Dreaming in Black and White: What It Means, and Doesn't
By Evgeny Smirnov, PhD · Psychological counsellor & founder of Individuate.me
Black-and-white dream reports track media exposure and memory, not pathology. The 1942 survey, its 2001 replication, and what missing colour actually means.
Dreaming in black and white most likely reflects the media you grew up with and the way dream memory decays, not anything wrong with you. The clearest evidence is a matched pair of surveys: Middleton (1942, The Journal of General Psychology) found that 70.7% of American college sophomores said they "rarely" or "never" saw colour in their dreams, and when Schwitzgebel ran a reconstruction of the same questionnaire on students in 2001, only 17.7% said so (Schwitzgebel, 2003, Perceptual and Motor Skills). Jungians read the dream image through the affect it carries (Wilkinson, 2006, Journal of Analytical Psychology), and treating colour as a carrier of that affect is a framing rather than a finding — so its absence is worth noticing, as a question rather than a diagnosis.
You wake at four in the morning and the dream is still sitting there — a stairwell, your sister, an argument about a car — and none of it has any colour at all. You check the memory again and it stays grey, like a screenshot with the saturation dragged to zero. By breakfast you have typed the question into your phone, and the top three results tell you it means depression, emotional detachment, or that you are a psychopath. Not one of them cites a study.
Had a dream with no colour in it?
Describe the grey dream as you remember it — including what you could not see. The analysis works with the image you actually have, not the one a dictionary says you should have had.
1. The short answer, and what it rests on
Reported dream colour tracks the media you were raised on. Murzyn (2008, Consciousness and Cognition) compared younger and older adults with different histories of black and white media, on both questionnaire and diary measures. People who had access to black and white media before colour media reported more greyscale dreams than people with no such exposure — and the two measures did not differ, which matters, because the diary is the harder test.
Her conclusion is hedged, and worth keeping in her terms rather than a journalist's: group differences in recall quality point to the possibility that true greyscale dreams occur only in people with black and white media experience. Possibility, not demonstration.
2. What percentage of people dream in black and white?
In 1942, 70.7% of American college sophomores said they rarely or never saw colour in dreams; when the questionnaire was rebuilt and run again in 2001, the figure was 17.7%.
Middleton's 1942 questionnaire is the origin point. Behind the headline 70.7%, the breakdown is stark: 40% of sophomores claimed never to see colours in dreams, 31% rarely, and only 10% frequently or very frequently (reported in Schwitzgebel, 2002, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science).
Schwitzgebel's 2001 study rebuilt that instrument — the 1942 original is lost, so he reconstructed its three target questions from the published report and added a definition to the colour-hearing item — and put it to 124 students at southern-California colleges. Only 17.7% said "rarely" or "never". He calls it an attempt to replicate, not a replication. His conclusion is the sentence everyone writing about this should have to reckon with: if dreams themselves have not changed, then "one or another (or both) groups of respondents were profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences" (Schwitzgebel, 2003, Perceptual and Motor Skills).
One detail should stop anyone reading the 1942 figure as a report of experience. The same questionnaire asked about coloured hearing — synaesthesia — and 68% claimed they rarely or never had it. An instrument that returns a similar-shaped answer for both is measuring how people answer questions.
3. Do people dream in colour? Wake them and ask
Stop asking people to remember, ask them on the spot, and the greyscale largely disappears. (The question is usually typed as "do people dream in color"; the answer below is the same either way.) Kahn, Dement, Fisher and Barmack (1962, Science) woke subjects during REM sleep and questioned them immediately; the great majority of dreams were described as having some colour. That began the reversal of scientific opinion in the 1960s — and it is a problem for any naive media hypothesis, since those awakenings happened in the era when surveys said dreams were monochrome.
The physiology is suggestive rather than decisive. Braun and colleagues (1998, Science) found that REM sleep selectively activates extrastriate visual cortex — particularly the ventral stream, which contains the colour-processing area V4 — while activity in the primary visual cortex is unexpectedly attenuated. They measured blood flow, not colour; the step from ventral-stream activation to colour is an inference, not their result.
Hold both. Immediate reports say colour; delayed reports sometimes say grey. The gap between them is the phenomenon.
Dive Deeper: The same gap between what a dream is like and what survives of it explains much else about dream memory — see why dreams feel so real while you are inside them.
4. Three questions people collapse into one
The commonest failure in writing about dream colour is fusing three separate questions into one vague hedge. They carry different evidence and deserve different grades.
| Question | Grade, and what was actually measured |
|---|---|
| Do dream reports vary with media exposure? | Well supported. Murzyn (2008, Consciousness and Cognition) across two age groups with different media histories; Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006, Dreaming) across three Chinese groups similar in age but differing in coloured-media exposure. Both measured reports. |
| Do some people genuinely experience greyscale dreams? | Mixed, leaning no. Murzyn raises it only as a possibility. Kahn et al. (1962, Science) found colour in the great majority of immediate REM awakenings; Braun et al. (1998, Science) found ventral-stream visual cortex active in REM — the stream that houses colour processing, which is an inference toward colour rather than a measurement of it. Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006) decline to treat their questionnaire as revealing genuine variation in coloured dreaming — only variation in opinions about it. |
| Does colour, or its absence, tell you something about yourself? | Unsupported as a measured result. No study cited here found colour, or its absence, to predict mood or wellbeing. Suinn (1966, The Psychiatric Quarterly) did put the personality question to the test — the title is "Jungian personality typology and color dreaming" — but a single unreplicated mid-century study is not something you can read your own grey dream against. |
5. Does dreaming in black and white mean you are a psychopath?
The false claim, by name: that dreaming in black and white indicates psychopathy, sociopathy, or an inability to feel emotion. It runs on symptom-list sites, in short-form video, and increasingly in AI answers that inherited it from them.
There is no literature behind it. Search the biomedical databases for monochrome or colourless dreaming alongside psychopathy or sociopathy and nothing comes back — not a weak study, not a contested one. The claim has no source because nobody ran the study.
The nearest data runs the other way. Tapia, Werboff and Winokur (1958, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease) compared recall of sleep phenomena in non-psychiatric medical patients and neurotic patients, and found the psychiatric group reporting coloured dreams somewhat more often than controls, highest among neurotic women. That runs against the folk claim rather than supporting it — though neurosis is not psychopathy, so even these numbers measure something else.
6. Do black and white dreams mean depression?
No measured link exists, and the surveys were never built to find one. Every study in this literature — Middleton (1942), Schwitzgebel (2003, Perceptual and Motor Skills), Murzyn (2008, Consciousness and Cognition), Schredl et al. (2008, Dreaming) — measured what people report about dream colour against media history, age, or recall quality. None administered a mood inventory, so there is no depression finding to be for or against.
The one clinical dataset that touched psychiatric status — Tapia, Werboff and Winokur (1958), above — ran the other way, with the psychiatric group reporting coloured dreams somewhat more often than controls. The emotional-numbing variant gets the same answer: nobody measured it either.
If your dreams have changed alongside a real change in how you feel, that deserves a qualified professional. This is a reflection tool, not a substitute for professional help.
7. Where the media explanation frays
This is the part a vendor page leaves out. The media story is the best available explanation, and it is not clean.
Schwitzgebel (2002, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) documents that 1950s dream researchers commonly held dreams to be predominantly a black and white phenomenon, while both earlier and later treatments presume or assert that dreams have colour. The view rose and fell with black and white film. Even the vocabulary followed the screen: Hall (1951, Scientific American) reported that a minority of dreams were entirely or partly coloured and called them "technicolored", borrowing openly from the colour movies then arriving.
Two complications.
- It is not a tidy historical staircase. Stepansky and colleagues (1998, Dreaming) surveyed a representative sample of Austrian adults in 1993 and found a strikingly large minority claiming not to dream in colour — far more than contemporaneous US student samples, long after colour television was universal in both countries.
- The effect lives between groups, not within them. Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006, Dreaming) found strong relationships between coloured-media history and coloured-dream reports across their three Chinese groups, and poor relationships within each. Their reading: the phenomenon is cultural rather than individual.
So media exposure shapes what people say about dream colour. Whether it shapes the dreams is a further claim, and only Murzyn's diary comparison gestures at it.
Bring the grey dream itself
Rather than deciding what monochrome means in general, describe this dream and what was happening around it. Colour, or its absence, is one detail among many.
8. Or do you just forget the colour? The memory explanation
A second hypothesis deserves equal billing: black-and-white reports may reflect the limits of dream recall rather than the dream experience. Schredl, Fuchedzhieva, Hämig and Schindele (2008, Dreaming) put that hypothesis to a direct test, and it held. Their students rated about 10% of their dreams as black and white when asked in general — but only 2.7% when asked about colour immediately after morning recall, and the figure fell again once "I may have forgotten" was an available answer.
The logic is simple. Colour is a low-salience attribute. You wake holding a narrative — who was there, what happened, how it felt — and the surface properties go first. Ask what colour the stairwell was and many will say honestly that there wasn't one, when the accurate answer is that they no longer know.
Murzyn's recall-quality data cut against a purely mnemonic reading, though. In her sample, people with early black and white media recalled their greyscale dreams as clearly as their coloured ones, while people without that exposure recalled coloured dreams significantly better than grey ones — memory artefact for the unexposed group, and the reason she allows that true greyscale dreams may occur in people with black and white media experience. A possibility, in her words, not a demonstration.
So "are my dreams in colour?" is nearly unanswerable from memory — and useless from a memory more than a few minutes old. The only reliable sampling point is inside the dream or in the first seconds after it — the position deliberate awareness inside a dream puts you in.
9. So why are your dreams black and white?
Working from the evidence above rather than from a symbol dictionary, here is what a monochrome report most plausibly points to.
| What you noticed | What it more likely points to |
|---|---|
| Dreams have "always" been grey, and you are over 55 | Media history — the best-supported association in this literature (Murzyn, 2008, Consciousness and Cognition), and one that says nothing about your psyche. |
| Dreams turned grey recently | A change in recall or attention, not in the dream. The memory hypothesis (Schredl et al., 2008, Dreaming) covers this better than any symbolic reading. |
| One dream was grey, the rest are colourful | The only case where the absence is a usable detail. Treat it as a feature of that image — like weather, or silence. |
| You only wondered after reading that grey dreams mean something | The question probably created the observation. Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006, Dreaming) is a paper about exactly that: beliefs about dreams travelling through a culture. |
| Dreams are unusually vivid and colourless | Vividness and colour need not move together, but they are not cleanly independent either — Murzyn (2008) found dream colour and recall quality interact. If intensity has jumped, the causes are usually physiological — see what actually drives vivid dreams. |
Notice what is not on that list: a personality type, a diagnosis, a moral quality, a spiritual grade. Some traditions do read colour and its absence as a message about the soul's condition; this page does not take that frame, because there is nothing to check it against.
10. What did Jung say about colour in dreams?
Start with the honest label. Jung proposed that the dream compensates the conscious attitude — that it supplies what the waking position leaves out (CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche). That is a theoretical construct, not a measured result. It has been put under systematic test: Roesler (2020, Journal of Analytical Psychology) identified five major dream patterns across dream series in Jungian psychotherapies, with typical pattern changes corresponding to therapeutic change, presented as findings supporting Jung's theory. A framework under examination — the correct status for it.
Within that framework the emphasis falls on the affect underpinning the dream image. Wilkinson (2006, Journal of Analytical Psychology) argues that contemporary neuroscience supports rather than contests Jung's view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. One framing that follows from that — framing, not finding — is that colour behaves like the intensity dial on feeling. When the colour is gone, the useful question is not "what does grey symbolise" but "where did the charge go?"
That question has honest shapes. Was the dream flat throughout, or vivid and merely uncoloured? Were you a participant or a spectator? Did anything land in the body? A dream watched from behind glass is a different object from a dream you were inside. The companion question — why this dream, tonight — usually has a duller answer than the image suggests: waking material appears to surface both the night after an event and again five to seven days later, which is the dream-lag effect.
What it is not is a lookup-table entry. The Jungian approach to dream symbols puts your own associations ahead of any fixed meaning — and monochrome is a poor candidate for a fixed meaning, given how badly people recall colour at all.
Dive Deeper: If you would rather work with what repeats than with what is missing, start with the motifs that show up across most people's dreams.
11. How to settle it for yourself
The question is answerable, but only with a method, because your memory of last month's dreams is worthless here.
- Record within seconds. Colour goes first. A voice note before you sit up beats a considered entry over coffee.
- Ask a specific question. Not "was it in colour" but "what colour was the door".
- Log one of three answers: colour, grey, don't know. The third is the important one. Middleton's 1942 scale had no room for it and neither did the main form of the 2001 replication — but wherever later surveys did offer it, between 15% and 22% of people took it (Schwitzgebel, 2003; Schwitzgebel, Huang & Zhou, 2006; Stepansky et al., 1998), and Schredl et al. (2008) found black-and-white reports fell as soon as "I may have forgotten" was on the card. Expect it to dominate early.
- Give it thirty entries before concluding anything. A single grey dream is noise.
- Note intensity separately from colour. Two fields, because they do not always run together.
Do that for a month and you will have what no questionnaire here has: your own distribution, sampled close to the source. You may well find that "black and white" was mostly "I never checked".
Frequently Asked Questions
What does dreaming in black and white mean?
In the best-evidenced reading it says something about how you remember and describe dreams, not about your mental health. Murzyn (2008, Consciousness and Cognition) found that people who had access to black and white media before colour media reported more greyscale dreams than people without that exposure. Woken during REM sleep and questioned immediately, people describe colour in the great majority of dreams (Kahn et al., 1962, Science).
Do people actually dream in colour?
The laboratory evidence says yes, overwhelmingly. When subjects are woken during REM sleep and asked at once, colour is reported in the large majority of dreams (Kahn et al., 1962, Science), and REM sleep selectively activates extrastriate visual cortex — the ventral stream, which contains the colour-processing area V4 — while primary visual cortex is attenuated (Braun et al., 1998, Science). That is blood flow, not colour: the step from ventral-stream activation to colour is an inference, not their result. What varies across surveys is what people believe about their dreams — Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006, Dreaming) argue such questionnaires measure opinion, not experience.
Does dreaming in black and white mean you are a psychopath?
No. There is no published study linking monochrome dream reports to psychopathy or sociopathy; the claim circulates without a source behind it. The nearest mid-century clinical data ran the opposite way: Tapia, Werboff and Winokur (1958, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease) found neurotic patients reporting coloured dreams somewhat more often than non-psychiatric patients, not less. The folk claim runs against the nearest numbers anyone collected — and even those measured neurosis, not psychopathy. Nobody has ever run the study the claim pretends to cite.
Why are my dreams suddenly black and white?
The likeliest answer is a change in recall or in attention rather than a change in the dream. Schredl and colleagues (2008, Dreaming) put the memory hypothesis to a direct test: black-and-white reports may reflect the limits of dream recall rather than the experience itself. Colour is a low-salience detail that fades fast on waking, and most people never had a habit of checking for it until something prompted the question.
Do older people dream in monochrome?
Older adults have reported greyscale dreams more often, but age here is probably standing in for media exposure. Murzyn (2008, Consciousness and Cognition) compared younger and older adults with different black-and-white media histories and found the exposure difference, not age alone, tracking the reports. Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou (2006, Dreaming) found the same pattern across Chinese groups similar in age but differing in coloured-media history.
The bottom line
Dreaming in black and white is, on current evidence, a fact about reports rather than a fact about dreams. Media exposure shapes what people say (Murzyn, 2008; Schwitzgebel, Huang & Zhou, 2006). Memory limits shape it further (Schredl et al., 2008). Immediate awakenings and REM imaging both suggest the dreaming brain is not working in greyscale at all (Kahn et al., 1962; Braun et al., 1998). The psychopath claim has no source; the depression claim has no measurement.
What remains is smaller and more useful. If one dream came without colour while the rest arrive saturated, that is a genuine feature of that dream — hold it as a question about where the feeling went, work it against your own associations, and resist any table telling you grey means detachment. That absence is worth a paragraph in your journal. It is not worth a diagnosis.
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