While most people report dreaming in colour, roughly 12% of people claim to only dream in black and white, as Stella Tooth replied. Studies were done where dreamers have been awakened and asked to select colours from a visual chart that closely match those in their dreams. Apparently soft pastel colours are those most frequently chosen.
Men and women who are under the age of 25 very rarely report dreaming in black and white. Those over the age of 55, however, report black and white dreams about 25% of the time. This is believed by researchers to be linked to childhood exposure of black and white TV. I remember when we got a colour telly and our neighbours came around to see the testcard... the little girl holding her teddy bear. I also remember watching snooker on TV in black and white - something which now seems absurd.
Do dreams inspire our creativity?
I believe that for some artists dreams are hugely important in developing creative thoughts. As an illustrator, my imagination is everything. I work on commissions where I discuss the brief with the client and then come up with initial sketches from my imagination. The process of being mentally stimulated to do something can come from our conscious or subconscious minds especially when it's something creative.
Nicolette Carter, one of our artists at Skylark says, “My work is about seeing the power in colour, patterns and detail. The placing of disparate elements to create a unified image." When asked what she loves most about being an artist, she replied, “The charm of being able to play and dream out loud.”
Inspiration comes from the imagination
Inspiration comes from the imagination and dreams play on this. A student of Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, turned to a most unusual way to access his subconscious for inspiration. He knew that the state between wakefulness and sleep was possibly the most creative for a brain. Like Freud and his fellow artists and surrealists, he believed dreams and imagination as “central rather than marginal to human thought.”
Dali searched for a way to stay in that creative trance-like state for as long as possible so that he could conjure up visions and thoughts, just as any one of us might enjoy staying in bed in a semi-awake state while we use our imagination and visualisation to its fullest. He devised a most interesting technique. In an essay by Ewell in 'Art and Gallery News'*, he said that Dali would sit in the warm sun, after a full lunch, and would place a metal mixing bowl in his lap and hold a large spoon loosely in his hands. As he fell asleep, the spoon would fall into the bowl and awaken him. He says, "He would reset the arrangement continuously and thus float along-not quite asleep and not quite awake-while his imagination would churn out the images."
Carl Jung, the famous dream psychologist in the 1930’s said that colours represent the following: yellow represents our intuition, black is connected to our unconscious, red our feelings, white our conscious mind and blue our thinking. Green represents our sensations. Sensitivity to colour relates to our emotions: green with envy or feeling blue.
Argia oil on canvas 80x105x4cms framed £520 by Stella Tooth
