do you dream in black & white?

I remember as a kid people talking about dreaming in black & white. I thought that was crazy. Black and white didn’t exist until photography came along, then movies and TV. How could the mind have evolved to dream in black and white? Do I remember the colors of things in my dreams? Not exactly. But I sure would remember the weirdness of their being in black and white. In a New Yorker article about dreams Margaret Talbot quotes “a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside”:

[Eric] Schwitzgebel’s team speculated that … ‘dreams may be neither colored nor black and white, leaving the colors of most of their objects unspecified, as novels do. Perhaps it takes time and energy to fill in all the colors in a richly detailed scene, with the result that most of our dream imagery is fairly sketchy, even if that sketchiness is not recognized by the dreamer.’

This sounds right to me. Dreams are sketchy — we’re constantly having to interpret them as they are happening. I don’t mean sussing out the symbolism, I mean deciding that you’re in a classroom even though it looks like a meadow, or that that’s your brother giving you advice even though he’s taller than your brother, older, darker-skinned, and balancing on a spinning globe.

source: 
“Nightmare Scenario: can we learn to rewrite our bad dreams?”

by Margaret Talbot

The New Yorker, November 16, 2009, v. 85 n. 37