Black N White!!!

[Hacker4real]

I am new here and I am really interested in learning this. I am lucky to day that I have the talent to recognize everytime I am in a dream, but I am not really that talented at taking contol as DCs know how to freak me out. Well my real problem is that even if I do become a good LDer I am dissapointed because I have never dreamed in color ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE someone knows somethink to help me please I can't imagine how much more enjoying it will be to have color dreams they will be very realistic.

[Lucid Lobster]

All I can saw is WOW. Black and White. You might consider that not only as a problem but a gift as well since I don't think many people can do that.

[jereb]

once I get lucid, I can drain the the color out to make it black and white, but that occurring naturally, is really amazing...

[Foobly]

My girlfriend once told me that this was a rather common problem faced by people, although we didn't go into specifics as to how to fix it in that conversation.

[Dairyman]

I haven't tried this but, you could try shouting (in your lucid dreams) the word "COLOR!" and see what happens. Or you could summon a paint brush and paint your dream.

[Shift]

The question of whether people dream in colour or black and white, while not central to dream research, is an interesting
one to study. This is because it touches upon the issues of how experience and beliefs can change what we feel to be a fundamental
aspect of our life, namely visual imagery and dreaming. Interest in this question has been recently revived when a
surprising inconsistency in the results of the early and later studies was discovered by Schwitzgebel (2002). The research
conducted in the early 20th century unanimously concluded that the vast majority of people dream in black and white.
For example, Bentley (1915) reported that 20% of dreams contain colour; in 1942 only about 29% of college students reported
having at least occasional coloured dreams (Middleton, 1942; see also de Martino, 1953, and Middleton, 1933). The proportion
of people reporting coloured dreams even decreased in the 1950’s: Knapp (1956) claimed that as little as 15% of dreams
contain colour, while Tapia, Werboff, and Winokur (1958) found that only 9% of people who reported to a hospital in St. Louis
for non-psychiatric medical problems remembered having coloured dreams. Moreover, this figure was contrasted with a 12%
rate of reporting coloured dreams among psychiatric inpatients in the same hospital and the researchers concluded that vivid
and coloured dreams may be a sign of psychological problems. Overall, researchers and study participants agreed that
black and white dreams were the norm, and rare cases of coloured dreams were dubbed ‘Technicolor’ dreams (Calef,
1954; Hall, 1951), highlighting their perceived artificiality.
This tendency to report black and white dreams suddenly disappeared in the 1960’s. Kahn, Dement, Fisher, and Barmack
(1962) wrote that ‘‘with careful interrogation close to the time of dreaming, color was found to be present in 82.7% of the
dreams” and Herman, Roffwarg, and Tauber (1968) discovered that coloured dreaming was reported after 69% of REM awakenings
of their subjects. Similar results were reached in studies carried out by Berger (1963), Jankowski, Dee, and Cartwright
(1977) and Snyder, Karacan, Tharp, and Scott (1968). Most recently, Schwitzgebel (2003) replicated Middleton’s (1942) study
and found that only 17.7% of US college students say they rarely or never experience coloured dreaming....
There are two major differences between the two sets of studies that can possibly explain the changes in reporting of coloured
dreaming. The first one is related to the cultural background. When the first studies were conducted, black and white
cinema (and later TV) was already quite widespread. At the time Bentley had carried out his first study in 1915, over 20 black
and white feature films were produced every year. It was very likely that the average college student (the typical participant
in these studies) had regular contact with black and white media. The rise in coloured dreaming, on the other hand, coincided
with the rise of coloured media. In late 1940’s colour movies began to be more common and by late 1960, nearly
all movies were produced in colour. The first colour TV shows were broadcast in 1950 (to be viewed in public places) and
the first consumer colour TV sets appeared in 1954 and by 1972 the majority of USA households had a colour TV. Thus, it
is possible to stipulate that the period of reporting greyscale dreams was caused by intense black and white media exposure....
Contemporary research that supports that theory has been already carried out by Schwitzgebel, Huang, and Zhou (2006).
Their replication of the Middleton (1942) questionnaire, carried out in China, revealed that groups with more exposure to
black and white media report less coloured dreaming, at levels comparable to the original 1942 study. Contrastingly, exposure
to coloured media before the age of 11 was strongly correlated with reporting of coloured dreaming...
The second explanation requires that black and white media only influence people’s beliefs about their dreams, without
changing the dream form, so that people would not report the true colouration of their dreams. There are two variants of this
explanation. The weak proposition places the distortion source in the poor long-term memory for dreams. Thus, under a casual
examination, people would indeed claim to experience greyscale dreams, and only when questioned closer to the time
of dreaming they could realise their dreams are, in fact, coloured. The strong proposition states that the distortion imposed
by beliefs in the nature of dreaming is implemented much earlier and reconstructs the memories to match the beliefs. In
such a case, there is no way to say anything about the ‘true’ form of dreaming, except through methods that would tap into
the dream content directly. One possible method would be signalling from within a lucid dream to inform external observers
about the colour nature of the dream (see LaBerge, 1985, for examples of similar studies). However, this assumes that dream
lucidity does not interfere with normal dream form and content, which has not yet been established. While this second possibility
seems unlikely, it needs to be considered nonetheless. (WHAT! I wasn't even expecting lucid dreaming to be in there :D)...
Thus, it is possible to conclude that early access to black and white media (without any access to colour
media) is a key factor in the reporting of black and white dreams. It is worth noticing that even the group with black and
white media experience, the average percentage of greyscale dreams experienced in this experiment was much lower than
the proportions typically reported in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This difference is most likely due to the influence from colour
media, which has been the dominant media type for at least the last 40 years. Overall, it seems that the form of dreams is not
fixed in stone during that period....


Murzyn, E. 2008. Do we only dream in colour? A comparison of reported dream colour in younger and older adults with different experiences of black and white media. Consciousness and Cognition. 17: 1228-1237

Moral of the (long) story... spend lots of time during the day thinking of color and make sure everything you do involves lots of color?
Man, what motivation to not be a B+W photographer! :tongue:

I'm assuming you can see colors in real life, have no agnosia, and can sit there right now and visualize colors?

[Hacker4real]

Yeah Of course I could see colors in real life but in the dream world colors are unknown to me, as when I dream I can't dream in color I am so SAD:( I don't consider this a gift, I don't see why anyone would want to have their dreams in black and white it makes everything so unrealistic.

[Hacker4real]

once I get lucid, I can drain the the color out to make it black and white, but that occurring naturally, is really amazing...

I can't dream in color I am so SAD:( I don't consider this a gift, I don't see why anyone would want to have their dreams in black and white it makes everything so unrealistic.

[Specialis Sapientia]

Maybe you can use this thread ?
http://www.dreamviews.com/community/showthread.php?t=70838

I have ONCE in my life seen black and white while dreaming.

The dream started off with me blind, at the same time I was lucid, I walked around and after some minutes I got tired of being blind.

I visualized my vision, while focusing.

The interesting thing is that I gained my vision in steps:

1. I start to see outlines, everything is black, but some white lines appear and starts shaping.

2. My vision starts to come back, instead of contours, my vision "fill" everything out. I can only see B&W.

3. I keep focusing, colours appear, moments later I have full colour vision.

----

Try to experiment a bit, lucidity can help a lot!

[Conkt]

I read somewhere that one in ten people dream in black and white. I don't think there's much you could do to help it. You could try distorting reality:

This is currently my favorite reality check. Focus on something (a book, a corner of a wall, etc.) and really try to change it with your mind. You should be grunting, not blinking, and your face should give the impression that you are severely constipated. If you're awake, nothing will happen. If you are asleep, the object should distort and CHANGE COLOUR. Try doing it on a larger scale and focus on your dream world, trying to distort it and add colour with your mind.

[Shift]

lmao, why don't you just command it to change? No reason to get constipated.

[Hacker4real]

Thank all of You guys for trying to Help I will definetly try them out.

[archdreamer]

Dreaming in black and white sounds boring to me, but it's a pretty consistent friggin dreamsign. Training yourself to RC whenever you see greyscale images could be an idea. Once lucid, then you should probably be able to bring about color vision, which might even begin to influence your nonlucid dreams after a while.