Why Did People Dream in Black and White? The Science of Dreaming

Close your eyes for a second and think back to whatever you dreamed last night. What color was the sky in it? The walls of the room, the car, your mother's coat? For most people today, an answer arrives instantly, in full color, without any real effort. Ask that same question of someone born in the 1930s, though, and a surprising number will pause and tell you something odd. Gray. Faded. Something closer to an old newsreel than to ordinary sight.

Dream researchers spent most of the twentieth century quietly puzzled by this. Survey after survey, taken across different decades, kept turning up the same strange split. Then, as the century wore on, the split reversed itself almost completely. By the 2000s, the overwhelming majority of people reported dreaming in color, the same way they see the world while awake.

The story of black and white dreams starts, oddly enough, before television existed at all. And the best-supported explanation for what changed isn't a shift in human biology. It's what those dreamers spent their childhoods staring at.

THE POWER OF MEDIA AND EARLY TELEVISION

Before color television existed anywhere, most of the imagery a child absorbed came in shades of gray. Silent films. Black-and-white newsreels playing before the main feature at the cinema. Newspaper photographs, printed in cheap monochrome ink because color printing cost far more. Even home photography, for an average family, stayed black and white well into the 1960s in most countries, since color film and its processing were expensive luxuries most households skipped.

Television piled onto all of that. The BBC and the major American networks broadcast almost entirely in black and white through the 1940s and well into the 1950s. A child growing up during that stretch absorbed thousands of hours of monochrome imagery before ever seeing full color on a screen. That's not a minor exposure  it's a formative one, landing during the exact years a young brain is stocking its human visual memory with raw material.

The idea researchers use to connect this to dreaming is fairly simple, though still unproven at the level of brain mechanism. A dreaming brain builds scenes by drawing on stored visual material. If a huge share of that stored material came without hue attached, memory and imagination may lean on that same absence when improvising a dream. Nobody claims childhood television physically rewired anyone's visual cortex. The theory is softer than that, and stranger. It concerns which visual library the sleeping brain reaches for when it needs to build a face, a room, a street.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND FINDINGS

The paper trail on monochrome dreams goes back further than most people expect.

1915: psychologist Madison Bentley surveyed dreamers and found that only 20 percent of dreams were reported to contain color.

1942: researcher Warren Middleton gave 277 college sophomores a detailed questionnaire, and 70.7 percent of them said they rarely or never saw color in their dreams.

1953: a study by de Martino found that only 17 percent of undergraduate respondents claimed to see color in their dreams even once a month.

Then, through the 1960s and into the following decades, as color television sets replaced black-and-white ones across British and American living rooms, newer surveys began finding the opposite. Some studies put the figure as high as 83 percent of dreams involving some color. When philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel repeated Middleton's exact 1942 questionnaire on a fresh set of college students in 2001, the share reporting they rarely or never saw dream color had collapsed from 70.7 percent down to just 17.7 percent.

Something had shifted. Nobody tested it directly, though, until 2008.

That year, a psychology researcher named Eva Murzyn, working at the University of Dundee, ran a study directly comparing dream color across two age groups with very different television childhoods, later published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. She recruited 60 participants, splitting them evenly between people over 55 and people under 25. Everyone answered a questionnaire about their dreams and their childhood television and film habits, then kept a two-week dream diary, so Murzyn could check whether delayed recall matched fresher, morning-after recall. It did.

The generational gap, though, was wide. More than 20 percent of the older group, those raised on black-and-white broadcasts, reported dreaming in black and white, while less than 5 percent of the younger, color-TV-raised group said the same. A separate report on the same research put the younger group's figure precisely at 4.4 percent.

Murzyn's data pointed to something specific about timing too. The most impressionable window seems to fall between roughly ages 3 and 10, right around when children first develop the ability to recall their own dreams. Soak up your early visual world in monochrome during that stretch, and some trace of it appears to stick around for life, whatever colors your television showed you afterward. In a detail that has aged strangely well, Murzyn also mentioned one young subject, a frequent video game player, who described his dreams as feeling like he was watching them through a screen, the way a game frames its viewpoint. She later returned to that thread directly, going on to study how video game imagery specifically shows up in dream content.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF DREAMS

If black-and-white broadcasts could leave that kind of mark, the obvious next question is what today's screens are doing instead.

Color television spread through most households by the early 1970s. High-definition displays followed decades after that. Smartphones now put a bright, high-saturation rectangle in front of most people for several hours a day, often right up until the moment they close their eyes to sleep.

The color television impact on dreams is, at this point, one of the better-documented findings in sleep psychology, even with the underlying mechanism still murky. What's far less settled is the sequel. Nobody has run a Murzyn-style generational comparison on the smartphone era yet, so any claim about digital screens reshaping tonight's dreams stays a hypothesis, not an established finding. But the mechanism, if it holds, predicts something worth watching for. Kids raised on rapid-cut, high-saturation digital video should eventually show up in dream research carrying their own visual fingerprint, whatever form that turns out to take.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BRAIN-BASED PERSPECTIVES

This is the part most tellings of the story skate past.

Nobody has ever measured the color content of a dream directly, in real time, without waking the dreamer up to ask about it. Every data point in this entire field, from Bentley in 1915 to Murzyn in 2008, rests on self-report  a person waking up and translating, into language, something that happened in a state famous for scrambling accurate memory. That's the science of dreaming at its most frustrating: the instrument doing the measuring is the same foggy memory being measured.

That gap matters more than it sounds. Schwitzgebel, the philosopher who repeated Middleton's questionnaire, has spent years arguing that people are poor, easily misled narrators of their own dream experience, capable of being seriously wrong about something as basic as whether their dreams even had color. One of Middleton's original 1942 respondents illustrates the problem neatly. He insisted that virtually all of his dreams came out sepia toned, the brownish tint of old photographs, rather than true black and white, suggesting he wasn't recalling a colorless experience so much as reaching for the closest visual metaphor his era had handed him.

There's also a subtler possibility worth taking seriously. Middleton's 1942 subjects had been teenagers just three years earlier, when The Wizard of Oz made its famous jump into Technicolor. Some may have read the question "do you see color in your dreams" as asking about that kind of fantastical, saturated movie color, not ordinary daytime color, which would skew their answers toward no for reasons that have nothing to do with what their sleeping brains actually generated.

So did someone born in 1935 truly generate colorless neural imagery during REM sleep? Or did they experience an ordinary dream and simply describe it using the only visual vocabulary their culture had trained into them  the newsreel, the photograph, the television screen, all of it gray? Brain scans can show which regions of the visual cortex light up during REM sleep. They cannot yet show what color, if any, a sleeping brain believes it's looking at.

Something did shift, measurably, across a century of surveys, from Middleton's 70.7 percent monochrome-leaning students to Murzyn's 4.4 percent among the color-TV generation. Even skeptics of dream self-report don't dispute that the numbers moved. What they still argue over is where exactly that shift happened: inside the dreaming brain itself, or only in the words people reached for once they'd already woken up.

Tonight, when you dream, take note. Vivid color, or something closer to gray?

Nobody has yet figured out how to ask a sleeping brain that question without waking it up to answer, which means whatever is actually happening behind closed eyes at three in the morning is still, for now, locked away from every instrument science has built.