writings in Nietzsche’s later career.  But it’s worth pointing out that both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung knew of Nietzsche’s philosophy and wove his ideas directly into their new psychological theories.  If you want to understand Freud and Jung better, go back to Nietzsche and his childhood dreams.

(Note: the picture shows Nietzsche in 1861, at the age of 16 or 17.)