B&W TV Generation Has Monochrome Dreams 343
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.'"
I have doubts about this (Score:5, 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.
What about people who don't grow up watching TV? (Score:4, 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.
makes me wonder... (Score:4, 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 :)
Re:I smell BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing B&W *as* color?! (Score:1, Interesting)
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:I smell BS (Score:2, Interesting)
I still pull Calvin & Hobbes in every day w/ dailystrips and I still love it.
Re:Color processing is wierd (Score:4, 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.
Re:What happened to the Indian chief? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Seeing B&W *as* color?! (Score:1, Interesting)
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:0_o (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.
Re:What happened to the Indian chief? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 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).
Seeing in your dreams? (Score:1, Interesting)
Monochromatic dreams (Score:5, 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.
Re:I smell BS (Score:5, 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
We get a much of our visual input from movies & (Score:3, 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.
Re:Yo! Yo! GRAYSCALE (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
early boomer here (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.
Re:I smell BS (Score:3, 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 [onesixthwarriors.com], while I am wearing the classic Woodland Camouflage BDU [thestrategyzone.com] . In that dream, there's definitely a serious green vs. tan thing going on.
Re:Monochromatic dreams (Score:1, Interesting)
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:I smell BS (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!
Re:Monochromatic dreams (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.
Re:I smell BS (Score:2, Interesting)
You mean like this film (2007)? [adelaidefilmfestival.org]
Incidentally, I highly recomment this - it's very funny.
Video Game Dreams (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Monochromatic dreams (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I smell BS (Score:3, Interesting)