Colored dreams and schizophrenia - is there a relationship?

11/17/2018 About Sleep

According to statistics, at least 18% of people see colored dreams, and another 63% are not sure whether their dreams are colored. Even with modern technology, there is still no way to verify whether night visions are actually colored or whether they are presented in black and white. But then it turns out that the respondents described not what they saw, but their perception of the color scheme on a subconscious level.

The nature of dreams

Dreams are the result of the active work of the cerebral hemispheres during a person’s night rest.
They are inextricably linked with reality and come at moments of strong experiences, emotional outbursts, and are the result of hidden desires. The stronger the emotions and excitement experienced in reality, the more emotional and colorful the dreams will be. Most often, colored dreams are presented in dark shades and have a negative connotation. This is due to the fact that negative emotions prevail over positive ones - they disturb the sleeper for a long time. Subconsciously, a person tries to solve a real problem in a dream and sometimes it succeeds - even if he cannot remember what exactly he dreamed about at night, the solution is reliably stored in memory.

Color dreams come in the fast-wave rest phase, when the body is psychologically unloaded. The sleeper may not remember this, but during the night he sees several different dreams with a period of one and a half hours, which corresponds to the cyclical nature of sleep. Usually, moments from the last dream remain in the memory after waking up.

External conditions also affect night visions. So, for example, if a person dreams that he unbearably wants to go to the toilet and cannot find it, then there is a high probability that he really should wake up and visit the restroom. People who fall asleep to music, a TV series or a movie see their echoes in their dreams, as the hearing organs continue to receive the information entering them.

Why are there periods when a person does not dream?

There are different people who can see dreams at some periods of their lives and not at others.
It all depends on the state of mind and specific experiences. Usually a person cannot remember dreams if everyday reality has caused severe disappointment, great excitement and passions that the subconscious does not accept.

Such psychotrauma can be acute or chronic. If a person is forced to work or study at a job that is completely uninteresting or unpleasant to him, then dreams stop.

Or, on the contrary, he often begins to see incoherent plots that do not bode well and cause a feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment.

Dreams often do not come for the following reasons:

• if the reality is such that a person simply does not accept it. For example, the dreamer is forced to communicate with people who are extremely unpleasant to him, to graduate from a university that does not at all correspond to his specialty, desires and capabilities, and to work at a job that does not evoke positive emotions and impressions. In such a situation, dreams do not come, and rest at night brings a person only physical relief;
• during illness or hard work. If a person is physically overtired, the body protects him from plots, and he does not dream at all. During sleep, the dreamer simply regains his strength, so no plots are revealed to him;
• after traumatic events. The death or betrayal of a loved one, disturbing news and news, sudden losses can disorient the dreamer. He doesn’t even always understand and feel reality, which is why he doesn’t have dreams, especially prophetic ones.

Nature protects the psyche from traumatic experiences, so at this time a person either has no dreams at all or night scenes become plotless and unmemorable. Some people even think that they don’t dream. In fact, this is not so and everyone has dreams, but they cannot remember them, either because the plot was blurry and did not carry any information, or the subconscious blocked access to nightly information.

If a person does not see dreams for a long time, then his problems are such that he is not open to information or does not perceive it. After resolving tense moments or arguments, he begins to have dreams.

Another reason for not remembering dreams is that the dreamer simply cannot get enough sleep for a long time. Chronic fatigue and lack of sleep negatively affect the psyche, so a person may not see any dreams or stories.

He needs night time in order to restore physical performance or temporarily forget about difficult memories and events. It is useless to induce prophetic dreams on such days.

Why do I have colorful dreams?

When a person is in the grip of a dream, he first of all pays attention to the emotional coloring of what is happening, analyzes his feelings and experiences.
Then you have to connect events that replace each other and often do not obey logic. It is not surprising that the dreamer does not pay attention to color, so he says that he had a dream in black and white. The color composition of dreams will be stored in memory if at least one of two conditions is met.

• Focusing on color

If during the dreaming process the sleeper turns his attention to the color of a particular object or object, then this moment will remain in memory even after waking up. Most often, people remember a bright blue sky, muddy green water, and simpler objects - a red dress, a green apple.

• Emotional color

The color perception of reality is deposited in the subconscious from childhood. For example, a red traffic light is associated with prohibition and danger, and a green one is associated with calm and the illusion of protection. The mechanisms of symbolism continue to operate in dreams. For this reason, emotional experiences cause colorful, vivid dreams. In nightmares, the colors most often predominate are black and red, while in good visions, green, yellow and blue predominate.

Decoding

It is important not only to see a bright picture, but also to understand the symbolism. It happens that when a person wakes up, he does not remember exactly what he dreamed, but he can talk about the colors and emotions he experienced. According to psychological findings, each color carries a semantic meaning:

1. Everything is white - the intentions of those around you regarding the dreamer are only pure.
2. A lot of red shade - most likely, love lives in the soul.
3. A large clearing of yellow flowers - a friend experiences an unstable feeling or the dreamer sins in a similar way.
4. Blue color - it’s time to become wiser and gain experience.
5. The color black colored the dream - expect serious shocks, but don’t worry ahead of time, maybe it’s just your imagination that paints in such dark colors.
6. Green signals dreams.
7. Seeing everything in pink is joy and fun.
8. Purple hue - the feelings are mutual.
9. Orange color may mean that the nervous system needs rest.

Almost all light colors speak of good things, while dark colors make you take a closer look at your inner feelings and faces around you.

How famous psychoanalysts interpret dreams

It is believed that a dream in color is a psychological phenomenon, so most psychotherapists have devoted a lot of work to studying this phenomenon.

If you look at dream books, you can glean various interesting information:

1. Miller's Dream Book. Interprets the abundance of green in a dream as a wonderful chance to celebrate an event. If the visions are colored red, then it is recommended to pay attention to health or problems in reality, the solution of which should not be put in a box. Yellow color can indicate the need to work on oneself.
2. Interpretation according to Freud. The dream book claims that colored dreams confirm a person’s maturation. This can mean either the need to become responsible or a rejection of past mistakes. Yellow images encourage action and it is recommended not to consider any obstacles along the way as insurmountable obstacles.

Which interpretation is closer, decide for yourself, but you should not take so literally the games of the imagination and subconscious, which are realized in the form of dreams.

Analyzing the information, we can say that no one is immune from colored dreams. The appearance of wild colors in a dream is not always a signal to visit a psychiatrist, but only an indication of the impressionability of nature.

Who sees colorful dreams

In search of an answer to the question of who dreams in color, scientists have hypothesized that every person’s dream has a certain color scheme that matches the real world. This is logical, since during wakefulness, normal color perception occurs in colorful tones. But then another question arises - which sleepers remember colors in night visions and which do not?

Effect of age

According to surveys, most young people have brightly colored dreams, while the older generation has dull nighttime episodes. Perhaps this is due to the fact that with age a person becomes less emotional, so gray everyday life is transferred to night visions.

Young people strive to receive new emotions and impressions; their brains use many neural connections. Therefore, colored dreams are a common occurrence for them. This means that children have the brightest vision, since for them color has a special meaning in understanding the world around them.

The influence of intelligence

The higher a person’s brain activity, the more neural connections are involved in his life. Neurons remember information, impressions are stored in them. When a person has a well-developed intellect, he easily recalls various facts and events hidden in the distant corners of his memory. For others, these neural connections remain inaccessible and represent forgotten memories that are actually stored in memory.

The activity of neurons in people with well-developed intellect causes the appearance of colorful dreams. Sleepers often see important moments from the past and experience the same events.

Creative development

It is no secret that the works of Salvador Dali are a reflection of his dreams with all the bright colors that were used to paint the canvases. Creative people are receptive to the changing realities of reality and experience them deeply. They perceive the world not from a logical point of view, but on an emotional level, so their night visions are bright and colorful. Many brilliant creative works of various authors in various fields of art are the result of successful dreams.

Psychological disorders

American scientists conducted a large-scale study, during which all patients were divided into three groups:

• Schizophrenics;
• Healthy people;
• Patients with various phobias.

It turned out that a healthy person experiences colorful dreams about 20 times less often than subjects with abnormalities. Many people encounter their phobias in their dreams. Dreams that carry emotional negativity have a bright color.

The meaning of colored dreams

Psychologists and somnologists from different countries have long been conducting research on the topic of dream colors, and have identified a pattern, determining the meaning of certain shades for the sleeper:

• Red often symbolizes anxiety, danger, and alertness. Less often it is a sign of falling in love.
• Orange is a sign that a person needs rest. High workload causes unreasonable anxiety, which is expressed by the orange palette.
• White - a positive color of vision indicates readiness for new achievements, good mood and general emotional tone of the body.
• Light colors mean calm and serenity.
• Blue – a positive mood, accompanied by a desire to isolate oneself from the outside world. Most often it appears when a person is doing well in life, but lacks time for himself.
• Golden speaks of a high degree of tension - a “fasting” day is needed both emotionally and physically.

For some people, certain colors have their own meaning. For example, women interviewed focus on the fact that before the start of the menstrual cycle they dream of a red object - and this is an unmistakable sign that has never misfired.

The meaning of colors and shades prevailing in visions

• Light colors and white can mean something new and fresh. You should set your whole day in a good mood after such a dream.
• Celestial colors characterize euphoria and detachment. Perhaps this is exactly what you lack in real life.
• Red colors are known to mean excitement. Along with this, there is another interpretation of the scarlet color - it symbolizes immediate readiness for love experiences.
• Orange shades are a sign of anxiety. It's worth thinking about what's wrong in your life.
• The predominance of yellow color means the uplift in life, the tone in which a person is.
• Black and purple colors indicate general fatigue or illness.
• Gray shades symbolize boredom and apathy. It might be worth a change of scenery and a distraction.

Disease or benefit?

The fact that colored dreams are an integral sign of schizophrenia can frighten impressionable people. This, by the way, will lead to the appearance of new colored dreams and the “circle” will close. In fact, colored dreams come to all people at least once in their lives, except those who are blind from birth and have never seen all the colors of the world. The frequency and intensity of dreams depends on the characteristics of an individual person.

In addition, schizophrenics usually see nightmares in their dreams - ghosts, monsters, blood. If a healthy person does not have any of this, then there is no point in worrying about the psychological state. Moreover, vivid night visions help develop extrasensory abilities or require the implementation of creative personality skills. In both cases, they can be used as an impetus for new achievements.

Who is lucky enough to have colorful dreams?

It has already been proven through experiments that a person in his dreams perceives images more than their coloring. The brightness of what you see depends on your personality, character, and temperament. But there are several categories that can constantly have colored dreams:

1. People are emotional, hypersensitive and receptive. Their real life is rich in events, colored by new impressions, meetings, and night dreams seem to serve as a continuation of everyday life. But there is another opinion that colorful dreams brighten up a monotonous life and help fight depression.
2. With a high level of intellectual development. But many argue with this statement, believing that mental abilities can only affect the complexity of the plot or the colorfulness of the retelling.
3. Lefties. Because it is the right hemisphere that is responsible for imaginative thinking, and it is more developed in them.
4. Children. Exploring the world, they receive vivid impressions projected by the subconscious.
5. Age category up to 30 years. According to the research results, among those who have had colorful dreams, more than 70% are young people.
6. If we consider gender, then representatives of the fair sex are more likely to see bright images in all the colors of the rainbow in their dreams.
7. People who have recently given up bad habits. Medicine explains that the endocrine system influences the colors in which the brain provides us with a picture.

Based on the above, the conclusion suggests itself: it is wrong to say that a vivid dream comes only to a select few. Make your life brighter and colorful dreams won’t keep you waiting long.

Research by specialists

It was possible to connect the colorfulness of dreams and psychological disorders with the invention of the tomograph. It was at this point that it became clear that unusual brain activity at night is common to all people. But only in patients with phobias and severe psychological disorders does it cause nightmares.

A healthy person does not need to worry even if his usual not vivid dreams are replaced by colorful dreams. To independently search for schizophrenia in yourself, you can pay attention to increased isolation, lack of positive emotions, and indifference to self-realization. If there is none of this, then your psychological health is in order. If you detect at least one sign, you should consult a doctor, since vivid dreams are caused not only by schizophrenia, but also by depression due to stress, which is treatable.

Hypotheses of colorful dreams

Since there is no technology that could clearly answer the question of when and why color and black and white dreams occur and what they symbolize, scientists continue to build various theories and guesses on this matter.

Theory 1. Everyone has different dreams.

It is based on the fact that every person observes both color and black and white dreams, but remembers only those that are accompanied by rich colors. Emotional activity adds color to the imagination, and overwork and chronic fatigue are accompanied by faded dreams that are not deposited in the memory of the sleeper.

Theory 2. Color is a sign of talent

Since bright images most often come to artists, some researchers have concluded that frequent colorful dreams are a sign of talent, including undisclosed talent. True, the same scientists claim that all talented people have a tendency towards schizophrenia, which is why they call the symptom both positive and alarming.

Theory 3. Color cinema

This is a rather dubious hypothesis, since it assumes that the colorfulness of dreams is associated with the advent of color television during the childhood of the new generation, when the perception of color is formed. But according to this same theory, it turns out that the older volunteers studied did not see other colors in life except black and white TV, so the hypothesis refutes itself.

Interesting facts about dreams

Several interesting facts about dreams have been established that are indirectly related to the color of night visions:

• Women are very emotional, so vivid dreams are a common occurrence for them;
• The right hemisphere is responsible for the color and meaning of dreams, so left-handers are more likely to talk about what they saw at night than right-handers;
• There are no dreams during snoring;
• Giving up a bad habit is often accompanied by a return to it in colorful dreams;
• When prophetic dreams occur, they are as realistic as possible and painted in bright colors.

The presence of nightly colorful dreams should only cause concern in cases where the content of the dream itself is disturbing. If in dreams a person is transported to a bright and pleasant world, wakes up rested and full of vital energy for new achievements, then such dreams can be enjoyed without hesitation.

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