Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
So this means I am going to dream in 1080i?
Thanks to DRM, your dreams will all be downscaled from that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"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.
about how the youtube generation will dream...
Monstar L
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?
The truth, of course, is that before the 1950s, the world itself was in Black and White.
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.
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
that as you grow older, the color leaches out of your dreams along with hope. Oh, wait, that's just me.