Do people still report dreaming in black and white? An attempt to replicate a questionnaire from 1942.

Full Abstract

In the 1940s and 1950s many people in the United States appear to have thought they dreamed in black and white. For example, Middleton (1942) found that 70.7% of 277 college sophomores reported "rarely" or "never" seeing colors in their dreams. The present study replicated Middleton's questionnaire and found that a sample of 124 students in 2001 reported a significantly greater rate of colored dreaming than the earlier sample, with only 17.7% saying that they "rarely" or "never" see colors in their dreams. Assuming that dreams themselves have not changed over this time period, it appears that one or the other (or both) groups of respondents must be profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences.

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Author information

Author/s: Schwitzgebel, Eric (E);

Affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of California-Riverside, 92521-0201, USA. eschwitz(-atsign-)citrus.ucr.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Perceptual and motor skills (Percept Mot Skills), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Feb; vol 96 (issue 1) : pp 25-9

Dates: Created 2003/04/22; Completed 2003/08/04; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12705505, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Female
Humans
Male
Mental Recall
Music
Questionnaires
Reproducibility of Results
Students - psychology

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