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B&W TV Generation Has Monochrome Dreams

Posted by kdawson on from the horse-of-a-different-color dept.

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.'"

57 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. 0_o by Ieatsyou · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:0_o by DreadfulGrape · · Score: 5, Funny

      Only if there's enough plasma in your brain.

      --
      sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
    2. Re:0_o by santix · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    3. Re:0_o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe. I dream in text mode.

    4. Re:0_o by Ambiguous+Puzuma · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:0_o by Nadaka · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

  2. Nope... by Junta · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    1. Re:Nope... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      And watermarked.

    2. Re:Nope... by ypctx · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  3. I smell BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I smell BS by Kagura · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:I smell BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:I smell BS by schklerg · · Score: 2, Interesting
      and it was grainy for a while too.

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

      --
      Be Excellent To Each Other
    4. Re:I smell BS by lysergic.acid · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:I smell BS by moteyalpha · · Score: 2, Funny

      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

    6. Re:I smell BS by aclarke · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      www.clarke.ca
    7. Re:I smell BS by Bryan+Ischo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    8. Re:I smell BS by bonch · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:I smell BS by Dun+Malg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
    10. Re:I smell BS by DavidTC · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
    11. Re:I smell BS by noidentity · · Score: 2, Funny

      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).

    12. Re:I smell BS by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    13. Re:I smell BS by fastest+fascist · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  4. I have doubts about this by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I have doubts about this by reboot246 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:I have doubts about this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  5. Not Properly Controlled by rm999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  6. Color processing is wierd by pieterh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    My blog
    1. Re:Color processing is wierd by Hatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  7. What about people who don't grow up watching TV? by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. I shudder to think by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Funny

    about how the youtube generation will dream...

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:I shudder to think by MindlessAutomata · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  9. makes me wonder... by MonoSynth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 :)

  10. Re:And what about those of us who grew up... by Artifakt · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Who is John Cabal?
  11. pseudoscience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  12. What happened to the Indian chief? by mbstone · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:What happened to the Indian chief? by GayBliss · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?"

    2. Re:What happened to the Indian chief? by evilviper · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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).

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    3. Re:What happened to the Indian chief? by BitterOak · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  13. Actually, the world was B&W back then by Erandir · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  14. Dubious by NoNeeeed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Paul Leader
  15. I can dream in... by kilodelta · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

  16. Monochromatic dreams by spineboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    ..........FULL STOP.
    1. Re:Monochromatic dreams by shawb · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
    2. Re:Monochromatic dreams by vux984 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:Monochromatic dreams by inhuman_4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Monochromatic dreams by bar-agent · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
    5. Re:Monochromatic dreams by shawb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
  17. We get a much of our visual input from movies & by FreeUser · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
  18. So how did they dream before TV? by jep77 · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  19. Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit). by GayBliss · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  20. It's dreams all the way down... by seanadams.com · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  21. I think by stimpy · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  22. early boomer here by zogger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  23. Maybe humans received an upgrade... by HouseOfMisterE · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  24. Re:NTSC vs PAL (vs 8-bit). by filedil · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  25. B&W TV Generation by Leota · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.