“Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?”, 2002-12-01 ():
In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology.
If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the experience of dreaming is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be.
…This paper will trace the rise and fall of the view, once dominant among research psychologists as well as the general population of the United States, that people dream primarily in black and white. It will then attempt to evoke perplexity in the reader about whether we actually do dream in color and an admission that our knowledge of the phenomenology of dreaming is much shakier than we ordinarily take it to be. I write in service of the broader thesis that people generally have only poor knowledge of their own conscious lives, contrary to what many philosophers have supposed.