What is the dream color? The perception of color in dreams is not predefined and depends on several factors, among which technology appears to be. Between the 1920s and 1950s, in fact, approximately 80% of the participants to the studies he reported dreaming in black and whitetoday similar research shows that people mostly dream in color. 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 which, today, might seem extravagant: among all the subjects interviewed, only the 20% of Americans declared dream 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 the data, in the first half of the twentieth century most people he dreamed in black and whiteproducing dreamlike 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 one 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 one to believe that the technicolor dream could be a symptom of some psychiatric condition, 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 one 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 build the scenes we experience at night. In this complex operation it was demonstrated that i averageespecially among the younger ones, can make a great contribution to dream direction, influencing both the form that the content of dreams.
Precisely for this reason, according to the most accredited hypotheses, the sudden change in color of dreams observed starting from 60s can be linked to one of the biggest 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 programmes) were almost exclusively in black and white. But the 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 in black and white, began to broadcast color images, closer to reality.
In the following years, as color televisions spread into homes all over the world and series like The Flintstones and Star Trek became icons for entire generations, in parallel even dreams, especially among the younger onesthey began to dyed in all colors. And today, in light of the knowledge acquired from the study of dreams, connect this phenomenon tomedia influence it is a more than plausible hypothesis. Not surprisingly, a study conducted in 2008 demonstrated that the older peopleaccustomed from small to medium black and white, did more often black and white dreams compared to younger, born and raised in the age of color media.
This “technicolor revolution of dreams” reminds us that science cannot be contained in watertight compartments. THE’innovation and the technological revolutions they do not only influence scientific progress, but they profoundly affect 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.
