Yes — and the fact that we ever doubted it is one of the strangest stories in dream research. Today around four in five dreams contain colour. But in the 1950s, studies found the opposite: most people swore their dreams were black and white. What changed was not the human brain. It was television.

The black-and-white generation

People who grew up with black-and-white film and TV reported mostly monochrome dreams; once colour media took over, colour dreams returned within a generation — and older adults raised on monochrome screens kept reporting grey dreams decades later. The likely explanation: dreams themselves may not carry a firm colour setting, and when we reconstruct them on waking, we borrow the visual language of the images we consume. Our dreams, in other words, are dressed by our media.

When a colour takes over the dream

Most dream colour is incidental — but sometimes one colour floods the dream and becomes its message, and tradition reads each precisely. White announces peace, weddings and new beginnings; black warns of the unknown and endings; red is passion or danger, and dream blood classically points to family and vitality. Green promises growth like young grass; gold means fortune with a warning attached; blue brings calm, the colour of the open sky and sea. A rainbow — every colour at once — is among the luckiest dream signs there is.

What your dream palette says about you

Emotionally intense dreams tend to be the most vividly coloured — colour rides on feeling. People who pay attention to their dreams report more colour, not because their dreams changed but because their looking did. So treat colour as a highlighter: when a dream insists on a colour, the dictionary treats it as seriously as any object in the dream. The grey dream and the golden one are rarely saying the same thing.