Color-blindness and Dreaming

Here's a thought: how does color blindness interact with dreaming? Forgive me if I'm incorrect, but I believe color-blindness is an issue of the eyes, not the brain, so these individuals should be able to dream in colors they cannot visibly see. Unless, of course, our dreams are based solely on our experiences and expectations. Then they would only be able to dream in colors they have been able to see before. The idea itself is certainly worth looking into...it would help us understand the degree to which our experiences pattern our minds.


That said, it would be pretty hard to find enough people out there who have vivid enough dreams AND are color-blind. :?

I imagine that, as you wrote, they wouldn't see all of the colors because of their life experiences. They don't realize what green or purple really is. That's an interesting question though. My grandmom and four uncles are colorblind, maybe I'll ask them about what colors are in their dreams.

It is possible to see colors in your dreams that you have never actually seen in real life. Colors are just concepts in our mind and our brains are plenty flexible enough to imagine entirely new ones. I have read a few dream journals were people actually did but the one most in my memory is the latest entry in Hyu's DJ. First lesson in time dilation - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

Quote:

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Since I focus so hard on my vision, it becomes more and more intense.
I can see beyond the color spectrum visible to the human eye.
Ultraviolet and infrared, I can see them so clearly.
They aren't red or violet at all, they are entirely different colors.
The now 5 base colors start merging together to form new ones.
Everything is so beautiful.

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There really isn't a reason a color blind person could not dream vividly. The way they would perceive vividness would be different from how you perceive it. Even completely blind people dream, they experience dreams with the same senses they do while awake. Most Color blind people can see colors but depending on the type they can't see certain colors, usually red and green.

Well i doubt they'd have colours we see daily. Even if they did, you can't describe purple, if "purple" is completely differen to them. With the remote sense of colour they recieve from a dream, colour would be bizzarre to describe unless you had the same descriptions as them in their dreams. i suupose .

I agree, it would be impossible to ask them for an specific color, as the only thing really defining a color is the wavelength of the light, and the corresponding concept the brain has. On the other hand as MadMonkey posted and I also believe myself it is possible to have sensory input which is otherwise impossible in the real world. So I would conclude that a color-blind person is indeed able to see exactly those colors they are missing, but it is a lot less likely to happen.

We could only know for sure if it would be possible to fix color-blindness, because then we could ask them if they had already seen that color in a dream before the fix.

I had heard somewhere that a Dr. in the know, said that when we dream that we dream in black and white. I disagree. :)~

I am a 18-wheeler truck driver and a lucid dreamer for at least 3 decades.

In one lucid dream, I knew that I was responsible for an intersection accident.

Upon realizing that I had run a stop light, I rewound myself in my dream and when going under the light, I looked up and actualy saw that the light was RED.

Not by the light being at the top of the signal but really seeing the color RED.

Dennis M.