B&W TV Generation Has Monochrome Dreams

Ant writes "The Telegraph reports that people over 55 who were brought up watching a monochrome TV set are more likely to dream in black and white, even years later. New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the color of your dreams. While almost all under-25s dream in color, many over-55s, all of whom were brought up with B&W sets, often still dream in monochrome. The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that '... there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed ... [B]efore the advent of black and white television all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color.'"

Comments

0_o

[Ieatsyou]

So this means I am going to dream in 1080i?

Re:0_o

[DreadfulGrape]

Only if there's enough plasma in your brain.

Re:0_o

[santix]

And as long as your brain pixels are not dead...

Re:0_o

[peragrin]

better question if you only watch TV drawn in Black and white XKCD style will all your dreams be of stick figures?

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, and flesh colored.

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. I dream in text mode.

Re:0_o

[Laser_iCE]

I'd hate to think what the BBW generation is going to dream about...

Re:0_o

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

I did actually dream in text mode once, after having spent all day at the computer. The dream didn't "work" very well--any kind of writing in dreams tends to be unstable, changing on the fly--but I was definitely reading from a console that filled my entire field of view.

Re:0_o

[Nadaka]

Hell, I once had a dreams in C++ and assembly...

The C++ dream ended in a segmentation fault, the assembly dream ended with a stack overflow.

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the +1 Tragic mod option?

Re:0_o

[Requiem18th]

Yes.

Also if you grow up watching anthropomorphic animals you may dream in anthropomorphic animals, I bet the Japanese dream in anime heck I bet some dream in *manga* complete with onomatopoeia.

Re:0_o

[Requiem18th]

I've had dreams and python and *nightmares* in Fox-pro. I have also dreamed in tetris, axelay, metroid and paneru-de-pon.

Re:0_o

[allgoodnamesaretaken]

sometimes I program in my dreams but I'd say it's entirely stable... I can seem to compile anything I want out of any old gibberish I tap in, once compiling a fridge from the lords prayer, for example. It's awesome!

Re:0_o

[joeme1]

I once spent an evening watching "Driving Miss Daisy" and playing Tetris on my Gameboy (original b&w). That night I couldn't sleep because everytime I started to doze off I saw Tetris pieces falling down around little old ladies drinking tea.

Re:0_o

[X0563511]

I've dreamed in Angband. But in first person. But they were still letters. Very strange.

Re:0_o

[aurtherdent2000]

Hyper dimensional dreams: I had dreamt in weird spaces, when I was down with heavy fever. There was less of a concept of space-time, but a weird tunnels and stuff...

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

i dream matrix code

Re:0_o

[cayenne8]

"I once spent an evening watching "Driving Miss Daisy" and playing Tetris on my Gameboy (original b&w). That night I couldn't sleep because everytime I started to doze off I saw Tetris pieces falling down around little old ladies drinking tea."

It is nice to hear occasionally from other people who have done acid.

:)

Reminds me of that old saying "Spot...Spot...the microdot..."

"Look, Look...see Spot...Blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually was black and white then; and before that. Dinosaurs.

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

i allway woundered why i get a THX logo at the begining of my dreams...

Re:0_o

[hcgpragt]

Have you ever wondered if any if this was real?
(tune of matrix starts in)

Re:0_o

[Moghedien]

Same here. I had a nightmarish dream about fighting Morgoth. DDWLPLDVVL@

You turn on the shower.
Oops! It feels deathly cold!

Morgoth announces: I am your father!
You are confused.
There is a wall blocking your way. (3x)
Morgoth undresses.
You are more confused.

Re:0_o

[aproposofwhat]

This is true - as a star-struck 9 year old in posession of a Casio Mini (this was 1973 in the UK, and I was the first kid in the school to have one), I spent nights and nights dreaming of screens and screens of green LED numbers.

The image still pops up now and again after a suitably herbal evening :)

Re:0_o

[aproposofwhat]

ROFL :)

Here's a handy hint - don't take shrooms while reading Alice in Wonderland.

Worst trip I ever had, and that includes Stockport!

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet__r than me, I dr_e_ in torr_nts.. (87% complete)

Re:0_o

[DarkOx]

Wow, I though I was strange because I sometimes have dreams in TSQL

Re:0_o

[Requiem18th]

But AIW us *meant* to be read on shrooms, the book is full of them as well.

Re:0_o

[Antaeus Feldspar]

I have actually dreamed in Wikipedia's two-column version-diff format.

Re:0_o

[javakah]

I too have actually had a dream in text. It was back when I was playing MUDs a lot (text multiplayer games). The dream was in text in a MUD. I took that as a sign that I was playing too much and cut back on the hours.

Now if only I could get this Undead Rogue out of my dreams...

Re:0_o

[b4upoo]

There was a time when I solved algebraic equations while asleep. More frightening yet was that I usually solved two simultaniously. I'm not joking.
          But the article neglects to mention that many of us spent our early childhood in an era in which TV did not exist. So how about those of us who only could see TV after the age of six?

Re:0_o

[Anonymous Coward]

You were dreaming of the matrix? Wet dream? Blondes, Redheads, Brunettes...

Re:0_o

[kn0tw0rk]

No thats not wierd. Try dreams of worlds done in celtic knotwork. This after a weekend of drawing knotwork in almost every waking moment.

Re:0_o

[AbRASiON]

I used a BBS heavily from the age of 17 to 19 with some fellow people from Melbourne Australia (hi Playnetters) I had several dreams of scrolling text, it's pretty funny but in a way a bit scary too that I would dream like that.

We also played 4 player doom over a modem (some third party app did an IPX emulation) - I've also had 'the doom' dream, no I'm not joking.

Nope...

[Junta]

Thanks to DRM, your dreams will all be downscaled from that.

Re:Nope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to DRM, your dreams will all be downscaled from that.

And watermarked.

Re:Nope...

[ypctx]

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "Wet dream".

I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they seriously suggesting that something people saw for a few hours a week in black and white determined how they dream for the rest of their lives? The 90% of the time spent living in full colour was just swept away, because TV is just so fucking powerful? I bet no proper study will ever reach the same conclusion.

Re:I smell BS

[Kagura]

Out of all of my dreams, I can only remember a color memory from ONE that I had years ago, where I was in a bunch of picturesque green mountains. Otherwise, my dreams and the memories of those dreams have no concept of color or grayscale in them at all. Sometimes places are dark or poorly lit, or sometimes it's night, but I simply can't remember the color of anything else from any of my dreams.

Re:I smell BS

[theshowmecanuck]

I think you are right. However if not, the first thought that came to mind was that it is kind of sad the tube has begun to rule so much that people aren't dreaming in the colours of the real world. No, that's not the name of a T.V. show. :-p I think they need redo the study with a better method.

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth, of course, is that before the 1950s, the world itself was in Black and White.

Re:I smell BS

[schklerg]

and it was grainy for a while too.

I still pull Calvin & Hobbes in every day w/ dailystrips and I still love it.

Re:I smell BS

[philspear]

I know! It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that we're made up of little tiny atoms! Hey, earth to scientists, I'm a person, not a bunch of atoms! Speaking of earth, there are some people who claim the earth is round! How ridiculous is that! I see hills, that doesn't look too round! And what about if you walk too far in one direction? Wouldn't you fall off the earth?!? I tell you, these scientists just need a little bit of common sense and a little less scientific method!

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact you're clearly missing is that simply doing one experiment and calling it science does not make it definitive or even accurate. It's entirely possible the method was flawed or the results were skewed in any number of ways, or simply that the test sample wasn't big enough. This is a vast problem with popular science reporting - a single experiment is reported on in such a way that its results are presented as irrefutable fact because, after all, this is science. The truth is that any results should be tested and independently verified again and again before any such sweeping statements can be made. Clearly this hasn't been done, and I'm confident that when (if?) this experiment is repeated it will not find the same results. Of course by then it'll be old news, and nobody wants to report that something exciting/interesting was invalidated - that doesn't pull in hits, so it'll go unnoticed and the simpler folk who buy into anything they read under a science heading as fact (such as yourself) will go on their whole lives believing this absolute fallacy.

Re:I smell BS

[lysergic.acid]

you can smell whatever you want to smell. its your groundless assumptions against multiple corroborated studies.

TV is a powerful (and insidious) cultural media, probably the most influential cultural media in modern society. that's why corporations spend so much money on TV commercials to imprint their brand on TV viewers, especially children. the data gathered from the recent study and from past research are not all that surprising. the researcher also offers a rational explanation for the data:

Even though they would have spent only a few hours a day watching TV or films, their attention and emotional engagement would have been heightened during this time, leaving a deeper imprint on their mind, Miss Murzyn told the New Scientist.

"The crucial time is between three and 10 when we all begin to have the ability to dream," she said.

"Television and films which by their very nature are interesting and emotionally engaging and even dreamlike. So when you dream you may copy what you have seen on the screen.

"I have even had a computer game player who dreams as if he is in front of a computer screen."

and if you had bothered to RTFA, you'd see that even the subjects who watched B&W television growing up dreamt in color 75% of the time. but it's not all that surprising that individuals will dream in the palette of the dominant cultural media in their childhood.

Re:I smell BS

[zeptobyte]

Dreams are fantasy. Television is fantasy. Reality is not. See the connection now?

Re:I smell BS

[moteyalpha]

I have a Ted Turner cell ® in my brain and I colorized all my old black and white memories.
I think Kagura has the best answer. How do you know it is color, if the images don't come from an eye stalk. I could think of anything and say it is color in my imagination and it would simply have that trait. I could imagine this text is white on blue if I wanted. I think that the experimenters were making the subjects believe in <RED> XUL

Re:I smell BS

[aclarke]

I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt. I remember waking up and finding it odd that I'd never dreamed in colour before that point.

I never associated that with television. Maybe kid are more likely to dream in black and white. We did have a B&W television and I was allowed to watch one hour per day. Usually Mr. Dressup (Canadian show) and Gilligan's Island.

Re:I smell BS

[Darkness404]

Awww... You stole my joke

Re:I smell BS

[philspear]

Well, repeatability is of course important, but like you aluded to, it's usually not in a researchers interest to repeat someone else's experiments just to validate it, and there should be some caution when dealing with a single study. And of course you're right when you point out that reporting of science often overstates things.

The assumption though should not be that the results are incorrect. What you're saying is "I don't believe it, so it's going to remain BS until someone else wastes their funding to confirm it." If there are some obvious glaring errors with the methodology, that's a legitimate reason to discount the results. If it's just you doubt the theory because it doesn't seem very plausible to you, it's more likely that you are wrong than the study.

Naturally, this is not proven yet without verification, and should not go into any textbooks without the qualifier "One study concluded...". But your hypothesis that TV can't have that influence is refuted (though not disproven) by the results of the present study, not vice versa.

Re:I smell BS

[Bryan Ischo]

Can you ever remember saying to yourself in your dream, "that man has such a funny red hat", or any other similar statement that involved color? That would give an indication that you were perceiving colors during your dream, even though you can't reconstruct the image that you were perceiving from memory with sufficient clarity to perceive the color again.

I myself definitely have seen color in my dreams, almost all of them, and definitely remember specific colors all the time. That being said, my memories are always fuzzy to varying degrees, and a single dream will have a range of clarity in what I recall.

- Some of it I remember just as very high-level ideas, not specifics, example: "I was dreaming that there was a tornado coming", but without any specific images or other details.

- Some of it I remember as broken up sequences of events that I reconstruct into what "must have been" a coherent whole; example: "I heard a loud whooshing noise, looked in my back yard, and saw a tornado in the distance", "Some time after that, I was in my house and I knew that the tornado was just outside and I had to get downstairs", "Later, there were a bunch of people I didn't know in my house and we were looking at the broken furniture and stuff strewn everywhere and the roof was missing, I got the feeling that they had all come to my house for shelter from the tornado" - while all of these are mere snapshots of what would have been presumably a complete experience with all of the gaps filled in, I don't remember what happened between the short segments of dream that I recall. But I do have an overwhelming feeling that there was a continuity, I just can't recall it.

- Some of it I remember as very detailed snapshots, just a mere moment in which all of my senses were engaged in a coherent and whole perception: "the window was open, I could feel the wind blowing in on my face, I felt an intense dread and fear as I watched the tornado spinning towards my house, the tornado was white and grey, a tall funnel cloud that moved slowly towards me, it was clearly late afternoon and the sky was dark and everything had a very eerie and surreal quality. The grass was green and I could see trees behind the tornado. The window sill was white and there was slightly golden glow from the sun behind the thick black clouds". From these snapshots I know that my dream included specific sensory experiences like color, texture, the feel of my body, smells, etc.

My memories of any particular dream will always have a mixture of these components, to varying degrees. All of these different levels of dream recall convince me that dreams, while I am experiencing them:

- Have moments of great coherency, but also large stretches of nonlinearness and just strange leaps of logic and perception
- Include detailed perceptions from all five senses, although definitely not always coherent, and not all senses are stimulated all the time
- Often are very lengthy, but often the dream changes its nature almost completely between parts
- Often have strong emotional compoenents
- Sometimes have uncanny consistency that one would think could only be driven by a plot that was already laid out before I even dreamed it. For example, sometimes I dream something early in a dream that doesn't make any sense at all until later in the dream, when I realize the reason for what I dreamt earlier. Sometimes these are so sophisticated and intertwined that it is impossible to think that me dream didn't have some idea "where it was going" before I even dreamed it
- Usually I participate actively in the experience, making decisions and acting on them, in ways that are both affected by, and affect, the outcome of the dream as it unfolds

I think that everyone experiences dreams in these same ways, to a large degree, the main difference being:

- How much you "care" about dreams, which affects how much effort your subconscious mind puts into participating your dreams. I honestly believe that you only have really vivid and co

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Also..., calling parent "simple"? Get of that particular high horse!

Re:I smell BS

[bonch]

The article is based on a survey a psychology student did, and only 30 people in the survey were over age 55. I think a bit more research needs to be done before we can draw the conclusion the article is trying to make.

Re:I smell BS

[budgenator]

my first dream with color was when I was about 8, a series of ivy covered tree fort over the sidewalk actually had pale green leaves, everything else was black and white; but I grew up when television was mostly b/w with a few color shows. Most of my dreams are muted color but a few are full.

Re:I smell BS

[shawb]

Although I don't have a source at hand, I've heard many times that watching television puts one in a trance-like state. This is probably similar enough to dreaming that the brain learns to dream in a similar manner.

Re:I smell BS

[sam0737]

Hey do you have a TV at home? or mainly watch newspaper? ...or Slashdot?

Re:I smell BS

[Dun Malg]

Out of all of my dreams, I can only remember a color memory from ONE...

My recurring anxiety dream is color-based. It's the military version of the "got to school and forgot my homework" dream, but I dream I'm standing in formation in my Army unit and suddenly I realize that everyone else is wearing the Desert Combat Uniform, while I am wearing the classic Woodland Camouflage BDU . In that dream, there's definitely a serious green vs. tan thing going on.

Re:I smell BS

[roguetrick]

Skepticism doesn't work that way, we don't blindly accept every study shouted on Slashdot, and the more outrageous it sounds at first glance, the more combed over it'd have to be for us to truly accept it. Its a healthy reaction of Joe public, otherwise everyone would be shouting from the rooftops about MOND or whatever new piece of popular science recently fell down our hole.

Re:I smell BS

[retchdog]

This "meta-study" suggests that most studies are more than 50% likely to be wrong: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124&ct=1

It's an interesting analysis, involving the sample size of a study as a predictor of its correctness, and the fact that most studies have a small sample size.

Assuming that his study itself is, in fact, true, should I still approach a paper with initial credibility? The right thing to do is I suppose, look at the sample size and if it is below the median cut-off, suppose it's false; otherwise, suppose it's true.

Re:I smell BS

[philspear]

I think I was pretty clearly not saying "you must accept it." Why would you put words in my mouth like that? What I'm saying is that results trump hypothesis, not the other way around. He's says that TV doesn't have that influence, these results argue they do, the results are more convicing than the word of an AC.

Blind acceptance is bad, skepticism good, but only if it's logical and open-minded. If results run counter to your worldview, you can't reject the results on that basis, you see if there are problems with the methods, results, or conclusions and if there are, THEN you say it's BS.

The AC has done none of this. He looked at the conclusion only (and, it seems, didn't even RTFA), decided it was wrong, and that only another study could prove it. That's not healthy skepticism, that's dogmatism. Historically, that has been even more toxic to science than blind acceptance.

Re:I smell BS

[Jorophose]

You know, thinking back, I don't think I can remember colours in my dreams; I can fill in the blanks because of familiar situations... but maybe we do that all the time? Like we actively re-write our dreams to make them more familiar?...

Re:I smell BS

[philspear]

I was actually thinking of that same paper. Study size is a good qualifier to how much stock to put into the conclusions of a study. But I think it's a mistake to write off a study entirely because of it's sample size. For one thing, there is no magic number by itself.

Re:I smell BS

[DavidTC]

I'm still of the opinion that we barely have 'dreams' at all. We just think about random shit as we sleep, hypothesis about random things and piece stuff together.

When people 'remember' dreams it's just throwing it all together as we wake up, or when we change in and out of different sleep cycles. Any sense of linear time in a dream is just us putting that on it afterward, or running through a lot of images rapidly as we wake up.

And while I don't know if I 'dream' in black and white or not, I do know I often dream in third person, which would be completely insane if it was actually happening in real time. I can't imagine how I'd walk around and whatnot. But, like I said, I suspect that's just me imagining something and placing 'me' in it, and then later inventing some sort of linear sequence to explain it.

This also explains how 'remembering' dreams can be incredibly erratic, where you often 'forget' things that it would be impossible not to notice. You didn't forget, you just simply didn't flesh that detail out when imagining about it.

Of course, the whole premise that it would be possible to imagine something and be conscious of imagining it but not notice that, in fact, it's a dream, is actually pretty silly to start with. You can't be conscious and have no volition at the same time!

Re:I smell BS

[noidentity]

The truth, of course, is that before the 1950s, the world itself was in Black and White.

You think that's bad; a few decades before that the world was silent (sometimes having music in the background).

Re:I smell BS

[cjb658]

But what if that study is wrong?

Everything I say is a lie. Except that. And that. And that...

BUFFER OVERFLOW ERROR

Re:I smell BS

[TexVex]

Are they seriously suggesting that something people saw for a few hours a week in black and white determined how they dream for the rest of their lives?

My mother, who is one of those 55+ talked about in the article, says she often dreams in monochrome. In conversations about it, black-and-white movies and television have come up as a possible cause.

I've never dreamed in black-and-white, but for a few nights during a time when I was playing Ultima Online way, way too much, I dreamed in that game's third person isometric viewpoint and art style.

Re:I smell BS

[BrokenHalo]

You think that's bad; a few decades before that the world was silent (sometimes having music in the background).

You mean like this film (2007)?

Incidentally, I highly recomment this - it's very funny.

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

because TV is just so fucking powerful?

Where did you learn that kind of language? From TV? Do you use the f word all the time? Now how powerful do you think the TV is?

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the big thing they're missing is that back then they all probably watched their black and white TVs just as much or more than we do today with our color ones. Like all the time - especially those who stayed home. So it's quite possible the ones they surveyed probably were the ones that were not watching TV for a few hours a day, but a very large portion of their day. Which probably means for the most of the day they were indeed watching black and white.

Re:I smell BS

[fastest fascist]

What about the viewpoint? I have fairly cinematic dreams, by which I mean that the point of view changes a lot, as if watching a movie shot from multiple angles and edited together. I'd say most of the time I'm not looking through my own eyes in my dreams, and I wonder if this could happen to someone who hasn't grown up watching TV and cinema.

Re:I smell BS

[theonetruekeebler]

I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt.

I'm 39, and I think I went the other way with dreaming: My dreams were always in color, except this one where I was playing with the Little Rascals. That was in black and white, because hey, they were too.

I had an older co-worker, a New Age flake with lots of Fashionably Pagan flake friends who used to hold rituals for Embalk and Beltane and whatever the hell else they could reject their Protestant upbringing with. He dreamed in black and white and insisted that dreaming in color meant you were astral traveling. I told him about my Little Rascals dream and he told me I had a pink aura. Whatevs.

I suppose my great grandfather dreamed in short loops of crowds walking slightly too fast and trains coming at him...

Re:I smell BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth, of course, is that before the 1950s, the world itself was in Black and White.

But only for a brief period. Some time before the 18th century, the world was in color, but the edges weren't sharply defined, and there was a kind of texture over everything.

Ancient Greece, on the other hand, was all white.

And ancient Egypt, that was a special time. Those positions look painful to hold for any length of time.

Re:I smell BS

[Reziac]

Well, we know who's going to be The Target today, don't we? ;)

I dreamed in B/W til 10 years after we got a colour TV (when I was 16), and I always attrib'd that to growing up with a B/W TV. I suspect how your dreams are affected by what real-life influences depends a lot on what's important to your life, and how your brain processes it. To me, TV and dreams were both an escape; that one paralleled the other shouldn't be surprising. Now, I have mostly DOOM dreams -- the escapism I most enjoy in Real Life is there in dreams too. :)

Re:I smell BS

[UdoKeir]

People walked a lot faster back then, too.

I have doubts about this

[the eric conspiracy]

I'm 58, and the only black and white things in my dreams are the TVs that I dream about watching when I dream of my youthful experiences.

Re:I have doubts about this

[reboot246]

I'm 55 and I've always dreamed in color. I didn't watch color TV until I was out of high school. Sounds like they need to go back to the old drawing board and start the study again, maybe with more people and a wider range of ages. Still seems like a waste of time and money to me.

Re:I have doubts about this

[tftp]

I'm 55 and I've always dreamed in color.

The real world around us is in color, and I bet it has more influence on people than some boring TV a couple of hours per day.

Re:I have doubts about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so since your sample of 1 contradicts the study they need to increase their sample size and do the study again! Good thinking!

Re:I have doubts about this

[whoever57]

I'm early '50s and I think I dream in B&W, but .... my memories are largely B&W also. I don't really remember colors, although I can attach a color tag to a memory. For example, when remebering a car, I might not visualize the color of a car -- only the shape, but I could associate the word red with the memory of the car.

Re:I have doubts about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the article? Do you realize this is just some psychology student's survey, and she only interviewed 30 people over 55?

Re:I have doubts about this

[budgenator]

Your also posting on /., we're not exactly a typical population. When I took psychology they said color dreaming tended to tract intelligence, and creativity scores and more likely in women and much rarer in men.

Re:I have doubts about this

[reboot246]

Yes, I read the article. I was saying that a new, bigger study would be a waste of time and money. One sentence followed the other. :)

Re:I have doubts about this

[reboot246]

I was hoping my one, added to the one before it, would be followed by several more. Maybe we could get more samples than the study had!

Re:I have doubts about this

[Rick17JJ]

I am in my mid-50s, and usually dream in black and white. The only exception is after I have just spent all day hiking or backpacking among the bright colors outdoors. Then that evening and on the next night my dreams and other mental imagery usually become much more colorful. After hiking all day, my memories become saturated with the bright vivid colors of blue sky, white clouds, green and yellow leaves, and also yellow, red and purple flowers and red rock formations. Then afterwards, for about the next two days my various types of mental imagery and dreams becomes much more colorful, before gradually fading back to black and white.

After having been hiking or backpacking all day, if I close my eyes while I am still awake, I can usually see a faint but steady steam of slight traces of brightly colored flickering faint mental images that I am not consciously creating. Then, after about 2 days the color fades away to mostly black and white for dreams and most other types of conscious or unconscious mental imagery.

I am now in my mid-50s and unlike most other television views of that time period, I did not upgrade to using a more expensive color TV until I was in my mid-30s somewhere during the 1980s. Ever since then, I have have owned 13" color TVs with rabbit ears antennas.

When I am starting to fall asleep I sometimes see traces of dream like images start to appear just before I fall asleep. That sometimes gives me a preview of of whether my dreams are going to be in black and white or color. Normally they are in black and white.

Re:I have doubts about this

[ignavus]

I don't remember many dreams, but one of the very few that I remember from my childhood and teen years (B&W TV era) was in vivid colour. It involved a lavish ballroom that would have done the Versailles Palace proud.

That had to be "shown" in colour!

Re:I have doubts about this

[Reziac]

I grew up with B/W TV. I dreamed in B/W from the time I was a little kid, until about 10 years after we got a colour TV, when I was 16. I've always attributed having B/W dreams to growing up with a B/W TV.

 

Not Properly Controlled

[rm999]

"The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that"

It sounds like they didn't properly control this experiment. By having two groups with such drastically different ages, there are now two variables: what kind of TV someone grew up watching, and age. Maybe older people are more likely to honestly admit they dream in black and white, or maybe they lose the ability to dream in color as they age. I think most people can't remember the minute visual details of their dreams, so experiments like this can easily introduce a bias in how one describes his dreams.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[owlnation]

Yeah, it's nonsense. Very badly designed experiment, and a very small sample. What about people who grew up without TV etc, etc...

I wonder who funds stuff like this? I have lots of projects that would produce just as viable/ludicrous conclusions. Where can I find the golden goose like these guys?

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[arkhan_jg]

I read the paper article this morning. They had two groups of older people - those who grew up watching colour television, and those who didn't. Those who grew up with colour reported dreaming in B&W about 5% of the time, same as the young people who grew up with colour. The older people who grew up with B&W TV reported dreaming in B&W 25% of the time.

Now, you can argue that watching colour TV in our formative years alters how we perceive dreams once we've just woken up from them, rather than the dreams themselves - even the researched admits that.

Either way, it's an interesting study.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[nomadic]

It sounds like they didn't properly control this experiment.

That's the accusation thrown at every psychological experiment on slashdot. Every study is going to have some sort of bias and experimental flaws, it's not particle physics and you can't correct for everything.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[mollymoo]

It's a student (undergraduate I presume) project, so I expect the funding was zero.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[rm999]

Yes, and it's a very common argument against the psychology field in general. Just because sloppy science is the norm does not justify drawing conclusions from sloppy experiments.

My problem is highly visible news stories drawing controversial conclusions from controversial experiments. Studies have shown (http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658) that most published science research ends up being wrong - especially headline grabbing studies like this one.

Slashdot has an intelligent, critical readership, so you are bound to see experiments dissected carefully. I consider that a strength of these forums, not a weakness. While there may be no perfect experiment (especially in a complicated, ill-defined field like psychology), there can still be "good" and "bad" ones. The results are indeed interesting, but are they correct?

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[BrokenHalo]

That's the accusation thrown at every psychological experiment on slashdot.

That's nothing to do with Slashdot. It's a valid reservation.

The samples for these studies cannot be expected to be free from bias, since they are (almost invariably) self-selected. And without publishing exactly what questions were asked of respondents, claiming to be able to indicate any kind of conclusion is woolly thinking.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[BrokenHalo]

It's a student (undergraduate I presume) project, so I expect the funding was zero.

This page indicates that she is a postgrad.

Re:Not Properly Controlled

[ceoyoyo]

It's kind of tough to control both age and whether or not you watched black and white or colour TV.

However, if you'd like to volunteer your children to be randomized, I'm sure they'd be interested.

Honestly...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even sure if I dream in color or not.

Re:Yo! Yo! GRAYSCALE

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you get when you add black and white? Yeah thats right, you get purple! Dum kids these days.

And what about those of us who grew up...

[John Hasler]

...not watching TV at all? I read books as a child but I don't dream in black text on white paper.

Re:And what about those of us who grew up...

[Artifakt]

I frequently have dreams where I'm reading some modern work, but the book is a huge leather bound volume with clasps and hinges, and the text is in archaic black letter, or hand scribed with illuminated portions. I guess, by the study, this is because of my formative years in the 1540's.

Re:And what about those of us who grew up...

[jensend]

I didn't watch much TV growing up but did do a lot of reading, and I find that (at least in regard to the dreams I'm aware of having had) my dreams are usually not visual. I'm aware of what surroundings I'm in in the dream and might be able to describe them in terms one would expect to correspond to sight, but I don't really "see" anything. Reading this article makes me realize that this non-visual sense in my dreams has much in common with imagination as I read.

Of course, plenty of people dreamt in visual color long before TV was around- but perhaps that reflects the fact that before TV most kids' perceptions of the world were less influenced by various media and more influenced by interaction with the outside physical world.

Re:And what about those of us who grew up...

[DougWombat]

Where I grew up we had no TV, no FM and no AM radio either. I do, however, dream in colour but with the audio in *hiss* full *crackle* shortwave *bzzz* splendour.

Re:And what about those of us who grew up...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 1540's? With a 6-digit UID? Hah!

Re:And what about those of us who grew up...

[Anonymous Coward]

I frequently have dreams where I'm reading some modern work, but the book is a huge leather bound volume with clasps and hinges, and the text is in archaic black letter, or hand scribed with illuminated portions. I guess, by the study, this is because of my formative years in the 1540's.

Connor MacCleod, is that you?

Dreaming not always in visuals

[kilraid]

I don't think the principal elements of dreams has to be visual imagery. If I recall a dream, I cannot always remember actually seeing anything. Sometimes it's more like objects and concepts. That dreams would merely replace sensory input is probably a misconception.

Color, by the way. (But once it was black and white and some things in color, as in Nethack)

Color processing is wierd

[pieterh]

I remember dreams that were in black and white but where specific things - a person, an object - were in vivid colors, red, blue, yellow.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that our dream color schemes are influenced by the TV we watch. Did they ask people who grew up with no TV if they dream in color, B&W?

Much more likely, there are age differences. Maybe some people start to dream more in B&W as they get older. Correlation is not causation!

Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[kilraid]

Ha! Another Nethack player!

Re:Color processing is wierd

[John Hasler]

My family didn't have a TV until I was 13. I dream in color (or at least that's how I remember it in the morning). BTW you may dream a normal amount but not remember it.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.

You dream. You just don't remember it.

Without REM, and its accompanying dreams, we eventually die. Barring very extreme sleep disturbances, pretty much everyone dreams every "night." In an eight hour span of sleep, it would be ridiculously irregular if a person experienced no REM. Now, obviously not everyone gets eight hours of sleep a night, which is part of your point--but even in a much short span, say three hours, REM almost certainly takes place.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Hatta]

Yeah, it's strange. I don't remember many dreams where I've noticed whether they're in color or not. Does that mean I dream in black and white, because there's no color information? Or does it mean I dream in color, because I'd notice something so different from my regular experiences.

Personally, I don't think color exists in my dreams unless it's relevant to the content. That makes this "B&W vs Color" question totally meaningless.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Anonymous Coward]

a person, an object - were in vivid colors, red, blue, yellow.

You dreams sound like "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover". I hope you didn't see that as a child!

Greenaway gives a nightmare tinge to these scenes by using a different color scheme for every locale -- red for the dining room, white for the toilets -- and having the color of the character's costumes change as they walk from one to another.

Maybe some people start to dream more in B&W as they get older. Correlation is not causation!

Don't be silly. These people always dreamed in B&W. The summary even implies that some peoples dreams eventually switched from B&W to color, but most didn't. Correlation + explanation = evidence for causation!

Re:Color processing is wierd

[CastrTroy]

I don't dream much at all, or as others have pointed out, I don't remember my dreams. Once in a while I'll remember them for like 30 seconds, and it usually ends up like this XKCD Comic. My wife on the other hand remembers almost all her dreams in a lot of detail. I wonder if any studies have been done about the reasons why some people remember dreams, while others don't.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember dreams that were in black and white but where specific things - a person, an object - were in vivid colors, red, blue, yellow.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that our dream color schemes are influenced by the TV we watch. Did they ask people who grew up with no TV if they dream in color, B&W?

Much more likely, there are age differences. Maybe some people start to dream more in B&W as they get older. Correlation is not causation!

Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.

Actually, truly deep sleep is dreamless sleep.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Anonymous Coward]

Dreaming almost always happens in REM sleep phase, not the deep sleep phase.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[Artifakt]

The above is fundamentally accurate. In fact, if you really found yourself regularly getting only 3 hours of sleep a night, your brain would start cycling into rem sleep very quickly, and skipping intermediate stages, just to squeeze more dreaming in. In severe cases, the body will fight to dream even if it has to neglect physical fatigue product cleanup and minor injury repair.
        However, if you get less than 5 or maybe 6 complete dream cycles in, your memories of dreams will be very fragmented, and it appears, from experimenters asking people to write down their dreams while waking them just after the cycle ends and letting the subject get through a variable number of cycles, that the actual dreams start out very fragmented and illogical, and as the sleep cycles go on, get longer, more cohesive, maybe more like real experiences, even while retaining many of their fantastic elements.
        I think it's interesting, that most of the people in western society don't get nearly enough regular, uninterrupted sleep to fully use the function of dreaming. Maybe all our theories about dreaming are as skewed as if we were theorizing about healthy diets and everyone had a mild case of vitamin deficiencies. How do we do real research if our average baseline group isn't skewed from our species biological norm?
       

Re:Color processing is wierd

[zippthorne]

He dreams in ascii text?

Re:Color processing is wierd

[YourExperiment]

Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.

Theoretically, this ought to mean you dream more, unless you really are getting no sleep at all. Pretty much everyone dreams, but remembering that you've done so when you awake is thought to be a factor of how you wake up. If you are awakened suddenly while dreaming (say by an alarm clock, or maybe two young kids) you're far more likely to realise that you were dreaming than someone who woke up gradually, who will probably have no memory of dreaming at all.

Re:Color processing is wierd

[tooth]

I'm with you on this, I've heard previously about dreams in b&w, and after I've had a dream there's no specific info I can get about colours. It's kind of like saying that I had a blue idea, or a sound having colour. To me, dreams are ideas, thoughts and feelings with picture notes to make a point.

half license fee for B&W TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they ask those under 25 who only have B&W TVs? License fee is half for B&W TVs, there's got to be somebody under 25 with only a B&W TV...

Re:half license fee for B&W TV

[camperslo]

Hmmm, I wonder if the people closely watching a black and white set that had wide video bandwidth would dream with the visible dot pattern on the parts of the picture where the most brightly saturated color was. One couldn't tell what color it was from, but one who knew what to look for could see it on a set with good focus and bandwidth.

The color subcarrier frequency for NTSC was picked at 3.579545 MHz. (In theory, TV police could sniff out that or similar PAL frequency to detect color sets radiating in B&W licensed households) Why such and odd choice for the frequency? For a horizontal scan rate of 15.734 KHz (previously 15.750 for B&W) and a vertical rate of 59.97 Hz, the dot pattern on one line was offset exactly half a dot from the adjacent line to minimize it being visible on black and white sets. (Color sets used filtering to avoid the dots, but that reduced detail until someone came up with comb filters... but that's another ramble...)

I wonder how much one could cut costs by making flat-panel greyscale displays? It would only need 1/3 as many pixels. I can just see it now... retro frames that look like the front of a 50's television hanging on the wall showing old shows in black and white. Someone could preload a system with a drive full of shows where the copyrights have run out.

I wonder if we'd grown up watching sets with the blue-lateral magnet out of adjustment, if we'd dream with everything having a blue fringe on one side, and yellow on the other?

I really really hope that future dreams don't have compression artifacts.

Re:half license fee for B&W TV

[retchdog]

Someone could preload a system with a drive full of shows where the copyrights have run out.

In that case, the television screen would be the color of the sky above the port in Chiba City.

Re:half license fee for B&W TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, that is actually a sweet idea, look at the OLPC, it had a B/W mode that had a massively higher resolution and clarity compared to the color screen. (still has it?)

B/W screens would be incredibly useful for those who just do monochromatic work.
This is actually really high when it comes to office work, colored inks costs more too, most print with B/W.
Its not like they couldn't have colored screens too for the odd time they want to design colorful prints.
I'm actually shocked that nobody has even went into this full-scale. (only places where you see this is like e-readers sadly...)

What about people who don't grow up watching TV?

[alvinrod]

I'm not claiming that I didn't grow up watching TV, or even that there are very many people out there like that, but what about people who didn't watch a lot of TV growing up? Is it related to the environment in which we spend the most time? What I'm wondering is whether or not reading a lot of books would cause black and white dreams simply because the black text on a white background is similar to black and white television.

Ethical issues aside, can we raise some children in an environment largely deprived of green and see if that affects their dreams? It would probably be interesting to know, but I'm not sure how much it would further our understanding of the human mind.

I shudder to think

[antifoidulus]

about how the youtube generation will dream...

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL i drem n lolcats!111!!!1ONE

teh leave britney alone guy narrates my dreams

Re:I shudder to think

[adnonsense]

In short grainy snatches of up to 10 minutes.

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean the 2girls1cup generation, don't you?

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no, the question is "how the youporn generation will dream?" :)

Re:I shudder to think

[MindlessAutomata]

Fuck! Just when I was undoing her bra strap, things suddenly went Rick Astley! Fuck!

Re:I shudder to think

[SteveFoerster]

I guess ten minutes of snatch is better than nothing....

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

not much different.. their blurry mishmashes will simply be more quantitized.. and the audio will sound like a cellphone.

Re:I shudder to think

[objekt]

Obligatory Bill Nelson youtube reference (warning, kid of loud)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMmmhyrvRsE

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably similar to just about any Youtube Poop video, with a hint of Pork and Beans.

Haha god, i would love to dream as if i was actually in a Youtube Poop video.

Re:I shudder to think

[Anonymous Coward]

about how the youtube generation will dream...

*Buffering....*

makes me wonder...

[MonoSynth]

Besides the fact that this proves that tv has a way too big influence on our lives an our personalities, I wonder if this effects the way we look at the world outside our dreams. Do "b&w people" have more feeling for shapes and textures while "color people" look at the world from a more color-based perspective? Does it influence the way a photographer composes a picture? Does it influence how quick we react in traffic, recognizing colors instead of shapes? Does it influence our definition of beauty?

Interesting stuff :)

Re:makes me wonder...

[John Hasler]

...? ...? ...? ...is this study utter crap that proves nothing?

Re:makes me wonder...

[slashtivus]

This is not a 'fact' at all. It is one singular piece of research by a student with a small sample. Most everyones lives with a large component of 'meat space' meaning that they work with real people and real events in full color in daily life. I'll buy in to this when there are dozens of studies with proper control groups that all come to a similar conclusion.

Re:makes me wonder...

[bar-agent]

Do "b&w people" have more feeling for shapes and textures while "color people" look at the world from a more color-based perspective? Does it influence the way a photographer composes a picture?

I don't know about black & white television, but I know that black & white photographers consider shots differently from color photographers. They look around and see shadow and contrast, and choose their photos from that basis, rather than from color contrast or attractive or startling color combinations. They look at the world differently.

Vivid Colors for Me!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause I've never seen a B&W Vivid Video :)

pseudoscience

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, please. What, they think the generation before TV (the radio generation) dreamed in audio only? Did the people of Shakespeare's time dream in iambic pentameter?

Good ol' pseudoscience rears it's ugly head again.

Re:pseudoscience

[Molochi]

I remember someone once told me men dream in black and white and women dream in color. This more than 20 something years ago. Then some years later and 2000 miles away I heard it again. I think it's an idea perpetrated and perpetuated by people that meet the criteria or that just don't remember their dreams.

I'm a guy who grew up with a B&W set and I've always dreamed in color.

Re:pseudoscience

[Tony Hoyle]

Sounds wierd to me. Personally I can't imagine dreaming in black and white - hell I'm not sure I'd do a good job of imagining a black and white world (it'd probably wake me up.. going from the 3d technicolour dolby surround that's a typical dream to a crappy black and white movie would be quite a shock :p).

Re:pseudoscience

[budgenator]

Men my age all say they dream in black and white while most women say they dream in color. In fact my peers look at me in disbelief when I tell them I sometimes dream in color, frequently with main items and people in color with backgrounds in monochrome and only occasionally in monochrome, I'm 54. In psychology I was taught that color dreaming was rare in men and a sign of high intelligence and or creativity.

Re:pseudoscience

[ignavus]

Did the people of Shakespeare's time dream in iambic pentameter?

Well, yeah.

Didn't you ever watch Romeo and Juliet? Mercutio has this dream about some fairy and that was all in iambic pentameters.

It would be kind of cool to dream in poetry. I bet it would work a treat for picking up chicks. Though if they were in bed listening to you recite poetry in your sleep I'd reckon you would have made it past the pickup stage.

Re:pseudoscience

[Eli Gottlieb]

In psychology I was taught that color dreaming was rare in men and a sign of high intelligence and or creativity.

Excellent, I love things that confirm to me how intelligent and creative I am.

Re: Nethack players

[John Hasler]

We're everywhere.

That explains SOOO much.

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered why the colours in my dreams flood out until I hit myself in the head. This also explains when I wake up and feel like I'm falling, it's just the stupid v-hold.

The next time I have a bad dream I'm going to try turning the rotor.

RAWR-RAWR-RWAR-RAWR-RAWR-bad dream fuzzing out-RAWR-RAWR-bad dream gone!-RAWR-RAWR-RAWR-overpowered local news station!

Yeah

[no-body]

and Internet generation wet....

Re:Yo! Yo! GRAYSCALE

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear, this subject is not all black and white, but here's a little jingle I wrote, goes something like this

The ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
A child is black, a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight, a beautiful sight

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land, all the land

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light, to see the light

And now at last we plainly see
We'll have a dance of Liberty, Liberty!

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight, a beautiful sight

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light, to see the light

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight, a beautiful sight

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light, to see the light

C'mon, get it, get it
Ohh-ohhhh, yeah, yeah
Keep it up now, around the world
Little boys and little girls
Yeah, yeah-eah, oh-ohhh

David Arkin

Dream in B&W ?

[mbone]

I was brought up on B&W TVs and have never, to my memory, dreamed in B&W (and I keep a dream journal).

Re:Dream in B&W ?

[mbone]

Oh, and I am not quite 55

Consequence:

[whathappenedtomonday]

Watch as little television as possible - or none at all - and keep your kids away from it at all cost. It fucks up your brain.

Re:Consequence:

[Darkness404]

Because the stuff on YouTube is far more intelligent than the stuff on TV....

Re:Consequence:

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet gives you get a choice, at least.

For now.

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[John Hasler]

> I'm not claiming that I didn't grow up watching TV, or even that there are very many
> people out there like that, but what about people who didn't watch a lot of TV growing
> up?

We are a lucky few.

> Is it related to the environment in which we spend the most time?

Are your dreams mostly inane sitcoms and animated advertisements for crappy toys?

> What I'm wondering is whether or not reading a lot of books would cause black and white
> dreams simply because the black text on a white background is similar to black and
> white television.

Didn't happen to me, but I spent a lot of time outside as well as reading many books. But then, I read in color and 3D.

o rly

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm going to dream with pixelations and a little note saying "Buffering ..."?

Of course if I was a real geek, I'd dream in blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups.

I don't even see the code anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.

Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's for some weirdness that I and my family have never been able to figure out.

I'm relatively young (24), but spent the early years with a black & white TV. Around age 6-8(?), my parents finally acquired a color TV.

Two things here:
1) I dream in color now, and think I did back then (although I cannot say this for 100%). This is but one data point, and perhaps I did not have B&W long enough to overly influence my dream development (if this phenomenon is for real).

2) I saw the black and white TV as color! Meaning, I had no idea that it was black and white until my parents told me many years later.

I didn't lead a particularly deprived childhood, in that I saw movies on occasion at the cinema, visited other friends who had color TVs, and so forth--it was really that my parents were frugal--so it wasn't like I hadn't been exposed to color TV (and then, of course, there is Real Life, in its full-blown technicolor glory).

I explicitly remember the transition between televisions as one from a certain color palette to a new color palette--not gray scale to color! (I think it was Disney's "Gummi Bears" which stands out most in my mind.)

My youngest brother (my age minus 4) vaguely remembers the TV thing in the same way. My parents always thought we were crazy, until years later talking to my father's sister about this, who also reported viewing things in her childhood in a similar manner. Heriditary?

This is obviously tangential to the original topic, but I've always been curious about what caused this--did my young mind project color onto the screen? For the record, I most definitely see B&W as color, now, and I'm not colorblind. If anyone reading here has any ideas of what strange brain workings caused this, I would be very curious.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[clang_jangle]

2) I saw the black and white TV as color! Meaning, I had no idea that it was black and white until my parents told me many years later.

Interesting. We had only a B&W until I was 11, but I was always sure I could tell when things on the screen were actually red or brown. No other colors, just red and brown.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I also remember seeing the Smurfs and Scooby Doo in colour, even though we had a B&W TV for years. I remember my mother saying "Oh, the Smurfs are blue!" after we got a new TV, and turning to look at her like she was nuts.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Bryan Ischo]

I sincerely doubt that your mind created the perception of coherent colors while you were watching a black and white TV.

I think it's much more likely that two factors are at work:

1. Cloudy memory due to the gap of time between now and when you were a child combined with the fact that children don't have very good memories anyway

2. When you were a child, you may not have noticed the difference between black and white and color programs because you were not paying any attention to that aspect of your experience

Even today, my wife, who is in her 30's, says she can't tell the difference between standard definition and high definition programming. I know that she really can, but when she watches TV, it's just not something that she pays any attention to. So left to her own devices, her memory of watching a program doesn't retain any perception of the video quality of the program. If I were to sit down with her and show her a standard def program and a high def side by side (or even one after the other on the same set), we'd be able to talk through the differences, which I am certain she could notice and appreciate if instructed to do so. So when her attention is specifically directed by an outside influence to video quality, she can perceive the difference. But her mind does not normally notice such things so on her own, her experience of watching a program has no component which is related to video quality, and furthermore, what she remembers about it loses any small amount of perception of video quality that she might have had at the time she was watching it.

I use her as an example, but I think that every single person does the same sort of thing with numerous aspects of perception all the time.

I think that when you were a kid, if someone had shown you black and white TV and color TV side by side, you clearly would have seen the difference. But when you were left to your own devices, watching that black and white TV, you didn't pay any attention to the hues you were perceiving on the screen. So if afterwards someone asked you (or you asked yourself) whether or not you had watched a color or black and white TV program, you would have replied based on what you had assumed about your experience, rather than what you had actually perceived.

Color vs. black-and-white is definitely a pretty big thing to just sweep under the rug of perception, but I think it really is the same as much more subtle aspects to what we perceive, like video quality, just to a different degree. And I think that being a kid, with the inherent lack of maturity of thought and perception of childhood, you were more able to filter that part of your experience out than you would be today as an adult, which is why it seems so strange and impossible now to think that you could have done that back then.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

Synesthesia, perhaps? That tends to run in families.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[srobert]

Glad you wrote that. I thought I was the only one who had this experience. I'm 45. Until about 1969 we had a black and white television at my house. I distinctly remembered seeing color on it as well. Batman and Robin were popular when I was about 4 or 5. The show was in color, but until we got the color set I shouldn't have been seeing the colors. The only explanation I have ever been able to come up with is, as you said, a mental projection of color into what I was seeing. I knew Batman's suit was blue (perhaps because I had sometimes saw it at my grandmother's house on her color set), so I saw it that way.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Anonymous Coward]

At the very least if you have synaesthesia you can project color - but this isn't always accurate. You can see a deep green and a deep red as the same color because there isn't enough of a difference between the shades in monochrome - amusing as it is to think of shades in monochrome.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible to fool the brain into thinking that a black and white image is in colour by flashing parts of the image at certain frequencies.

I'm not sure how the biological side works, perhaps different rod and cone cells in the eye get depleted at different rates by the flashing, and so don't fire properly.

It was demonstrated on 'tommorows world' in the UK some time in the 60's. I do remember this clearly, though I can't find anything about it on the net.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[bendodge]

2) I saw the black and white TV as color! Meaning, I had no idea that it was black and white until my parents told me many years later.

I'm a bit younger than you, and I experienced almost the exact same thing. My parents got a color TV later than most other people. I was still in my early childhood when we got the color TV, and I refused to believe that I had been watching Tigger in B&W until I saw the old set after viewing the new one. Also interesting was that the new set revealed that some of my old 'colors' were wrong (Rabbit was something other than light yellow, IIRC).

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Tacvek]

Indeed it is possible. The demonstration would have used a Benham's disk, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The effect is not well understood. The colors produced are generally fairly pale, and are not necessarily the same for everybody.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that is the exact phenomenon. Thanks.

On the program they were flashing different bits of the image at different rates, rather than using a disk. The principle looks identical though.

I remember seeing bits of the image as vaguely purple, and some a bit green. It was not very effective, or nice to look at for long!

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Dogtanian]

Interesting. We had only a B&W until I was 11, but I was always sure I could tell when things on the screen were actually red or brown. No other colors, just red and brown.

I noticed that when using my dad's old portable black and white TV that things that would have been coloured (on a colour TV) appeared to have a subtle pattern to them. If you detuned the signal slightly (in such a way that on a colour TV would cause it to lose the colour signal and display as slightly fuzzy black and white) then this effect was lost.

I assume that this was some form of artifacting caused by the high-frequency colour subcarrier, which obviously wouldn't have been used by the B&W TV per se, but may have caused some sort of interference unless completely filtered out.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Dogtanian]

My parents still had a black and white set when I was fairly young (up until the age of seven or so; I'm in my early thirties just now). I can assure you that colour was a big, visible and in-your-face difference and even then I was envious of other people who had colour TVs. I still remember watching an episode of the Doctor Who story 'The Keeper of Traken' in colour at the house of friends of my parents (must have been around 5 then), specifically the scenes in the grove with the statue, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't been in colour.

I'm sure you're right that colour vs. black and white is something that the brain can filter out- I don't specifically remember most TV I watched then as being in black and white, more just (in retrospect) not having been in colour. But I certainly knew the difference between black and white and colour, just like I remember if a program was colour or black and white (i.e. old) when my parents got the colour TV.

HD is a bad example because although it's certainly an improvement, it's not likely to be one that's as noticable to kids, no matter how good it is. It's essentially improved video quality, not a fundamental in-your-face difference. Remember that kids like bright colours.

Re:Seeing B&W *as* color?!

[Tacvek]

It is certainly possible to replicate the effect with out the disk, with just flashing, but such demos are far less common for some reason. Part of the usefulness of the disk is that it does not keep the same flashing frequency for the entirety of the spin, since it gradually slows down, which increases the proportion of people who can see the effect at some point, as the exact same frequencies do not work for everybody, or so I have heard.

Not surprising..

[n1hilist]

My dreams as a kid were pixelated! And my teenage dreams often had things like wireframed landscapes with low polygon trees!

Even when I dreamt about breakups with ex's, or random things.. all 3D engine inspired.

What happened to the Indian chief?

[mbstone]

We didn't have color TV until I was 7.

Things you probably don't remember about TV.

TV didn't used to be all night. After Johnny Carson the booth announcer would come on and read a long blurb about how the station is licensed by the FCC to transmit from Mt. Foobar with a radiated power of blah blah and serve the public interest blah blather.

Then they would show a film of a military band playing The Star-Spangled Banner and then they would turn off the transmitter, filling your living room with snow and white noise.

TV used to be three channels which is why millions of people voluntarily watched programs like Gilligan's Island or Mr. Ed. It took an act of Congress to set up a fourth channel.

Every drug store used to have a tube tester where you could bring in the vacuum tubes from your TV to see if they needed replacement.

When you turned off the TV, there was a little white dot that remained in the middle of the screen.

Before Sunrise Semester and Captain Kangaroo TV stations aired test patterns, and there was this Indian chief at the top of the test pattern. Evidently he held an exalted position among the gods of TV, who was he? Why isn't he on color bars? What is the technical significance of all those numbers on the test pattern?

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[GayBliss]

Oh yes, I remember it all so well.

And don't forget the manual tuning of each channel by the turning of the big knob on the front that had stops at each channel, and then the "fine tuning" ring behind the knob that you turned to get it just right in combination with the best position of the rabbit ears for each channel.
I wonder how many people still say "turn the channel" as opposed to "change the channel", and if it differs by age?

How about the public service announcement that came on at 10pm that said:
"Parents, it's now 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?"

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[evilviper]

Things you probably don't remember about TV. [...] they would show a film of a military band playing The Star-Spangled Banner and then they would turn off the transmitter, filling your living room with snow and white noise.

Yes... Nobody that has ever watched the movie Poltergeist knows any of this...

Really, who doesn't remember this? It's been perhaps less than 10 years now since all stations started broadcasting infomercials all night. I think KCET (Los Angeles PBS station) was doing it up until ~2 years ago.

TV used to be three channels which is why millions of people voluntarily watched programs like Gilligan's Island or Mr. Ed. It took an act of Congress to set up a fourth channel.

TV used to be 1 channel... Then 2... Then 3... Then 4...

I don't think there was really a decent length of time (in the any of the major markets) when there were only TV 3 channels. There certainly wasn't in Los Angeles, with local (independent) stations owned by the Los Angeles Times, Paramount, Disney, etc. They used to be dammed good TV channels to, until the late 90's when mergers and rampant cost cutting turned them all into crap.

What you're actually talking about are NATIONAL networks (ie. CBS, NBC-Red, NBC-Blue/ABC).

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[dreamchaser]

Up through the 70's most markets, even most large ones, had the 3 networks, PBS, and one or two independant channels on UHF.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[jo7hs2]

"How about the public service announcement that came on at 10pm that said: 'Parents, it's now 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?'" That one you can still hear. At least one station out of NYC still airs it daily.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[Anonymous Coward]

And in Poland they'd say :"It's 10 o'clock. Do you know what time it is?"...

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[Rick17JJ]

Yes, I watched black and white television when I was growing up in the 1960s. I would pull the knob to turn on the TV and after a few seconds or so, the tubes would warm up and a picture would appear. If I remember correctly, for a split second, the image would grow from a dot to full size. I think we had about 3 or 4 channels, such as probably ABC, CBS, NBC and probably one independent station.

To change channels we had to manually turn the knob with a klunk, klunk noise each time we turned the knob. after changing channels, occasionally we would have to adjust the fine-tunning knob or adjust the rabbit ears slightly for a better picture. When the TV got older, it accumulated more dust in the channel changing knob, and we would have to wiggle the knob a few times or click it back and forth a few times before getting a clear black and white picture. There were no digital type buttons and there was no remote.

As a child, I remember turning on the TV early in the morning before anything was on and just getting the test pattern that the station used, such as the one with the Indian and some other patterns. If I remember correctly, I would eventually hear a few test tones that were a clue that broadcasting was about to begin. It was followed by the brief announcement that mbstone mentioned and then the first show would begin.

When I would peek into ventilation holes in the back of the TV, I could see a few tubes glowing. One of the grocery stores we shopped at had a tube tester machine. It was not far from the 1 cent gumball machines and also the toy car which would rock back and forth for a couple minutes after mommy inserted the appropriate coin.

I remember watching shows such as "Leave it to Beaver," "The Lucy Show," "Dobie Gillis," "Gidget," "Captain Kangaroo," and "The Lone Ranger." My favorites included show such as "One Step Beyond," "The Outer Limits," "The Twilight Zone," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Perry Mason," and "The Mod Squad." The dumbest shows which I actually watched were "My Mother the Car" which was about a guy who's mother was a car, and also "Mr Ed," which was about guy with a talking horse. We also watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite every evening.

This was back in the days when the milk man would deliver milk to our door, girls wore dresses, most mothers stayed at home and some families still had just one car. We would dial phone numbers by rotating the dial on a rotary phones and where we could dial "0" to get the operator.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Every drug store used to have a tube tester where you could bring in the vacuum tubes from your TV to see if they needed replacement.

Ah, trips to the hardware store with my dad. He'd look up the tube number in that plastic flip chart thingy. Then he would let me set those big black plastic dials. Let the tube heat up, then push a button, and see if the needle jumped up to a green area.

When you turned off the TV, there was a little white dot that remained in the middle of the screen.

Wow, *THAT* dot! And then they got Walter Cronkite out of bed too early, and he really had bags under his eyes . . . and then Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon!

What is the technical significance of all those numbers on the test pattern?

Alas, my dad would be able to tell you that. He designed television transmitter antenna for RCA. His biggest work went down with the World Trade Center. Sniff, sniff :-(

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[Rick17JJ]

In the early 1960s, as I recall, everyone had black and white, but I should add that by the late 1960s many or possibly even most families had color TVs. However, a few families such as ours chose to keep using the less expensive black and white TVs. For us black and white was good enough.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[WeirdJohn]

I first saw a colour TV when I was 14, and we got one when I was 18. I have never, as far as I can recall, dreamed in B&W, and I have an excellent memory and can usually remember 5 to 10 dreams that I have each night. I have to wonder what the studies are really measuring.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[fotoguzzi]

Thrown in a dumpster. http://www.pharis-video.com/p4788.htm

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[BitterOak]

Before Sunrise Semester and Captain Kangaroo TV stations aired test patterns, and there was this Indian chief at the top of the test pattern. Evidently he held an exalted position among the gods of TV, who was he? Why isn't he on color bars? What is the technical significance of all those numbers on the test pattern?

There is more about it here, and also a higher res version of the card.

Re:What happened to the Indian chief?

[Reziac]

Thanks, you two, I remember all that, and now I feel really old ;)

Now I'm off to drag our first B/W TV (from 1953) in from the garage. Maybe it still works!!!

Missing group

[clang_jangle]

You know, if this study had also investigated those who worked for years with green monochrome monitors and found a significant percentage of them dreamed in green monochrome, it'd be a lot more credible.

tricky question

[abigsmurf]

I honestly do not know if I dream in black and white or colour. I just can't remember dreams in that much detail, even seconds after waking I wouldn't be able to answer for sure.

However isn't there a big problem with memorising dreams. It's widely known that dreams are meant to be forgotten, they're 'stored' in part of a brain that's meant to not keep things. As such to remember a dream, you first recall it whilst it's fresh, then you seperately remember what you've recalled. Essentially a version of chinese whispers.

There's a risk that people aren't remembering the dream but remembering what they thought the dream was. If any of that makes sense...

Re:tricky question

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, sort of. I can sometimes vividly recall what happened in a dream and some of the "scenes", but I have no sense of whether it's in color. It's just not visual like that.

Re:tricky question

[Tony Hoyle]

Remembering dreams is a nice skill to have... I don't remember all mine but quite a few of them.

The pinnnacle is Lucid dreams - imagine being in your own personal matrix :p (OK I overstate it's rare you get *that* much control but it does happen).

Bull

[Culture20]

My family was not well to do when I was in elementary school, and we had an ancient BW TV. I dream in technocolor. Heck, the _world_ is in color.

Actually, the world was B&W back then

[Erandir]

CALVIN: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?

CALVIN'S DAD: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.

CALVIN: Really?

CALVIN'S DAD: Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.

CALVIN: That's really weird.

CALVIN'S DAD: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.

CALVIN: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?

CALVIN'S DAD: Not necessarily, a lot of great artists were insane.

CALVIN: But ... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?

CALVIN'S DAD: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else in the '30s.

CALVIN: So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?

CALVIN'S DAD: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

(CUT TO: EXT. Tree limb, Calvin talking with Hobbes)

CALVIN: The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.

HOBBES: Whenever it seems that way, I take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner.

color itself was invented in the 50s

[SuperElectric]

I remember reading some fiction book where the protagonist's dad had convinced his young son that color itself was invented sometime in the 1950's, which is why old movies were in black and white. This would certainly jibe with that theory :D. Dads, try it today!

Re:color itself was invented in the 50s

[Anonymous Coward]

Calvin & Hobbes, actually.

NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit).

[BLAG-blast]

So, do people in the UK dream in PAL and people in the USA dream in NTSC? I'm glad I grew up in the UK, dream in NTSC just seems like the stuff nightmares are made of!

I definitely remember being a child in the '80s and dreaming in 8-bit graphics, too much playing Elite and Exile I think.

Dream on....

Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit).

[John Hasler]

> So, do people in the UK dream in PAL and people in the USA dream in NTSC? I'm glad I
> grew up in the UK, dream in NTSC just seems like the stuff nightmares are made of!

It could be worse. You could be French and dream in SECAM.

Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit).

[GayBliss]

8-bit graphics!  You were spoiled!

My first computers were 1-bit graphics (B&W), and my favorite computer game was NetHack (www.nethack.org) (although I think it was just called Hack back then).  My dreams look something like this:

|----------|
|  @   !   |
|          >
|----------|

That's me in the kitchen with my father.

Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit).

[BLAG-blast]

MMmmmm, nethack... I would mod you up if I hadn't already reply to this article.

Ok, technically it was 4bit graphics, but since I don't count flashing as a color, it only had 8 colo(u)rs.

Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit).

[filedil]

It's interesting that your father is represented as a potion. Some hidden meaning perhaps?

Dubious

[NoNeeeed]

Remembering back to my psych classes, colour and B&W dreaming tend to happen at different parts of the sleep cycle. Colour is more common in REM, while dreams during NREM sleep are more likely to be in B&W.

Since sleep patterns change as we age, it seems probable that this has far more to do with the age of the study participants. Since people were asked to record their dreams in the morning, they will tend to remember those dreams from their most recent sleep cycles.

A better approach would be to conduct a proper sleep study, in which people of different ages are woken at different parts of their sleep cycle (as detected by EEG) and asked about their dreams and whether they were in colour. Anything else is an extrapolation too far and subject to too many other factors.

NTSC

[Anonymous Coward]

Do Americans dream Never The Same Colour?

Age?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is drivel; and I speak as someone in their mid-60s. I'll bet not one of the authors is over 25.

I doubt it too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in my 20s and I dream in black and white. Sometimes in color, but mostly in black and white.

I dream...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in sepia :-D

Pseudo-science

[KasperMeerts]

I'm pretty sure dreams don't come from the visual cortex but are conceived in the perception itself.
What I mean is, things don't have color in my dreams. They are not black-white, they are not dark, there is just no color information.
They only do when it's important. I will dream of green grass but when I dream of a book, it's just a book, not a black, green, UV, red or transparent book. No color information because it doesn't matter.

In short: I call bullshit on this.

Re:Pseudo-science

[PhoenixFlare]

Maybe yours don't :)

I for one have had countless instances of color for "non-important" things in my dreams - green grass, brown dirt, blue water, cars, food, etc. Talk to anyone that practices lucid dreaming especially, and they can no doubt give you many examples.

Re:Pseudo-science

[bornwaysouth]

In essence, I'd agree, but you are a bit harsh. It would be better to call it a curious result. I too tend not to recall much about dreams, but what I do is not about the colour. Not if coloured, just it is irrelevant. Whereas falling is remembered. (I'm 60 BTW, and first saw TV aged 15 in N&W, The Untouchables.)

Two points are important. TV watching to me is passive. So are dreams. You participate vividly, but without control. Reading a book is far more active. So maybe TV (or film for that matter) is great for putting you into passive participation mode. In short, TV mode could be a mental mode for how you are to participate. Whereas the Playstation generation who do not read books as much simply lack that code. In that sense, the research may tell us something useful, which has nothing to do with age really at all.

The other point is recall. Can you note the transition from B&W to colour really, and can you have it as non-important, and just inject it later once awake. I do remember watching the Wizard of Oz when young, a film which starts in B&W and then uses colour. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the world turns to colour. At the time, it took me some time to realise that the film was in colour. It was just as real in B&W as in colour. To test the effect on a young generation would be tricky. You would have to get them used to B&W first. Then get them to press a button when films turn to colour. It may be quite a slow transition if it does not occur during a scene change.

Upshot is that this research is a cue to do some useful science. It is not much better than a curiosity.

Re:Pseudo-science

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true, i lucid dream quite frequently (also polyphasic sleep ftw)

Been doing it for a good couple years on and off.

Been attempting to control logical operations in those dreams so i can actually use it as a tool to research, rather than just imagine myself as Goku from Dragonball... yep, i like to relive my childhood in dreams. ;_;

Re:Pseudo-science

[Requiem18th]

You should have a talk with this guy, he affectionately mocks polyphasic sleepers and says polyphasic sleep is detrimental.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

I can dream in...

[kilodelta]

B&W, NTSC color, and HD. Imagine that and I'm only 43 years old.

I do however still dream of green or amber letters on a black screen.

News flash

[Deadstick]

many over-55s, all of whom were brought up with B&W sets

WTF? If you're ten years over 55, there's about an even-money chance that you were ten years old before you had any TV set.

rj

This explains a lot...

[fahrbot-bot]

Too many Vampire movies and LSD when I was young, now I dream of Ultraviolet in ultraviolet.

P.S. The UV (light) page has a nice false-color shot of the solar corona in UV.

Interesting....

[zunicron]

I dream in color about watching TV in black and white.

I haven't dreamed at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

since I dreamed I got a DMCA takedown notice.

Very dark dreams -- maybe bw, maybe color

[Legendre]

I don't know if it's just me, but my normal dreams almost happen in darkness; I almost wish someone would turn on the lights! For age reference, I'm 30. Because everything is so damn dark, I really can't tell if there are colors around or not. It's like walking outside at night, with no lights, and no moon. Maybe things have colors, but I just can't see nothing! Even if I'm dreaming of a sunny day on the beach, it's like someone turned the brightness/contrast so that everything is just so dark! Now, I tried lucid dreaming techniques a while back -- BAM!!!! FULL beautiful colors, very vivid, just like during waking hours!! Lucid dreaming is hard though, takes a lot of practice. So now I'm back to the dreams of darkness.

Black and white?

[Anonymous Coward]

My dreams are always in green and white. I don't know why. Also, I sometimes moderate in my sleep.

I have my doubts.

[jonadab]

I think someone should try an independent verification study on this one and see if maybe they missed something out of their experimental procedure or controls or whatnot.

I suppose old geezers who grew up in the days of radio (you know, the same people who still talk about "listening" to the television because "listen" is the verb they grew up with for tuning into broadcasts) dream in audio only? *That* could be interesting...

We didn't get a color television until I was in high school, but I don't recall ever dreaming in black and white. I do recall dreaming in 3D and, in some cases, in the abstract (with no visual imagery at all). This is, of course, purely anecdotal. But I have my doubts about the headline.

Re:I have my doubts.

[Walt Dismal]

We old geezers who listened to radio before they invented stereo now dream only in monaural. But worse, because I grew up when they only had two-dimensional television, now I only dream in 2D instead of 3D like everyone else. And I went to a baseball park and fainted from the intensity of the experience.

Re:I have my doubts.

[John Hasler]

> I suppose old geezers who grew up in the days of radio (you know, the same people who
> still talk about "listening" to the television because "listen" is the verb they grew up
> with for tuning into broadcasts)

No, I don't know. I'm over 60 and I've never heard anyone talk about "listening" to the television: not even my father, who's nearly 100.

Neither B&W nor color

[GayBliss]

This story is implying that dreams are like movies that we sit back and watch.
Unless they are specifically about color, dreams are just thoughts that are neither B&W nor color.

It's equivalent to remembering a past experience. Even though we can remember exactly how an event played out, color is not part of it unless it has some significance in the memory.

Re:Neither B&W nor color

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I always wonder about people who dream in "black and white" or "color". Do they watch movies or TV in their dreams?

If so, I think they need to quit watching so many damn movies/TV in real life.

More

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/08.06/BrainsColorProc.html

They should do a follow-up study where the researchers actually monitor brain activity in addition to reporting experiential observations from the subjects.

makes you wonder

[theeddie55]

1. before television, did people mostly dream in color, dream in black and white or just not dream?
2. young children who only watch cartoons, what sort of dreams do they have?

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess before TV people had newsreel dreams and before that silent film dreams with those cards with words & pian-ie.

Seeing in your dreams?

[Cream of Tomato Soup]

Hmmmm. What do you guys mean by dreaming in color or black and white? My dreams seem to lack any sort of projected visual images which I can focus on. They are rather cognitive or imaginary-looking (like closing your eyes while awake and imagining a dinosaur chasing after you).

Re:Seeing in your dreams?

[Raenex]

My dreams seem to lack any sort of projected visual images which I can focus on.

It could be that you dream in full color and detail but your memory doesn't capture it. Dreams are slippery -- the details fade fast.

They are rather cognitive or imaginary-looking (like closing your eyes while awake and imagining a dinosaur chasing after you).

Try recollecting something from yesterday -- is it much different?

Monochromatic dreams

[spineboy]

I've had silent dreams, monochromatic dreams where everything was various shades of blue, or red, etc.
Sure - black and white as well as full hyper color, and mixed as well.
I've had the same dream for 7 nights in a row when I was sick with the flu. Each day the evil four foot witch with burnt skin, wooden claws, and broken gravel teeth chased me thru my house and got and got a few feet closer to catching me.
I've also woken myself out of dreams a few times when a spider jumped on my face in the dream, and my hand hit my face, thereby awakening me.

I have some really, really weird dreams, where I ride my bike and talk to large giant insects under puddles of water, through a clacking language. I don't tell people about these, 'cause I think they might think I'm doing drugs, which I don't do - just have a vivid, vivid imagination.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[sortius_nod]

Well, there has been some studies that show the body releases DMT when having vivid dreams. So your body may be getting you high without knowing.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

Then you might want to try lucid dreaming... it can be quite fun. The hard part is to realize that you are dreaming. The best way that I have found to do this is to make spot checks when you are awake, asking yourself if what is happening is possible. If you get in the habit of doing this when you are awake you should start eventually making reality checks in your dreams, or some out there dream logic will start to make you realize that in the waking world that is impossible. The two triggers that have worked the most often for me are movie style scene changes where you are one place and then suddenly another, or of course flying. Other things that can signify a dream are text scrambling itself (Text generally is not stable in dreams... probably reading skills are too complex to maintain in a dream) or light levels not changing when they should (I.E. turning a light on or off does not affect the brightness. I had a friend that would often flick lights on and off just to check if he was dreaming.) After learning to recognize whether you are dreaming or not, the next difficulty is in getting yourself to keep dreaming while you are conscious of it. The shock of realizing you are dreaming often causes you to wake up enough to stop dreaming, or to change the dream such that you no longer are lucid. I don't personally know of any tricks to help here... it seems to be just more getting comfortable with lucid dreaming. Once you have this down, you can eventually learn to control almost any aspect of your dream: calling in people you want to interact with, putting yourself in any situation you want to imagine, etc. It takes time to get full control of your dream world, but it can be done bit by bit. And if you are the imaginative type, it can be quite rewarding.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[vux984]

It takes time to get full control of your dream world, but it can be done bit by bit. And if you are the imaginative type, it can be quite rewarding.

You can even play WoW without a monthly fee... playing both sides on one server, without gold farmer spam.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[jtgd]

What I have found that works is holding my dream hand up in front of my face and looking at it. At that point the dream becomes lucid. The trick of course is remembering to do it. I just remembered, but your idea of doing it habitually in the waking state might just work. Lucid dreams can be really amazing when you consciously take control. Quite fun.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Jorophose]

Mm, and I thought I was alone too. I sometimes get those dreams.

But more often than that, even, I get dreams that... seem to take over reality. So realistic that they sometimes take precedence over history. I don't remember what I did last week at lunchtime. Did I drive an ATV past a canteen? Proposed to a lover? Did I talk to that person or not?

It's very interesting when you get dreams like that, especially when they're quite persistant.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really believe it is possible to control dreams consciously. But I've had occasions where I accidentaly realize I'm dreaming. Usually, this has no other effect besides me undergoing some action to forcefully wake up, action that itself works just like the rest of the dream, with no real conscious control.

But I do remember having that sort of lucid dreaming once... The trigger was a book cover with a typo in the title, which suddenly dissapeared while I was reading it. I don't remember exactly the text, but I remember thinking that was a common misspeling and when it disappeared suddenly realizing that was a dream. That time I gained control, walking about the dream world consciously. But that didn't last long... the feeling of "realism" in the dream world caused a feeling of being trapped, and that eventually triggered a wake up, I guess.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Miseph]

Thanks for that, now go back to watching Waking Life and quit with the trippy. ;)

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[inhuman_4]

When I was a kid I had dreams like that fairly often. I would not be able to seperate the dream memories from real ones.

These were just dreams about what I do every day which made things awkward. I would remember moving something yesterday, but when I looked it had not moved at all.

One time I dreamed I had talked about something with my mother while my father was in the room. But neither of them remembered any of it. That was really awkward because I remembered it in such detail.

Fortunately I don't get dreams like that anymore. I wondered for a long time if mabey I was just crazy.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[cjb658]

Well, there has been some studies that show the body releases DMT when having vivid dreams. So your body may be getting you high without knowing.

So is the release of DMT the cause or the effect?

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[cjb658]

Just curious, how much time during your sleep do you spend dreaming?

I don't usually remember dreams. When I do, it's usually because I wake up early and go back to sleep.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't really believe it is possible to control dreams consciously."

It is fairly simple to do with practice. You are incorrect.

I do this regularly.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[rgo]

Sometimes I dream that I'm awake lying on my bed but I can't move and I start to panic (it's awful). That thing has happened so many times that in those dreams I realized the fact that I'm sleeping, but I still can't move or wake up, so I just try to stay calm until I stop dreaming.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[AmberBlackCat]

What kind of monitor do you have?

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

I once Had this dream!
But mine wasn't a witch, but a wooden artists mannequin!

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

> The shock of realizing you are dreaming often causes you to wake up enough to stop dreaming, or to change the dream such that you no longer are lucid. I don't personally know of any tricks to help here...

Spin your body in your lucid dream. This seems to force your mind to generate the imagery to fill your field of view, keeping you in the dream. This isn't my own invention; I read it from a book written by a lucid dream researcher.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[bar-agent]

Sometimes I dream that I'm awake lying on my bed but I can't move and I start to panic (it's awful).

This is pretty common, it's called sleep paralysis. The reason is because you actually are a little awake and you actually can't actually move. Your may not be fully asleep but your mind has gone into dreaming mode and isn't really controlling your body anymore. You try to move and you'd be moving your dreaming self, not your physical self. Usually it makes people panicky, too.

I don't know if that has ever happened to me, but if it did, I don't remember or it didn't bother me too much.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[bar-agent]

I'm not sure how I know I'm dreaming. Usually it is because there is some real-world leakage, like I hear traffic or something in the background, or it's a fantastical situation, like I'm stranded on an alien planet. But once I realize I'm dreaming, I no longer have any issues with nightmares. I just imagine up a BFG or something and solve my nightmare that way.

It's quite fun!

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut back on the Robitussin DM. Dextromethorphan is a cough suppressant, but it's also a hallucinogen.

You can also hallucinate if you have a high enough fever.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[NovaHorizon]

Now.. What if your dream-self.. just downright says "This is all a dream anyway" in dialog response to someone else? Add that with the fact that I still didn't seem to have more control over the dream at that point than I feel I have over any other dream I've had in my life..

Is that normal?

And yes, my dream self did begin doing the abnormal shortly after saying it, and I don't recall any thought of "This reality doesn't add up" at any point prior to the occurrence. (abnormal meaning he began jumping until finally figuring out flight and leaving.)

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

Ahh... hypnopompic (waking up) paralysis. When you are asleep, your mind puts out a chemical that paralyzes your muscles so you don't injure yourself because of your dream movements. The paralysis comes about when you basically wake up in the wrong order. You are kinda dreaming, kinda awake and your muscles are still paralyzed. There's many stories in folklore about a witch sitting on your chest and such that go along with the phenomenon.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

Yeah... the light switch thing is from waking life. To make it clear, I don't believe that the whole lucid dreaming thing will open up great insights into reality, just that it's kinda fun. Really, what I get out of it is the same thing as getting immersed into a great story or video game. Basically, entertainment and it costs nothing. Attempting lucid dreaming doesn't even cost time, as the effort is generally spent while falling asleep and maybe those few sweet moments after you hit the snooze button in the morning.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

The real-life time is generally quite quick. Basically, dreams comes out pre-formed, and then your mind translates the mostly random data on the fly to make some sort of story behind them. IIRC, the stage of REM where dreams actually occur is basically seconds long, which can translate into hours of dream time.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

That's the start of lucid dreaming. If you think it may be interesting, it basically takes a little bit of thought during your waking time to train your mind to look for the cues. Eventually you may get a little better at it... it's not that different from any other type of creative thought.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done it once that I can remember. I was not trying to do it. It feels very different than a normal dream. I think being passive is part of what I associate with dreaming, so in that sense it didn't feel like a dream. I really wish I could make it happen more often. /atraintocry (AC because of mod points)

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Mistshadow2k4]

I've had the same dream for 7 nights in a row when I was sick with the flu. Each day the evil four foot witch with burnt skin, wooden claws, and broken gravel teeth chased me thru my house and got and got a few feet closer to catching me.

I have some really, really weird dreams, where I ride my bike and talk to large giant insects under puddles of water, through a clacking language. I don't tell people about these, 'cause I think they might think I'm doing drugs, which I don't do - just have a vivid, vivid imagination.

Vivid imagination? Definitely. You should write this stuff down. The first one sounds like a part of a horror novel for teens, the second part of a sci-fi story.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[olivervaga]

I have the exact same thing, I sometimes can't tell if something has happened in reality or if I'd just dreamed it. From time to time, when I happen to have a bad dream, it's quite a relief to find out during the next day that the event I thought to be real isn't.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[NovaHorizon]

I wasn't looking for cues though.. I usually consider my dreams to be like movies, and just watch. For a little while I tried to keep the thought of reality checks in mind before going to sleep.. but that only lasted about 3 days before I completely forgot and went on to something else. Then a couple months later, that happened. No desire to attempt a lucid dream or anything. My dream self just new for a fact that it was a dream, and actually appeared to be getting bored with the current setting.

I did however have that shock of realization hit shortly after flight started though, and woke up.

No doubt I'll be attempting a lucid dream tonight now that the thought is back in my head.. lol

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Diag]

I have something similar happen to me from time to time. But for me, I am driving a car, and I need to brake, but no matter how hard I try to push down my foot on the pedal, the car won't slow down.

This has happened to me for so long that, now, when it does happen, I realise I am dreaming. Most of the time I freak out (either at the "Oh crap, I'm gonna crash" thought, or the "Oh wow, I'm dreaming" thought) and wake up. But a few times recently I have managed to stay asleep for a bit, although I've never been able to really "control" the dream once I realised what was happening.

Somewhat more on topic, I have no idea whether I dream in colour or monochrome. Since I've never noticed, I guess it is colour. I grew up in the days of colour TV (barely).

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[bronney]

I've done quite a few, next time, to stay in the dream, find an object in the dream and concentrate on it. It helps to calm yourself down and let you dream a bit more.

Every single time I get in the lucid mode, I jump off a building, of course that's after my lucid check -- strip naked and nobody looked at me, ok dream. And fly. Flying is the best thing. Flying into a tornado is just kick ass!

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[dontmakemethink]

The shock of realizing you are dreaming often causes you to wake up enough to stop dreaming, or to change the dream such that you no longer are lucid. I don't personally know of any tricks to help here... it seems to be just more getting comfortable with lucid dreaming.

It helps to not look (redirect your eyes) at anything specific. Your eyes are closed, so it doesn't make any difference to move your eyes anyway. All it does is interrupt your suspension of disbelief when the image does not move with eye movements. Soon you learn to move the image, not your eyes.

Speaking of weird dreams, I once had a doozy with a weird RL twist. Fortunately this was not graphic - my mom gave birth to a tupperware dish, which served the role of an egg, out of which hatched a chocolate toy lawnmower. My brother and I horsed around with it at a cottage my grandfather had sold 10 years prior. We flipped it over, and there was a 1-800 phone number that I remembered when I woke. I called it right away, and it was the poison control center, the first number in my local phone book at the time. I wrote a Primus-like song about it called The Dance Of The Chocolate Lawnmower.

For the record, it was full color, and I grew up with color TV. It skipped a fair bit, all the would-be gross parts, and only seemed to take maybe 15 minutes.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Schadrach]

Could be worse, my whole family (on my mother's side) has night terrors (think a nightmare, but without a recognizable "dream" to connect the sensations with, and you have trouble waking from it) coupled with somnambulism (sleep walking/talking) to varying degrees. Thankfully we generally get better as we get older (I've only woken up in the wrong room once in the past year). One of my cousins was the worst of us. You have no idea what someone walking around, eyes closed and unresponsive whilst having an apparent panic attack he can't be woken from is like.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[dontmakemethink]

It skipped a fair bit, all the would-be gross parts, and only seemed to take maybe 15 minutes

Hrm, perhaps I watched too many sit-coms...

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[cefek]

Yo, mate, try opening your window.

No, I really mean it. Sleeping with the window open (provided you don't leave near the railway or in a busy downtown) really solved those issues with many people I know.

My 0,02 Euro for your sleeping pleasure

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[monkphin]

I remember a few years ago I had a few nights of the same fever dream - I had a large number of arms, but they weren't arms, they were RJ45 cables that looked like my arms, that were all tangled up, stopping information getting through and every one was banging on my front door demanding I fixed their internet connection, but I couldn't because I couldn't untangle my arms to let the information flow through them.. I then woke up to find my limbs tangled in my sheets and blankets.. Same thing for about 4 days in a row.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a dream in Japanese that was subtitled in English.

I'm not kidding.

I had been watching a lot of anime that day, though. :)

  -AC

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[rgo]

Heeeyy!!! Thanks for explaining me this issue!
There's a Wikipedia article on the subject that was very informative for me: Sleep/Hypnopompic paralysis

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Reziac]

I've had those, but immediately assumed it was just "half" of REM sleep, so no panic.

However, if I try to physically fight the state, my heartrate skyrockets -- so I suspect nighttime heart attacks are often side effects of the state in folks with heart conditions. I've also had the unpleasantness of being in an awkward position so breathing is difficult -- one wonders about the implications of that!

Also, it won't end so long as I'm resisting -- best thing to do is relax and it'll go away in a few minutes.

Sometimes the state has started with my eyes open. If I close them, I can't reopen my eyes til it's over.

I've found that the state can be induced -- in my case, if my brain is following three different trains of thought at once, while on the edge of sleep. I've learned to recognise when it's about to slip over into sleep paralysis, and interrupt myself, since it's not exactly fun.

Something related that happened often when I was a kid, but almost never as an adult: a hyperawareness state, where I can feel each individual thread in the sheets, can feel/hear my blood moving, etc. This is NOT accompanied by paralysis, and I'm functionally awake, but I think it's probably a partial sleep state.

As to the nominal topic -- we had only B/W TV til I was 16. I dreamed in B/W until about 10 years after we got a colour TV, and I've always attributed that to the fact of growing up with B/W TV. However, when I had a B/W TV again for several years in the 1980s, I did not revert to dreaming in B/W, nor have I dreamed in monochrome since I began dreaming in colour.

The first dream I can remember, I was 5 years old, and it was in colour but wasn't a "real" dream -- more like being in the middle of multiple lightning flashes. I thought of it as a "nightmare" because being in bright colours made it so different, tho it wasn't actually scary.

The majority of memorable/fun dreams I have now are set in some variant of DOOM. Since I still think this is the only game worth playing, I have no complaint. :)

I'm a very light sleeper... one time I dreamed that a spider was building a web attached to my nose. Woke up and guess what, some idiot spider HAD built a web between the ceiling and my nose. WTF?!!

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[shawb]

Something related that happened often when I was a kid, but almost never as an adult: a hyperawareness state, where I can feel each individual thread in the sheets, can feel/hear my blood moving, etc. This is NOT accompanied by paralysis, and I'm functionally awake, but I think it's probably a partial sleep state.

I would guess that's the "filter" part of your brain falling asleep first... so all sensory data gets passed through to the main brain processes. Alternatively, it could be false positives on what's important; your senses may only seem hyper-aware as sensory data that you aren't used to getting flagged as important does get pushed into consciousness.

The majority of memorable/fun dreams I have now are set in some variant of DOOM. Since I still think this is the only game worth playing, I have no complaint. :)

...then there's the infamous Tetris dreams. I think video games in general translate very well into dreams. The graphics are more simple than real life, and therefore easier to process. And dreams are well known to replay problems that you are working on during the day, and what are games but a large problem solving excercise?

I'm a very light sleeper... one time I dreamed that a spider was building a web attached to my nose. Woke up and guess what, some idiot spider HAD built a web between the ceiling and my nose. WTF?!!

Simple. Real sensory data gets passed through to your brain, but it interprets it as dream data, so just incorporates it into the dream. The minute tickle of a spider may not be enough to rouse you, but would be enough to tell your brain that "hey, there's a spider on my nose!" and it therefore ends up in the dream.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Reziac]

Yeah, if you filter out all the foreground, that would make the background more obvious... I wasn't unaware of the foreground stuff, tho. It was a fun and interesting state, regardless.

I tend to be more aware of microshit than most folks, tho (maybe goes with being a supertaster, having a perfect ear, and being sensitive to more colours than normal -- so overall, a hyperaware nervous system) -- frex, I notice stuff like that if you get the light reflecting into your eyes just right, you can see your own retina (fundus, blood vessels, and all) as reflected off the back of the lens. And that you can readily see nuclear and other structures in the cellular debris that floats around in your eyes. (I've got one string of such debris that's been there since I was a kid... have watched it deteriorate over the years.) Being ridiculously aware of my sleeptime surroundings, to the chagrin of that spider, I suppose goes with the territory.

I've never had tetris dreams, tho I know people who do. My DOOM dreams come in two types: DOOM in Real Life, and "inside a level" -- always the same level, which is MONSTROUS HUGE and I've never "finished" it, tho I know my way around most of it by now. Funny how you have to learn the layout even when your own brain created it!

I always look like the Doomguy in my dreams, and I never get hit :)

Another peculiar sleep state: sometimes I can tell that one chunk of my brain has more or less "gone to sleep" even tho I'm up and around and interacting with people, etc. If it happens, it'll always be around 8pm, which would be one "sleep unit" prior to my normal first sleep cycle (a little after 10pm).

Conversely, if I get woke up, frex by an emergency phone call in the middle of the night, I'll proceed to give perfectly good advice despite that I can tell part of my brain isn't online yet. It's as if only the parts that need to be awake can be arsed to do so.

Sleep is a complex state, for sure, and it's not nearly so clearcut as "awake" or "asleep". That dreams are influenced by TV... well, most kids have a show they feel like they want to live inside of. For my generation, that usually meant Star Trek -- as escapist as you could get at the time. Is it any wonder that B/W viewing becomes a B/W dream?

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[mcgrew]

There's many stories in folklore about a witch sitting on your chest

That's no witch, that's my ex-wife!

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way I do spot checks is by checking digital clocks, or blocks of text. When you're awake, it's easy to read text. But, when you're sleeping it becomes very hard, like the poster above commented about his text dream.

One of the hook-in techniques I've picked up is looking at your hands, too see if you're thumbprints are blurry.

Re:Monochromatic dreams

[MBGMorden]

Sadly, I HAVE played WoW in a dream before. Instead of an avatar it was if I myself was actually in the game world running around but I still had to control my actions through actionbar buttons that were just floating in the air in front of me (almost as if my field of vision were the "screen").

And for some reason I was doing a Sunken Temple run during the dream. Weird since I've only did that dungeon maybe twice at most and that was years earlier :S.

My lucid dreams often end up badly though. Realizing I'm dreaming isn't exactly a problem. The bad part is that rather than making my own manifestations, my mind goes into a plethora of "What If" scenarios. "Dang it I'm dreaming. This stuff isn't real. I bet it'd be scary though if zombies started breaking into . . . OH SHIT!!!!".

TV affecting dreams may explain other things

[RyoShin]

Like why I had a dream last night where Dr. Gregory House chided me for not being able to beat an Iron Chef in only 24 hours.

WHAT IF, the question that has never asked!!!!

[holywarrior21c]

what would i dream if I DON'T watch TV anymore? So no more of my typical dreams: i just like falling off the cliff towards endless pit, chased by someone in a series of endless dark rooms, things happening around me and my friends that is completely unrelated to reality....it was never about what kind of media i use. it was rather elements taken from my real reality turned into cheesy and dopey phsyco-melo-drama interrupted by my roommate, alarm, boring professor, etc.

suddenly waking from a dream

[Anonymous Coward]

every now and then I will realize I am dreaming and this will usually wake me up.. (a great way of breaking out of a semi nightmare).. one time I realized there was music in my dream but no stereo near by, I realized I was dreaming and woke.. by waking up I managed to hold the memory and feeling of the dream and I was pretty stoked my dreams included music.. I suppose my point is that under most normal waking conditions I just don't retain many vivid memories of my dreams .. feelings and emotions can come back during the day but rarely tangible memories..

Possible to dream in color or b/w?

[Memroid]

Is it really possible for a dream to be in color or b/w? I mean we are just going through various ideas in our brain. The ideas can have colors associated with them, but how does our brain reproduce the color when provoking the thought? I find it moderately difficult to even close my eyes and think of concepts in color. I can do it more easily with my eyes open, and think of colors relative to the colors that I see in front of me and a current time. Perhaps colors are stored in our brain relative to one another, therefore accessing a thought in in b/w or in color would simply be the same - it would be a range of relative values.

Re:Possible to dream in color or b/w?

[Memroid]

typo: "in front of me and a current time" should read "in front of me at a current time"

Re:Possible to dream in color or b/w?

[Zorque]

I'm sure it is possible, it just depends on the perception of the dreamer. They're not actually seeing anything, but their brain thinks it does for a short time, and can still interpret that as being in color or monochrome.

Dream in monochrome monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a child we had a computer with a green and black monochrome monitor. Once when I was sick I had a nightmare where which consisted entirely green outlines on a black backdrop.

We get a much of our visual input from movies &

[FreeUser]

I don't believe I've ever dreamt in black and white, so I cannot comment from personal experience. However, I think we all would be surprised at how much of our visual input, in particular that which stimulates the imagination, comes from movies and television. It's not inconceivable that a generation or two, brought up on black and white movies and television, might find years of that sensory input have had a significant influence on their dreaming patterns.

Re:We get a much of our visual input from movies &

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dream in Color or B&W. Once, I've dreamed in cartoon - I attribute it to a bad meal. No, I don't use drugs and I've not ever done drugs. WHen I heard of a girlfriend of mine regularly dreamed in cartoon, I thought she was completely out of her skull. Then, 10 - 15 years later I have my dream in cartoon and while I still find it *very* odd to dream that way I no longer simply think of people who dream that way as loons.

Re:We get a much of our visual input from movies &

[FreeUser]

That's a very interesting way to dream. Did your girlfriend watch lots of cartoons as a child, or read a lot of comic books?

Pre-Motion Picture?

[PPCAvenger]

If those who grew up with color TV dream in color and those who grew up with black and white TV dream in black and white; does that means those who grew up reading books dream in illustration and text?

So how did they dream before TV?

[jep77]

I called my grandfather up to ask him about his dreams. He said he mostly dreams in sepia tones.

my own pointless, personal anecdotal evidence

[song-of-the-pogo]

i'm well under 55, but i grew up watching b&w television until i was in my teens (we couldn't afford one of those fancy-pants color tvs). not only did i dream in color as a child (as i still do now), but i tended to recall the b&w shows i'd seen in color.

Re:Yo! Yo! GRAYSCALE

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you get when you add red and blue and green? I'll give you a hint:

  0xFF0000
+0x00FF00
+0x0000FF
  --------
  0xFFFFFF

"B&W" TV was originally a lot like YUV, only without the UV. The Y, the luminosity, contains values for varying shades of gray, with black (not really) on one end and white (not really) on the other. Grayscale is what is is called today. No dithering was taking place, if that's what you supposed. These were true shades of gray. Certainly not "monochromatic", which you may remember from the green screen days, or if you were hip and with it, amber screen days. One color, get it. I agree with the OP. Kidz are stoopid(er) to-day.

Well, TV is a dream

[istartedi]

In a sense, TV is a dream--it's not real. Maybe the brain has a center for "not real" stuff. We had BW when I was a real small kid. I dream in color though. I think we got rid of the BW when I was no older than 5. It was a Philco, and I have fond memories of refusing to go to bed until the little white dot had completely disappeared. We kept it as a backup set, and even carted it off to our new house in the 80s. Long after it had been relegated to gathering dust in the basement, I pulled it out and experimented with it as a monitor for my C64, just to see the odd combination of a vacuum tube set hooked up to a digital computer. By then, some of the components must have gone out of value. The screen was distorted in one corner. Not gaussed, mind you--distorted. It was like, everything gradually became smaller in one corner. It was still watchable after all those years, and AFAIK would still be watchable today. Digital will kill it next year of course. My parents eventually gave it away or tossed it out (I don't remember which) probably around 1990.

It's dreams all the way down...

[seanadams.com]

But you have to admit it's an intriguing suggestion. I have for a long time believed that film, TV, and literature serve a similar purpose for society as a whole as dreams to for the individual, so it makes perfect sense to me that one should reflect the other. Our own dreams are a mechanism for us to sort out our experiences of the prior day, to test hypothetical scenarios, and to act out our wishes and impulses that we might not be able to respond to because of law or social mores.

The media clearly serves some of these functions for the "collective conscious" as well. It entertains and informs us, and just like our own dreams it is rich in symbolism, subtle messages, and parallel plots. It is far less limited than the "real world" in what it can express, such as plots which may explore illegal or immoral acts, and special effects or animation which allow these stories defy the limits of the physics. Perhaps just as video and literature collectively is the product of many different minds coming up with a rich interconnected web of ideas, so do our own dreams serve as a mechanism for different corners of our conscious to share their information and knit it together.

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[devnul73]

I also read in color. To me, most words have a "temperature", used for lack of a better way to describe it. Interestingly, "hot" words are blue and the opposite leans towards red. Never really affected my dreaming though. I'm in full color and can remember at least one a night. Now, as for the content, I usually wake up thinking WTF was that all about.

I think

[stimpy]

that as you grow older, the color leaches out of your dreams along with hope. Oh, wait, that's just me.

Re:I think

[ignavus]

I misread this as

the color leaches out of your dreams along with rope

I certainly hope it is just you.

Do most people remember dreams?

[Anonymous Coward]

Serious question. How often do most people remember dreams, and is it important?

I have only remembered 4 dreams in my life. It was such an unexpected, unfamiliar experience each time that I actually wrote them all down. They've happened over the last 15 years.

It really scares me a bit that the premise of City of Lost Children was a man who was unable to dream. He was supposed to have aged prematurely because of that. Does a similar fate await me?

What about people before TV?

[ghostbar38]

Did they dreamed with draws? or maybe if they liked DaVinci then dreamed with the Monalisa?...

early boomer here

[zogger]

And also we were the first family in the whole neighborhood to even have a TV. I get black and white dreams mostly (well over 95%, something like that), rarely once in a great while in color (that I remember anyway), with the caveat I am red/green deficient, but see colors well enough to identify the basic roygbiv deal if they are truly vibrant enough. So, that's my anecdotal to add to the study. Not sure on total viewing time of tv back then, coupla hours a night I guess (not a whole lot of viewing choices back then, made it easier to not watch much once the novelty of it wore off)(and bring back cool radio, that was nice), a little more on the weekends, but I do know I spent more time reading during childhood evening hours than watching TV, and was outside a whole lot during the day, as much as possible, which continues to this day, doing outside work mostly. So, to really round it off, call it back in childhood being exposed to a half black and white "world" while awake, half color, something like that (books=b/w as well obviously, so school and personal reading pleasure was a lot less colorful). And this is interesting, I never bothered to ask other boomers what color they dreamt in, except right now, I will ask my GF, she is similar age...she reports about half and half, color and b/w dreaming, and she has perfectly fine sense of color, like most women. So something causes the b/w dreaming, maybe the TV and alpha brainwaves caused that, especially in children when their minds are being formed so fast.

Re:early boomer here

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that weird (and note that I grew up without watching much TV and it was in colour by that time),
because my (rarely remembered, if they are visual at all) dreams never have colour.
I don't mean they are black-and-white, that would mean there is a "lack" of colour.
I mean that colour is an attribute that just never comes up in my dreams.

Save/reload?

[kerubi]

In my dreams, I can restart from an earlier time of the dream if I don't like what happened. And that new time, I know what is going to happen, so I can adjust. Not kidding.

I wonder what have I been doing in my childhood :D

(All in color, too).

no color at all

[FreeBSD evangelist]

My mother claimed she always dreamed in color. I wasn't sure what that meant. My dreams usually have no color at all. I don't mean B&W, just concepts and shapes. If the dream needs color in context ("What color is the stoplight") then color is there, but otherwise not.

So what did people dream in BEFORE TV?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm? Sepia?

All Your Colorless Green Ideas

[Mesa MIke]

...Sleep Furiously!

What About...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, What about dreams in ASCII? I know I've had a few of those.

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[yehooti3]

They could probably go back further and find similar results after Technicolor came out. My youth was in the 40's and all we had was black and white movies, except for a few Disney releases which became classics. I don't remember which one of those it was, but one did cause me to dream in color and I remember that it was my first dream in color. Since then though, I don't recall any dreams that stand out as being in color or B/W. That dream is remembered simply because it was in color.

Only Significant Items Matter

[excelblue]

It's interesting that all my dreams are in color, even though they always manifest in a fairly desaturated form. This is probably because I grew up in a fairly color-deprived environment - everything I used in my childhood were cheap and colorless, and in the first house I lived in, everything, including the carpet, were in neutrals, with almost no decoration. As a typical slashdotter, I stayed indoors most of the time. It got to the point that whenever I see something very colorful, I get slightly annoyed. Then, I have some other dreams where instead of seeing stuff like a person usually does, there's this hard-to-describe 2D edgeless vision, but it doesn't feel like I'm seeing from my eyes. It may be a 2D platformer game (viewed in third person) or some code. That might have something to do with how abstractly I imagine things. I guess it all has to do with how you view the world. I tend to ignore colors in real life, so they have little importance in my dreams. When I think about programming (at a high level) or gaming, I don't think about the platform at all, so that may lead to the abstract 2D dreams.

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[budgenator]

I have noticed that people who grown up on color only television don't appreciate fine art monochrome photography either

Not by a long shot

[AlpineR]

Considering the type of display that I saw the most growing up, I should dream at 320 by 200 pixel resolution with 32 colors. Thanks, Amiga.

In twenty years, when 4:3 standard definition televisions exist only in museums and the homes of the elderly, that video format will be associated with 1960-2005 just as strongly as black and white television is associated with the decades before. But whether 2005+ is the HDTV era or the post-television era remains to be seen.

Re:Not by a long shot

[BrokenHalo]

that video format will be associated with 1960-2005 just as strongly as black and white television is associated with the decades before.

Back where I come from (the Channel Islands), we didn't get colour TV until the early 1970s.

Re:Not by a long shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Back where I come from, we couldn't afford to rent a colour TV until 1979.

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[bussdriver]

Most of my dreams are not visual. Did I need to watch more TV as a child?

Grampian TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a slightly odd claim. Dundee didn't get TV until the early 1960s.

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/itw/Grampian/history.html

The over 55s must have been dreaming about TV.

I smell overheated tubes.

[Anonymous Coward]

'and if you had bothered to RTFA, you'd see that even the subjects who watched B&W television growing up dreamt in color 75% of the time. but it's not all that surprising that individuals will dream in the palette of the dominant cultural media in their childhood."

OK and so some of you dream in radio then.

Re:I smell overheated tubes.

[lysergic.acid]

that's a sloppy conflation of distinct concepts and ideas.

a palette is just the collection/range of colors exhibited by a visual work. if you watch B&W TV you will have strong emotionally loaded memories of visual scenes rendered in a B&W (Grayscale) palette. and since dreams evoke strong past emotional experiences, vivid memories of TV programs may surface in dreams. if those programs were B&W, then naturally that part of your dream will appear in its original palette. absence of a particular color or range of colors does not deprive one of any of our senses. it's the same as dreaming that you were in a desert, which would have a desert palette of mostly shades of yellow, light brown, white, etc. naturally, you won't likely see any purple or green in a dream about the desert.

before TV was invented when radio was the dominant form of mass media, people may have developed strong emotional associations with radio programs. experiences from those radio programs are just as likely to be revisited by a person in a dream state. but when you listen to a radio play/drama, you still visualize the action in your head. so when such memories are revisited in dreams, the original experience is played back in one's head taking the form of the visual scenes that had played out in your mind. it would be the same with dreams about books you read. you don't just dream about written words--that's not what is stored in your memory.

but people who are blind from birth may not develop a minds eye the same way that seeing individuals do. so perhaps they don't visualize imagery in their heads. in that case, they may or may not dream in just audio. but i think that would be an interesting field of research that could shed light on how the human brain works/develops.

I pity kids growing up using the internet

[Locke2005]

Who wants to see lag, pauses, and "Loading -- Please Wait" messages in the middle of their dreams? Not to mention those damn "401 page not found" errors!

I grew up without a TV.

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up without a TV, and to this day have never owned one. My dreams have always been in colour. Exciting, eh?

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[jo7hs2]

"Ethical issues aside, can we raise some children in an environment largely deprived of green and see if that affects their dreams? It would probably be interesting to know, but I'm not sure how much it would further our understanding of the human mind." Um... How about any major city?

Sometimes I wish I didn't dream in color

[Paul Burney]

Sometimes I wish I didn't dream in color...

Last week I was working heavily on some graphic materials for my company. Last night, probably due to having a slight fever, I had this seemingly endless dream about color matching. In it I was matching from pantone books to our printer to the screen over and over again... PMS 541, no not right, let's try PMS 540...

Arrghhhh.....

I think I've compromised on Goth/Cyberpunk

[smchris]

I know I've had B&W dreams but I don't think actual gray scale has happened in many, many years. I would say many of them are dark and high contrast now which probably has less to do with the 50s and 60s and more to do with contemporary horror and sci fi.

But some of the most interesting dreams were late 60s: you know, day glow and flying. Where was that in the report?

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Monochrome does not mean Black and White!

Mono = One
Chrome = Color

Monochrome = 1 Color. i.e. You have a lit pixel or you don't. Think of those Orange or Green early computer screens. Those are Monochrome.

B&W TV is "Gray-Scale". NOT MONOCHROME FOR FUCKS SAKE!

Maybe humans received an upgrade...

[HouseOfMisterE]

...around 25 years ago and the new revision has more advanced dreaming circuits?

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[zippthorne]

They don't dream at all. In fact, they don't sleep. They just spend their nights reading People Magazine to so they can constantly mention famous people they've never heard of.

Its simple....

[ZosX]

The visions coalesce and become flesh

Re:Yo! Yo! GRAYSCALE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so thats why after watching a lot of "B&W" it is hard to remember that it was not full colour. PS: I am the purple troll.

Maybe...

[BrokenHalo]

Maybe it isn't BS, but I wish TFA indicated something a bit more rigorous. The researcher's sample, although satisfying rudimentary requirements for Central Limit, is very small, given the necessarily subjective nature of the responses one would expect in this sort of survey.

I'm willing to concede that I might just exposing my prejudices about psychology as a field, but I have always believed it to be a pseudoscience not far removed from mumbo-jumbo.

My belief (without anything more to back this up than anecdotal experience) is that my dreams are in colour, but that as I try to recall them later, the colours get mentally "stripped out" (perhaps a form of video compression?). My reasoning (such as it is) behind this is that I have a tendency to recall colours quite vividly if I am woken suddenly while in the middle of a dream.

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you on both points.

I am a little different though in that it's rare for me to have a really visual dream. They're usually more physical or emotional. Also there might be some weird situation or problem to solve, like I'm working something out in my head but it doesn't come to anything.

I think it's because when I'm awake, I'm usually not looking at what I'm supposed to be looking at, and working something out in my head (that usually comes to nothing).

of course the french...

[slew]

Of course the french dream in Something Entirely Contrary to the American Method...

Re:suddenly waking from a dream

[bestiarosa]

Last time it happened to me a couple of days ago. I dreamt I was heading to South Pole with Amundsen's expedition and there I found blueberries.
Sometimes, my superego exaggerates a little bit.

if this true, some day...

[slew]

Some day one of our grandkids will have a study reporting that most people born before 2020 dream in 2D where all people born after dream in 3D. This will no doubt attributed to invention of the holodeck and 3d television. People will wonder if most people born before 1400 dreamt in 3D and we've been warping our brains into 2D for the last six centuries of entertainment options consisting of paintings, printed words television and youtube...

Then their great-great-grandkids will discover that in the past people didn't dream with a start, middle, and an end like most entertainment and we've all been figments of someone's imagination who was just dreaming for the last few million years... Now won't that be something ;^)

Subliminal messaging...

[Terminus32]

Just goes to show how much effect TV has on our sub-conscious mind.

They forgot the obvious cause

[thogard]

Older generations didn't have 24x7 street lights keeping their night vision inactive. Long ago when sun sets, most of what was seen is black and white with very slight color hues and our brains are very good at colorizing what we see. In many modern urban areas today there is so much artificial light at night that the night vision never kicks in.

Re:They forgot the obvious cause

[fotoguzzi]

Mod this guy up. He may be wrong, but it's a great point!

Re:They forgot the obvious cause

[ceoyoyo]

Good idea. Older studies indicated that people who grew up before TV tended to dream in colour though.

Video Game Dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

I was among the first 'video game generation'; I played my first video games at 2-3 on the commodore 64 and have been gaming fairly heavily ever since. Often in my dreams (I'd say 30-40%), I'll dream about either playing my dream as a video game or drifting between 'video-game control' of my dream and 'real-life control'. Also, independently of my dream 'control mode', I'll often be able to set and restore 'save points' in my dream.

Grew up with B&W TV, always dreamed in colour

[Dogtanian]

Back where I come from (the Channel Islands), we didn't get colour TV until the early 1970s.

Ditto lots of the rest of the UK; although BBC2 started broadcasting in colour in 1967, BBC1 and ITV- didn't officially go colour until late 1969 (Wikipedia, salt etc.). And I'm guessing that even then it would have been quite some time before all transmitters had been upgraded (possibly less if the colour upgrades had been rolled into the 625-line upgrades required for BBC2's launch).

Besides which, colour TV was expensive when it first came out, so it probably would have taken some time before everyone had it. Matter of fact, they were still quite expensive (both relative to black and white and in absolute terms) during the early 1980s. My family only had black and white until I was seven, and colour TV was a big deal to me when I was at other peoples houses. (HD might look nice, but I bet that it's unlikely to have as much impact for a kid of similar age today as the in-your-face visceral difference of going from black and white to colour.)

You're probably thinking that this is ancient history, and while this is correct- it was over 25 years (or roughly a generation) ago, which is a long time, damn I am old!- it's not the 50+ years ago that the article implies. (Even newspapers were almost entirely monochromatic then). I'm still in my early thirties, not my late fifties(!) but I grew up with black and white television...

And yet, I can not recall *ever* (not ONCE) having dreamed in black and white. Was my exposure- even on rare occasions- to colour media (including being at the cinema) responsible? Who knows. But I do know that my television viewing was overwhelmingly black and white and that it didn't stop me dreaming in colour.

The Wizard of Oz

[Anonymous Coward]

I was really surprised and dispappointed that The Wizard of Oz came out in color in 1939 and here I was in the 1970's watching B&W TV...

Nintendo DS

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up with DS, in my dreams I touch myself.

(Anonymous Coward)

Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the laugh!

Re:What about people who don't grow up watching TV

[ceoyoyo]

Sure can.

Ethical issues not aside: no, we can't.

If you're raised in an environment without a particular colour it's quite likely that you'd lose most or all of your ability to see that colour, not just in your dreams.

B&W TV Generation

[Leota]

The over 55 crowd also contains a lot of people who grew up without television. Being one of those I can tell you for sure all my dreams are not in B&W or in color. The most interesting thing about this topic is that it demonstrates once again, some people's obsessive need to EXPLAIN EVERYTHING, even if it means putting forth fantasy as fact.

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Codger]

I didn't have color TV until I was 17 or so, and I watched a lot of TV. I don't think I've ever dreamed in black and white unless I was dreaming about Oreo cookies.

The only way I can see B/W tv watching influencing your dreams like that is if you spent most of your waking hours watching. Most of us actually spend most of our time in the full-color real world.

I like this theory

[Mad-Bassist]

I've always wondered about this since I can't remember having black and white dreams. Some were dark, but that doesn't count to me.

I've heard of dreams being B/W, but the question was planted when I saw an episode of Magnum P.I. - he made the remark, "Black and white⦠this is a dream."

So, this makes sense to me and offers an answer to a long-nagging question. Now I have something to think about as I drift off to sleep before another round of graveyard shift fun!

Cartoon dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a kid, I dreamed in cartoons. I remember thinking about it one day, that my dreams had the feel of a cartoon to them. Nowadays my dreams feel much more like real life. I think it's likely that what your dreams are like is formed by your overall dominant stimulus; I watched cartoons as a child, but now I pretty much shun TV for the real world and the computer as an adult.

About reality checks

[Anonymous Coward]

A note about reality checks : pinching oneself in the arm does not actually work. The last time I did this while dreaming, I woke up in another dream.

Then I wet my bed.

I dream much far as I know

[LucidBeast]

but then again we didn't have a TV.

Pre-TV?

[Jason Levine]

What about those born pre-TV? In the radio era, did they dream in audio only? Did those who were born pre-radio have their all of their dreams take place on a stage?

I only watched TV one hour a day

[deodiaus2]

I only watched TV one hour a day. We got a B&W TV when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I would watch Lunny Tunes for my allowed hour. I guess I only dreamed of why the hell Wyle E. Coyote could never get the Road Runner, or why the scenes always changed to favor the Road Runner. I guess I never had the insight to explain this to my therapist. Such a waste of $125/hr when the answer was there all along!

those born before tv

[chaos4u]

so im guessing those born before tv dreamed in am/fm

and before radio they dreamed in terms of book pages and back white drawings.

and those who were born before the printing press must have dreamed in scrolls and calligraphy

except those cave people who dreamed in terms of stone walls and colored stone .

oh hell wait could it be the stone agers dreamt in color before the baby boomers

i like to think that we dream about things that consume the mind rather than about images on tv as it had been fairly well documented through out history that mankind has always had vivid dreams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_dreams_throughout_history

  and they are not always something that is placed their by what we always view or see but rather something that occurs uniquely to each one of us
and is some how subtly tied into how our individual minds work.

rather than tying a study of 60 people to previous dream studies and saying that the tv made them dream in black and white.

also i find it interesting that this study does not even consider blind people while how ever not able to specifically dream imagery are able to dream with smell and taste something that tv has yet to provide us.

It affects me

[older coder]

I most certainly have dreamed in B&W. I grew up with B&W TV - didn't have a color one in our house till I was halfway through high school. I haven't paid attention to it in a few years but I have certainly dreamed in B&W for most of my adult life.

High res wide screen LCD

[spineboy]

that's what kind of monitor I have, but when I had the dreams, it was a 21" CRT.

I don't think it had anything to do with using a dumb terminal, but interesting thought.