Do We Dream in Black and White?
Actually, a few decades ago this was common knowledge. Everyone knew that most dreams were in black and white. Today, anybody who recalls their own dreams knows that dreams are fully capable of depicting every color. Why the discrepancy?
As it turns out, media has a powerful influence on dream content. This apparently extends all the way down to color-schemes. When considering media-on-dream influence, just think about how the "Bogey-man" has been filled-in over your own years by various TV and movie characters. Or, how when zombie movies are popular in the theaters there is a corresponding jump in zombie dreams. Similarly, after watching any horror film some of the thematic content follows you into your sleeping mind-movies. OK, but how does this explain color changes (or lack of) in dreams? As you may have guessed by now, because TV and cinema were once exclusively available in grey scale, the media influence on our dreams was delineated to a colorless milieu. Black and white was the pallet we watched our moving pictures in, and to get our pre-edited story fixes we had to view a world devoid of the full pallet spectrum. In turn, many of our memorable dreams in recent yesteryear were in fact color-bland. But if you delve back further, before human ingenuity devised the technology to deliver moving pictures, the claim that dreams are in black and white disappears. Just as today, everyone who remembers their dreams in detail knows that color is the norm. |