Colored dreams: why this happens and who dreams of them more often

11/17/2018 About Sleep

According to statistics, at least 18% of people see colored dreams, and another 63% are not sure whether their dreams are colored. Even with modern technology, there is still no way to verify whether night visions are actually colored or whether they are presented in black and white. But then it turns out that the respondents described not what they saw, but their perception of the color scheme on a subconscious level.

The nature of dreams

Dreams are the result of the active work of the cerebral hemispheres during a person’s night rest.
They are inextricably linked with reality and come at moments of strong experiences, emotional outbursts, and are the result of hidden desires. The stronger the emotions and excitement experienced in reality, the more emotional and colorful the dreams will be. Most often, colored dreams are presented in dark shades and have a negative connotation. This is due to the fact that negative emotions prevail over positive ones - they disturb the sleeper for a long time. Subconsciously, a person tries to solve a real problem in a dream and sometimes it succeeds - even if he cannot remember what exactly he dreamed about at night, the solution is reliably stored in memory.

Color dreams come in the fast-wave rest phase, when the body is psychologically unloaded. The sleeper may not remember this, but during the night he sees several different dreams with a period of one and a half hours, which corresponds to the cyclical nature of sleep. Usually, moments from the last dream remain in the memory after waking up.

External conditions also affect night visions. So, for example, if a person dreams that he unbearably wants to go to the toilet and cannot find it, then there is a high probability that he really should wake up and visit the restroom. People who fall asleep to music, a TV series or a movie see their echoes in their dreams, as the hearing organs continue to receive the information entering them.

Nature of sleep

When a person plunges into the kingdom of Morpheus, consciousness recedes into the background and the reins of power pass to our subconscious. And who knows what you can see in a dream as a result of its interweaving with images from external reality.

During the night's rest, daytime information is sorted and processed. Dreams are the result of the work of higher nervous activity. When the brain stops perceiving stimuli from the outside world, it begins to notice what passed by during wakefulness.

Why do I have colorful dreams?

When a person is in the grip of a dream, he first of all pays attention to the emotional coloring of what is happening, analyzes his feelings and experiences.
Then you have to connect events that replace each other and often do not obey logic. It is not surprising that the dreamer does not pay attention to color, so he says that he had a dream in black and white. The color composition of dreams will be stored in memory if at least one of two conditions is met.

Focusing on color

If during the dreaming process the sleeper turns his attention to the color of a particular object or object, then this moment will remain in memory even after waking up. Most often, people remember a bright blue sky, muddy green water, and simpler objects - a red dress, a green apple.

Emotional color

The color perception of reality is deposited in the subconscious from childhood. For example, a red traffic light is associated with prohibition and danger, and a green one is associated with calm and the illusion of protection. The mechanisms of symbolism continue to operate in dreams. For this reason, emotional experiences cause colorful, vivid dreams. In nightmares, the colors most often predominate are black and red, while in good visions, green, yellow and blue predominate.

Colored dreams: what they mean, who dreams of them

Who sees colorful dreams

In search of an answer to the question of who dreams in color, scientists have hypothesized that every person’s dream has a certain color scheme that matches the real world. This is logical, since during wakefulness, normal color perception occurs in colorful tones. But then another question arises - which sleepers remember colors in night visions and which do not?

Effect of age

According to surveys, most young people have brightly colored dreams, while the older generation has dull nighttime episodes. Perhaps this is due to the fact that with age a person becomes less emotional, so gray everyday life is transferred to night visions.

Young people strive to receive new emotions and impressions; their brains use many neural connections. Therefore, colored dreams are a common occurrence for them. This means that children have the brightest vision, since for them color has a special meaning in understanding the world around them.

The influence of intelligence

The higher a person’s brain activity, the more neural connections are involved in his life. Neurons remember information, impressions are stored in them. When a person has a well-developed intellect, he easily recalls various facts and events hidden in the distant corners of his memory. For others, these neural connections remain inaccessible and represent forgotten memories that are actually stored in memory.

The activity of neurons in people with well-developed intellect causes the appearance of colorful dreams. Sleepers often see important moments from the past and experience the same events.

Creative development

It is no secret that the works of Salvador Dali are a reflection of his dreams with all the bright colors that were used to paint the canvases. Creative people are receptive to the changing realities of reality and experience them deeply. They perceive the world not from a logical point of view, but on an emotional level, so their night visions are bright and colorful. Many brilliant creative works of various authors in various fields of art are the result of successful dreams.

Psychological disorders

American scientists conducted a large-scale study, during which all patients were divided into three groups:

Schizophrenics;
Healthy people;
Patients with various phobias.

It turned out that a healthy person experiences colorful dreams about 20 times less often than subjects with abnormalities. Many people encounter their phobias in their dreams. Dreams that carry emotional negativity have a bright color.

The meaning of colored dreams

Psychologists and somnologists from different countries have long been conducting research on the topic of dream colors, and have identified a pattern, determining the meaning of certain shades for the sleeper:

Red often symbolizes anxiety, danger, and alertness. Less often it is a sign of falling in love.
Orange is a sign that a person needs rest. High workload causes unreasonable anxiety, which is expressed by the orange palette.
White - a positive color of vision indicates readiness for new achievements, good mood and general emotional tone of the body.
Light colors mean calm and serenity.
Blue – a positive mood, accompanied by a desire to isolate oneself from the outside world. Most often it appears when a person is doing well in life, but lacks time for himself.
Golden speaks of a high degree of tension - a “fasting” day is needed both emotionally and physically.

For some people, certain colors have their own meaning. For example, women interviewed focus on the fact that before the start of the menstrual cycle they dream of a red object - and this is an unmistakable sign that has never misfired.

Color meaning

Research conducted by psychologists from different countries shows that the color of a vision carries an emotional load. Why do you have these or those colored dreams? Primary colors mean:

It happens that for a person a certain color has its own, special meaning, and it may not coincide with the generally accepted one.

Despite research, frequent colored dreams are not a sign of a mental disorder. You need to worry if they come as nightmares. If these are pleasant, cheerful worlds, positive moments in life, there is no need to worry.

Source

Disease or benefit?

The fact that colored dreams are an integral sign of schizophrenia can frighten impressionable people. This, by the way, will lead to the appearance of new colored dreams and the “circle” will close. In fact, colored dreams come to all people at least once in their lives, except those who are blind from birth and have never seen all the colors of the world. The frequency and intensity of dreams depends on the characteristics of an individual person.

In addition, schizophrenics usually see nightmares in their dreams - ghosts, monsters, blood. If a healthy person does not have any of this, then there is no point in worrying about the psychological state. Moreover, vivid night visions help develop extrasensory abilities or require the implementation of creative personality skills. In both cases, they can be used as an impetus for new achievements.

Research by specialists

It was possible to connect the colorfulness of dreams and psychological disorders with the invention of the tomograph. It was at this point that it became clear that unusual brain activity at night is common to all people. But only in patients with phobias and severe psychological disorders does it cause nightmares.

A healthy person does not need to worry even if his usual not vivid dreams are replaced by colorful dreams. To independently search for schizophrenia in yourself, you can pay attention to increased isolation, lack of positive emotions, and indifference to self-realization. If there is none of this, then your psychological health is in order. If you detect at least one sign, you should consult a doctor, since vivid dreams are caused not only by schizophrenia, but also by depression due to stress, which is treatable.

Hypotheses of colorful dreams

Since there is no technology that could clearly answer the question of when and why color and black and white dreams occur and what they symbolize, scientists continue to build various theories and guesses on this matter.

Theory 1. Everyone has different dreams.

It is based on the fact that every person observes both color and black and white dreams, but remembers only those that are accompanied by rich colors. Emotional activity adds color to the imagination, and overwork and chronic fatigue are accompanied by faded dreams that are not deposited in the memory of the sleeper.

Theory 2. Color is a sign of talent

Since bright images most often come to artists, some researchers have concluded that frequent colorful dreams are a sign of talent, including undisclosed talent. True, the same scientists claim that all talented people have a tendency towards schizophrenia, which is why they call the symptom both positive and alarming.

Theory 3. Color cinema

This is a rather dubious hypothesis, since it assumes that the colorfulness of dreams is associated with the advent of color television during the childhood of the new generation, when the perception of color is formed. But according to this same theory, it turns out that the older volunteers studied did not see other colors in life except black and white TV, so the hypothesis refutes itself.

Colored dreams: normal or dangerous symptom?

Everyone sees dreams, but not everyone, however, remembers what they saw. Scientists say that most of us see black and white dreams, but about colored dreams they have many different versions, literally refuting each other... Why do we see colored dreams?

Conducted research in the field of sleep provides a clear explanation, yes, patients with schizophrenia often see colorful dreams and more often remember them precisely because of their brightness, but there is no clear answer to whether colored dreams are unique to schizophrenics (present and future). However, scientists immediately say that frequent and memorable color dreams are a sign of special brain activity typical of various borderline disorders, because most people see black and white dreams and many do not remember them.

Many scientists around the world are conducting research in this area, and most of them are inclined to believe that consciousness, subjected to some kind of change (stress, grief, overexertion), most often produces colorful dreams. True, many people enthusiastically talk about their color visions, considering them pleasant.

A study conducted using tomography showed that people with schizophrenia, in addition to color dreams, most often see nightmares, but this does not happen with people with a healthy psyche. Scientists strongly recommend that those who see colorful, vivid dreams interspersed with nightmares pay special attention to their health, because they are sure that such people are potential patients in psychiatric hospitals.

Of course, there is absolutely no need to panic; many people, including completely healthy people, have colorful dreams.

But if suddenly your dreams, which were previously black and white, not memorable and not bright, have acquired a particularly bright color and this scares you, then for your own peace of mind you can undergo an examination.

It is, of course, impossible to diagnose schizophrenia on the basis of dreams alone.

Diagnosis requires at least several symptoms. For example, pay attention to nervous symptoms, which are manifested by a decrease in the emotional background. There is also isolation and a lack of positive emotions. At the same time, the patient ceases to be interested in professional activities and does not meet the standards of behavior in social terms.

Often the onset of the disease is manifested by aggression and avoidance of social contacts. The person becomes emotionally unrestrained and unfriendly to others.

At the same time, the initial signs of schizophrenia often exist in isolation, for quite a long time (sometimes decades), and productive symptoms are often absent. When manifestations of psychosis are added to these manifestations, we can already talk about the presence of a clinically developed picture of the disease. Often delusions and hallucinations are added here, as well as acute forgetfulness (when a person cannot remember what he did just a few minutes ago). All this can result in psychosis and go into the terminal stage of “voices” in the head.

There are several more hypotheses about why we have colorful dreams.

Hypothesis 1: Everyone sees colored and black-and-white dreams, but the latter are not remembered, and colored ones are often accompanied by special events in a person’s life (in most cases positive) - and play with these “colors” in a dream. But overwork and fatigue are reflected in black and white dreams that we do not remember.

Interesting facts about dreams

Several interesting facts about dreams have been established that are indirectly related to the color of night visions:

Women are very emotional, so vivid dreams are a common occurrence for them;
The right hemisphere is responsible for the color and meaning of dreams, so left-handers are more likely to talk about what they saw at night than right-handers;
There are no dreams during snoring;
Giving up a bad habit is often accompanied by a return to it in colorful dreams;
When prophetic dreams occur, they are as realistic as possible and painted in bright colors.

The presence of nightly colorful dreams should only cause concern in cases where the content of the dream itself is disturbing. If in dreams a person is transported to a bright and pleasant world, wakes up rested and full of vital energy for new achievements, then such dreams can be enjoyed without hesitation.

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