“Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from 1942”, Eric Schwitzgebel2003-02-01 (dreams; backlinks)⁠:

In the 1940s and 1950s many people in the United States appear to have thought they dreamed in black and white. For example, Middleton1942 found that 70.7% of 277 college sophomores reported “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams.

The present study replicated Middleton’s questionnaire and found that a sample of 124 students in 2001 reported:

a statistically-significantly greater rate of colored dreaming than the earlier sample, with only 17.7% saying that they “rarely” or “never” see colors in their dreams.

Assuming that dreams themselves have not changed over this time period, it appears that one or the other (or both) groups of respondents must be profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences.

See Also:

• When people remember dreams they never experienced: A study of the malleability of dream recall over time

• Development in the understanding of perception: The decline of extramission perception beliefs

• Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep

• Human Vision Reconstructs Time to Satisfy Causal Constraints

• Beliefs of Children and Adults About Feeling Stares of Unseen Others

• Shape and color in apparent motion

• A deafening flash! Visual interference of auditory signal detection

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