Colour and number
Nine numbers rather than the thirty every dream dictionary carries, because the traditions are deep for a handful and absent for the rest. Colours are properties rather than things, which changes what an entry can honestly claim.
23 records
- 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.
- NumberNumbers in dreamsNumbers behave badly in dreams for a documented reason: digits are text, and text in dreams does not hold still. A number you are certain about was probably assembled on waking, and knowing that changes what is worth recording.
- NumberThreeThree is the number most likely to be genuinely present in a dream rather than reconstructed, because it is the largest quantity most people take in without counting. That perceptual fact does more work here than any tradition.
- NumberFourFour is the number where cultural divergence is sharpest and most consequential: it is a number of completeness and direction in several traditions, and a number avoided in buildings and telephone numbers across much of East Asia.
- NumberSevenThe most heavily loaded number in the Western and Near Eastern traditions, and the one most likely to have been supplied by the dreamer rather than seen. Seven is above the count-free threshold, which matters more here than anywhere.
- NumberEightEight is included because of one of the strongest live number associations anywhere: in Chinese tradition it is a number of prosperity, on a homophone, and that association has measurable effects on real prices and phone numbers.
- NumberTwelveTwelve is almost never counted in a dream and almost always structural: twelve hours on a clock, twelve months, twelve of a set. Where a dreamer reports twelve, they are usually reporting a system rather than a quantity.
- NumberThirteenThirteen is included for the same reason four is: a very large number of people have a real relationship with it, and a dream containing it is not neutral for them. The unluckiness is regional and recent, which is worth knowing.
- NumberFortyForty is here for one reason: across the Abrahamic traditions it is the standard number for a long period of trial, and it is used so consistently that it functions as an idiom for "a long time" rather than as a count.
- NumberRepeating numbersWidely reported, heavily discussed online, and explained without anything unusual: repeated digits are noticed because they are distinctive, and noticing them makes you notice them again. This is the clearest case of frequency illusion in the whole database.