12% of people dream entirely in black and white

If you are surprised by this fun fact about sleep, you should be happy because this means your dreams are more colorful than others. Studies show that not everyone dreams entirely in color, and 12% of the population dream entirely in black and white. To find out the reason behind this, several studies have been done, but the most interesting one was a study that aimed to find out whether differences in the reported color of dreams can be attributed to the influence of black and white media or to methodological issues.

The study organized research in two age groups: a group of people that were born before color television was introduced, and a group of people who lived most of their lives watching only black and white television. The results of the analysis showed that there were no differences between diary and questionnaire measures of dream color and that persons who had access to black and white media before color media had more greyscale dreams than people who had none. Additionally, there were inter-group variations in the recall accuracy of both color and black-and-white dreams, which raises the idea that real greyscale dreams are unique to viewers of black-and-white media.