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Do you dream in colour?

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Do you dream in colour?

Postby RedCelt69 on Thu Jun 21, 2012 3:11 pm

I've long wondered about this, and a recent news item renewed my interest in exploring it further. A new type of eye-surgery (for a specific eye problem) involves the connection of a low-resolution light-sensitive array to the optical nerves... giving the patients a very limited type of vision; a long way from a cure, but better than full blindness. When being interviewed, one of the patients said that one of the effects of the treatment was that, for the first time in years, he was having dreams in colour.

Now, to me, the idea of coloured-dreams is a nonsensical one. I have dreams, sure, but they're not in colour. They're not even in monochrome. The eyes aren't used in dreams and (for me) actual images aren't involved. They are thought-processes, involving the concept of images... not actual images. I mean, they can be very real and I've often woken from a (bad) dream to find myself very thankful that it was just a dream. They feel very real, but they've never been images that could be described as "colour".

And I'm curious to know if my dreams are usual or unusual.

So, do you dream in colour?
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby Senethro on Thu Jun 21, 2012 10:21 pm

RedCelt69 wrote:I've long wondered about this, and a recent news item renewed my interest in exploring it further. A new type of eye-surgery (for a specific eye problem) involves the connection of a low-resolution light-sensitive array to the optical nerves... giving the patients a very limited type of vision; a long way from a cure, but better than full blindness. When being interviewed, one of the patients said that one of the effects of the treatment was that, for the first time in years, he was having dreams in colour.

Now, to me, the idea of coloured-dreams is a nonsensical one. I have dreams, sure, but they're not in colour. They're not even in monochrome. The eyes aren't used in dreams and (for me) actual images aren't involved. They are thought-processes, involving the concept of images... not actual images. I mean, they can be very real and I've often woken from a (bad) dream to find myself very thankful that it was just a dream. They feel very real, but they've never been images that could be described as "colour".

And I'm curious to know if my dreams are usual or unusual.

So, do you dream in colour?


I don't follow this at all. My dreams are me going about, doing stuff, in places that can pass for real if not inspected too closely. Is this some kind of sophistry positing dreaming people only experiencing concepts of colour and so therefore somehow not "real" colour? Is colour an experience requiring an object and conscious observer?
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby macgamer on Fri Jun 22, 2012 9:17 am

I heard about this story and was similarly intrigued and asked myself the same question. I would go along with what Senethro wrote that, in a dream, or when we recall it on waking, we apply the concepts of colour to objects that we recognise.

As a side and slightly related phenomenon, I suffer from sleep paralysis, which when it first starting happen was terrifying. Now, from time to time I have the ability to realise that I'm in a dream and 'escape' from it (usually by touching my own face). It seems like borderline lucid dreaming, but without so much conscious control. However, during those more lucid dreams I have not perception of colour.
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby Senethro on Fri Jun 22, 2012 3:07 pm

Ok, I'm surprised again, I'll be more clear. I dream in full colour and limited dull sound. Smell is absent, touch inconsistent and proprioception (muscle stretch feedback) tends to be accurate to my sleeping body, not to anything happening in the dream. The mismatch between dream experience and proprioception often alerts me that I'm dreaming and wakes me up.

I don't experience this metaphysical stuff about concepts that you describe.
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby jollytiddlywink on Tue Jul 03, 2012 10:32 pm

I am likewise not sure if redcelt is being a bit of a kill-joy and insisting that since dreams aren't real, they can't happen in colour, or if he really means that he dreams of abstract casting-shadows-in-Plato's-cave concepts.

I dream in colour, and my dreams are mostly visual, in that my abiding impressions of them upon waking are what I saw happening in them. But I can state that I do also have a sense of taste in my dreams, and a sense of touch, as well as hearing. I cannot say for certain about muscle feedback or smell, but I can't say I have ever woken up aware at their absence.

My dreams play out like a film shot from a first-person point of view, and the world they take place in resembles reality more closely than anything else.
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby RedCelt69 on Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:39 am

I'm not trying to be a kill-joy. I'm trying to understand the differences (between my own mind and the mind of others) when it comes to the recollection of dreams. And the recollection part is important as, when being able to describe a dream we are awake, not dreaming. For some people, they can identify their dreams as being in colour or not in colour... and that is what confuses me.

I've already said that my dreams feel like reality; the realisation that they aren't only happens on wakening. I have never been able to identify my dreams as being in colour, as the concept (to me) seems like a nonsense one. If you recollected waking events from the previous day, do you describe them as being in colour? Your recollections are memories... and memories consist of concepts encapsulated in neurons and synaptic connections. The addition of colour is a curious one to me... and I wonder what non-colour dreams feel like, to those who do identify some of their dreams as something else.
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby macgamer on Thu Jul 05, 2012 10:38 am

RedCelt69 wrote:If you recollected waking events from the previous day, do you describe them as being in colour? Your recollections are memories... and memories consist of concepts encapsulated in neurons and synaptic connections. The addition of colour is a curious one to me... and I wonder what non-colour dreams feel like, to those who do identify some of their dreams as something else.


I was going to write something about recollected 'waking' memories. I would say that when I recall a memory briefly, the colours associated with that memory are not present. I wouldn't say I see it in 'black & white' per se, but rather the colour detail is not part of my conscious recollection because they are not important.

If the memory was particularly strong, then colours are frequently recalled or if I try purposely to recall the colours from a certain past experience, then they begin to get 'painted in'.

Memory / recall is imperfect. I find that with memories from the distance past, have a certain reconstructive quality to them, that is, I don't believe that they are being entirely recalled as I experienced them, but rather the gaps filled in by guess work, supposition or from what others told me. Our brain fills in the gaps of information from our eyes and reassembles it in a comprehensible manner. It would see plausible that the same thing happens with memory.
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Re: Do you dream in colour?

Postby Traveller on Tue Jul 10, 2012 10:20 am

Like macgamer says, if colour isn't relevant in a dream I just don't remember it. It's not that there isn't any colour, but more that the colour just doesn't matter. A red post box or blue police call box will always be those colours - remembered or otherwise: A green post box with pink polka-dots is much more likely to be remembered!

What I find interesting is that when I was younger, I did have dreams that were either explicitly black & white or explicitly in colour. So much more media then was only in black and white - including most television, all newspapers, and most photographs - that colour was relatively unusual, and just moving pictures in colour was itself worth remembering. (I used a black & white TV set until about 1995.)

Memory is certainly imperfect! When I moved to the United States as a young child, I managed to switch all my early UK memories to have the traffic driving on the right - including going round roundabouts the wrong way. The US didn't have roundabouts then, so it must have been UK memory that had been mirrored. I was even more confused with a vague memory of roads with three lanes - and concluded that I must have been thinking about the three-lane carriageways of English D3M motorways. Only much later did I discover that there really had been S3 single-carriageway roads with three lanes and unrestricted overtaking in both directions!
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