Colours of your dreams

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'”George Bernard shaw.

Dreams have always fascinated me. And when I mean dreams , it is not the aspirations we have, but the dreams we have when we fall asleep. Before I go on I would like to ask a question, do you dream in colour or do you dream in black and white? Try to answer this before you move on any further.

Dreams actually occur in the entire brain - all at once. Which is to say, there isn't just one area or part of the brain where dreams occur. When scientists first measured activity in our brains during REM sleep (REM stands for rapid eye movement sleep, when dreams occur), they discovered that our brains are as active during dreams as when we are awake. When we dream, our brains are stimulated from the inside, and all our senses are involved. This is why we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear in our dreams - the entire brain is just as busy as when we are awake!

Recurring dreams let us know that there is an important, unsolved problem in our lives. This is why recurring dreams are especially valuable to try to understand. Our subconscious mind is sending us an urgent message! Here's a fact about recurring dreams that not many people know: If we are able to identify the issue and solve the problem in our waking lives, the recurring dreams will stop. My first question about color in dreams has an interesting history. Historically, no one ever believed dreams were in black and white. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1950s and early 1960s that the question came to be debated. The cause? People were beginning to watch a lot of black and white television in those days, and this made their dreams, on occasion, mimic the black and white worlds that people were seeing on their TVs at night.
The answer to my question, accordingly, is tricky. All people dream in color. The truth is that we only recently began to dream in black and white—after we saw, for the first time, what a "black and white" world would look like. Think about it. If you'd never seen black and white movies and photographs and TV shows, it would be pretty hard to imagine what a "black and white" world would look like. For example, if you lived in the 1850s, and if someone asked you whether you dreamed in color or black and white—the question wouldn't make sense. You'd ask them: "What on Earth do you mean by dreaming in black and white?" Because the only world we knew back then was in full living color.

So far this is true. This means we dream in colour and also in black and white. But why don't we have information of the colour itself, why don't we remember what colour we had in our dreams?

The first thing is that YES it's true there are dreams in which there is no colour, but that is not because they're in black and white!What happens is that in dreaming, the automatic checking systems that go on in the mind are turned off. So, if the queen of England visited and brought a few aliens round for tea you'd probably be working out if you'd got enough cups and whether the biscuits you'd got would be acceptable, rather than thinking that it was a bit odd to be visited by the queen and some aliens.

Also, in dreams, things which aren't relevant are just UNSPECIFIED, and there are no alarm bells to flag up that something is MISSING. So, when you're flying on a magic carpet, you can't necessarily say which shoes you might have been wearing.

But not being able to tell what shoes you had on does not imply you were barefoot. This is what happens with the COLOUR situation. In a dream, where the colour of something is relevant, you see colour, but where the colour is not relevant, there is NO COLOUR INFORMATION. But that doesn't mean it's in black&white.This is the same way, why we remember only one person we talked to in a crowded room. We remember the room was crowded, but we remember no other person than the one we talked to.

It is this, the fact that "missing" information is not noticed to be missing, that fools the conscious mind on waking up into concluding that therefore by implication the dream must have been in black and white, whereas in fact it was just that colour wasn't important in that particular dream.