Seeing red again

In one of Allan Hobson’s popular books on dream science, probably the twenty year old reference 1, he makes the point that most people do dream in colour, at least some of the time. This being convincingly demonstrated by his systematic study of dreams – something which, incidentally, Freud never bothered with. He liked writing up his speculations and intuitions,  most famously in reference 2, but did not bother too much with systematic study, despite his early scientific training.

In my own dreams, I am not aware of much colour: they are not exactly all shades of grey, but there is not much in the way of bright, easily identified colours either. I might know the colour of something, but I do not experience the colour – from where I associate to the labelling possibility of the layers of LWS-R, for which see reference 3. I experience real colour from time to time, probably less than once a fortnight – this despite the fact that I am able to report dreams in the morning more often than not. To be fair, what I am not able to do is to report the dreams I am having when I am woken up in the middle of the night. I might well wake up, but I am not woken up in the way of the subjects of Hobson dream laboratory work, which is not the same thing at all.

So this morning, for a change, I had a waking fragment which involved a red blanket, or something of the sort, folded over something long and narrow, perhaps a bar or rod of some kind, which then morphed into a red Post Office van, complete with a golden crown – although in the fragment I missed most of the branding – apart from the red colour – and put the crown in the wrong place. Perhaps my memory holds something out of date.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Is my failure to see much colour in my dreams anything much to do with the fact that one generally dreams with one eyes shut and in the dark? The retinal cones (of reference 4) which generate colour vision, but which need quite a lot of light to work properly, will be relatively inactive. So the downstream areas of the brain which do colour processing will not be getting much stimulation from the eyes. Does this make it that much harder for the brain to convert the rather weak colour imagery available from memory into proper hallucination of colour?

Hobson does talk of large chunks of the brain being more or less offline when we are asleep, the result of chemical manipulations in the brain stem, but I don’t presently recall him addressing this particular point – beyond asserting the we can and do dream in colour, at least some of the time.

PS 1: the fact that, in response to the cold snap, we have recently added a heavy off-red woollen blanket to our bedding may well be part of the trigger for this fragment.

PS 2: some time ago I read a well known book about consciousness called ‘Seeing Red’ by Nicholas Humphrey (reference 5) and was clearly impressed given the number of mentions at reference 6. I shall take another look, but I don’t suppose it touches on present concerns.

References

Reference 1: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002.

Reference 2: The interpretation of dreams – Sigmund Freud – 1899/1954.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell. 

Reference 5: Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness – Nicholas Humphrey – 2006. A nicely produced little paperback from the Belknap Press. I am prompted to give it another look

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=humphrey. Previous notice of Humphrey and his book.