"Do We Dream in Color?"
I do not know about "we" - but I have no more doubt that I dream in color than that I see in color when awake. The color in my dreams is very realistic and it occurs in nearly every dream I remember (I usually remember 4 or 5 of my dreams a week).

I dream in vivid color

I have very vivid color dreams and also I am flying over
rooftops and cities all of the time. Aloft of my colors in
dreams are of reds, purples, yellows.

Bes,

many factors can influence a dream. For example, if your bedroom would be diffused with the aroma of a roasted chicken, you might dream of food.

I have the most vivid dreams when I have a "dream machine" running that I bought when such gadgets were popular in the "New Age" era.

~ Happy is he who can discover the causes of things, for thereby he has mastered all fear, and is throned above fate. -- Goethe ~

Now, THAT'S the carpool to join!
Hi Von, nice to meet you...I noticed the Vargas girl on your ME page...if either you or your husband uses Photoshop, go here
http://share.studio.adobe.com/axBrowseProduct.asp?p=2
use the "find" to search for "walrus"...a while back, I uploaded four sets of Vargas brushes that I had made.

A dream machine??

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1074127822996_69537022///?hub=TopStories

~ Happy is he who can discover the causes of things, for thereby he has mastered all fear, and is throned above fate. -- Goethe ~

I love the responses! finally found people who can make the "untested and unprovable" real and fun. I dream in color. Having studied dream analysis, certain colors have specific meaning in dreams. For instance, i read that standing on top of a mountain watching the sunset glow brilliant and PINK might suggest a person who is becoming more spiritual in nature, or seeking answers to creation and asking for a closer spiritual relationship with whatever that person's perception of God is.

you all seem to have missed the essence of the question "Do WE dream in color?"
You seem to have answered "I...dream in color"
Your answer is more of an anecdote of a memory of a dream...the question I posed was more of a how-does-this-machine-work question.
We remember the end product (the dream), but what is the process? Do we put in the components in the same way we put the components together when reading a story? If you analize your brain while reading different stories, you will notice that the amount of color in the story corresponds to the amount of color in the words. A story about an economist's theories have no color, or very little color. It mentions people, government, supply and demand, etc.The mind doesn't involve color in the story unless demographics come into play. Take a book, "The Outsiders" for example. We, that have read the book remember plenty of color from the story, from the sunrises to the color of the cars. What were the colors of every characters' shoes? The story was not affected by the lack of this color knowledge. If we were to pull out one frame of a dream to analize, would we find that it was a colorized black and white frame? The parts of the frame that had been color-specified (such as Ruby slippers, blue sky, green grass) had been colorized, while unspecified areas remained gray tones (not gray as a color, but informational gray)...if you were to question a person about a dream right after the dream (so the dream couldn't be futher embelished after the fact), could the person name the color of everything in the scene? even things that had nothing at all to do with the story? Would these unspecified areas be filled in while remembering the dream afterwards? and if there were unspecified areas (embelished and filled in after the fact), wouldn't that be a good case for saying that we only THINK that we dream in color?
My theory is that we dream in black and white and objects are colorized as needed for the story...a strong dream might have 90% or more colorized, while an informational dream (such as the things I need to get done tomorrow dream) might get away with 10% colorization or less.
I say black and white, but this is not meant as the colors "Black and White"...more like informational place holders...if in the story, you were to notice that things were in "Black and White", they would cease to be informational place holders and become the colors "Black and White"

you bet, in living color

I have real colour dreams, indistinguishable from real life.
Am I a person dremaing that I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a person?
I don't know.

Since we cannot speak for other's dreams Walrus, personal anecdotes are all we have. But if the majority of people claim to dream in colour, then I aggree that "we" do dream in colour.

I just thought of another example:
for those of you who understand html...think of a dream as html opened up in notepad and the waking world as the same html opened in a browser...you might dream in html in notepad format and when asked to describe it, you remember it in website format...since in the waking world you see everything in website format, you tend to believe that your dream world is also in website format.

Walrus, in my dreams I do not experience descriptions of colour, but I experience the perception of real colour.
As I said, my dreams seem indistinguishable from reality;
I only realize that I have been dreaming when I wake up.

Dreams are often not well remembered unless we write down or describe on tape-record, the dream, immediately on waking.
As we only tend to dream in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and as we cycle in and out of REM sleep many times per sleep, we have the potential to have many dreams during sleep, but only the last one, the one we wake from is remembered.
As to blind people dreaming in colour, I don't know.
As dreams spring from real life experiences or concerns, and our attempt to integrate these experiences during sleep, it may be that people who have been blind from birth do not have colour dreams. Or even dreams where visualised objects are present at all.

I cannot remember any sense of smells or odours in my dreams though. Curious.