What is the color of dreams? The perception of color in dreams is not predefined and depends on several factors, among which technology appears to be. In fact, between the 1920s and 1950s, around 80% of study participants reported dreaming in black and white, today similar research shows that people dream mainly in colour. According to the most accredited hypotheses, this “technicolor revolution” of dreams, which began in the 1960s, may have been influenced by the concomitant transition from black and white to color television. A phenomenon that reminds us how technological revolutions almost always have a significant impact on the way we live and perceive the world.
How the color of dreams has changed in the last century
The first study that investigated the color of dreams dates back to 1915. In those years, researchers detected a trend that today might seem bizarre: among all the subjects interviewed, only 20% of Americans declared that they dreamed in color. Over the years, numerous studies have been carried out to understand why some people dream in color and others not, and to monitor the trend over time. The table below shows the main studies that have investigated the color of dreams over the last century.
Notice anything strange? According to data, in the first half of the twentieth century, most people dreamed in black and white, producing dream scenarios similar to old photographs. This trend, however, underwent a radical reversal starting in the 1960s, when dreams suddenly began to acquire color. But what could have triggered this real technicolor revolution?
Curious note: from the data of the first studies, often conducted in hospitals, it seemed that psychiatric patients were more inclined to dream “in color”, incorrectly leading to the belief that the technicolor dream could be a symptom of some psychiatric condition, an obviously discredited and completely incorrect hypothesis.
The influence of the media on the color of dreams
To hypothesize what might have influenced the color of dreams, it is first necessary to understand how our brain “writes dream scripts”. Dreams, in fact, are an altered state of consciousness in which our unconscious takes on the role of a director, using everything it has observed and absorbed during the day to construct the scenes we experience at night. In this complex operation it was demonstrated that the media, especially among younger people, can make a great contribution to dream direction, influencing both the form and content of dreams.
Precisely for this reason, according to the most accredited hypotheses, the sudden change in the color of dreams observed since the 1960s can be linked to one of the greatest events in the history of multimedia. In the first half of the twentieth century, when the first studies on the color of dreams were conducted, the main media (photographs, cinema films and television programs) were almost exclusively in black and white. But on January 1, 1954, Americans who turned on the TV to follow the traditional New Year’s Eve parade found themselves faced with a real revolution: the TV screen, until then black and white, began to broadcast color images, closer to reality.
In the following years, while color televisions spread into homes all over the world and series like The Flintstones and Star Trek became icons for entire generations, at the same time dreams, especially among the youngest, began to take on all colors. And today, in light of the knowledge acquired from the study of dreams, linking this phenomenon to the influence of the media is a more than plausible hypothesis. Not surprisingly, a study conducted in 2008 showed that older people, accustomed to black-and-white media from childhood, had black-and-white dreams more often than younger people, born and raised in the era of color media.
This “technicolor dream revolution” reminds us that science cannot be contained in watertight compartments. Innovation and technological revolutions not only influence scientific progress, but have a profound impact on our way of living and perceiving the world, changing, in some cases, even the color with which we observe it and process it in our dreams.
