14 records
Dream colours
Colour is the category where a fixed symbol key falls apart most visibly. White is mourning in parts of East Asia and weddings in much of the West; the same colour cannot mean both, so it means neither on its own. These pages give each colour its traditions, name whose they are, and start from the one finding that constrains everything else: most people report dreaming in colour, but colour is noticed and recorded far less often than dream dictionaries assume.
- ColourColour in dreamsMost people report dreaming in colour, and most dream reports never mention it. Both are true, and the gap between them is why a colour you remember clearly is worth recording and a colour you had to think about probably is not.
- ColourRedThe colour most often noticed spontaneously in dream reports, which is the first thing worth knowing about it. Where red is present, dreamers tend to mention it without being asked, and that salience is real even where the meaning is not.
- ColourBlackBlack in dream reports is usually an absence rather than a colour: a figure with no detail, water with no visible bottom, a room with no light. What dreamers are describing is most often the failure to resolve something.
- ColourWhiteThe clearest case in this database of a colour that cannot have one meaning: white is the colour of weddings in much of the West and of mourning in parts of East Asia. Any entry that picks one is describing a culture and calling it a dream.
- ColourBlueBlue is rarely reported as a colour in its own right. It arrives attached to sky and water, which have their own entries, and dreamers almost never mention it unless something was blue that should not have been.
- ColourGreenGreen in reports is nearly always vegetation, which means the entry is usually about a garden, a forest or a field rather than about a colour. Where it is noticed as a colour, it is because it was too green.
- ColourGoldGold is reported as light more often than as a material, and those reports are consistently among the most positive in the database. Where it is a material, the money entry usually applies instead.
- ColourGreyGrey is the colour dreamers report when there was no colour, which makes it the most interesting entry in this category and the one with the best evidence behind it. It is also where the generational finding lives.
- ColourYellowYellow is reported rarely and, when it is, usually because something was the wrong shade of it: jaundiced, sickly or artificial. The reports are notably more negative than the traditions would predict.
- ColourPurplePurple is among the least reported colours and among the most confidently interpreted, which is a combination worth being suspicious of. Where dreamers do report it, they usually report it as unusual.
- ColourOrangeOrange is reported as light far more than as a surface, and almost always warm: streetlight, low sun, firelight. It is one of the few colours dreamers describe by its source rather than by the thing it is on.
- ColourPinkThe clearest case in this database of a colour meaning being invented recently and completely. Pink was a boy's colour in living memory, and the current association is about a century old at most.
- ColourBrownThe least reported colour in dream content, and the entry exists to say so. Brown is everywhere in the world and almost never mentioned, which is the attention finding at its most extreme.
- ColourSilverSilver is reported as a quality of light rather than as a colour, and specifically as moonlight. It sits with gold as the second of the two metallic colours dreamers describe by what they do to a scene.