The Importance of Color in Dreams
Dreams have fascinated people for hundreds of years. The ideas behind what they really are and where they come from have changed, and still not everyone agrees on them. One of the most interesting things about dreams is that some people dream in color and some people dream in black and white. In a waking state, color stimulates emotion. Red, for example, can be angry or exciting. Softer pastels are calming – especially greens and blues. Within a dream, color also evokes emotion, and it also might be created by the mind based on the emotions that are felt within the dream. In other words, you might dream something in a particular color because of the emotion you feel about it, not the other way around.
Most people dream in strong color, and some dream in vague color. Few people dream in black and white, although some do. Color can be optional on many things, of course, so our brain assigns color in dreams to certain objects. An example of this would be dreaming about a blue car instead of a green one. The processing of the dream is then affected by the processing of the color, and this is important to an understanding of how dreams work and what kinds of emotional responses they produce. Unfortunately, a lot of dream researchers of the past have spent very little time looking at color and how it affects and is affected by the dreams of people. They didn’t seem to see it as being important or significant in any way.
People respond to color on various levels. One of these is through the nervous system. It speeds up things like heart rate and breathing in the presence of red, and slows them down in the presence of blue and other, softer colors. Since it does this when the eyes see color while awake, it only makes sense that it would also respond to color that is ‘seen’ in a dream. Studies have shown that these dream responses are similar to the responses that are seen when a person is awake, indicating that color has a lot of importance in the dreams of individuals. Not everyone thinks about color as having any kind of emotional response, but the physiological proof is clear and can’t be disputed. Color matters to the way that people feel, even when they’re asleep.
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