According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, our language influences how we think and experience the world. That’s easy to imagine. Certainly our symbolism of mathematics influences how we calculate. Can you imagine doing moderately complex math with Roman numerals or without zero or negative numbers? But recently I was reminded that technological media also influences our perception of reality, and I have a Hackaday post to thank for it.
The post in question was about color TV. When I was a kid, most people had black and white TVs, although there were color sets. Even if you had a color set, many shows and movies were in black and white. Back then, many people still shot black and white film in their cameras, too, for many reasons. To make matters worse, I grew up in a small town, reading books from the local library that were ten or twenty years behind the times.
At some point, I read a statistic that said that most people dream in black and white. You may find this surprising, as I’ll bet you dream in color. It turns out, how people dream may have changed over the years and still and motion photography may be the reason.
The Post
In the post, I posed a question I’ve thought about many times: Did people dream in black and white before the advent of photography? It was kind of an off-hand remark to open the post, but many people reacted to it in the comments. They seemed surprised that I would ask that because, of course, everyone dreams in color.
I asked a few people I knew who also seemed very surprised that I would assume anyone ever dreams in color. But I was sure I had been told that sometime in the past. Time to hit the Internet and find out if that was incorrect or a false memory or something else. Turns out, it was indeed something else.
The Science
A scientific paper from 2008 held the answer. It turns out that science started asking questions like this in the early 1900s. Up through the 1940s, people overwhelmingly reported dreaming in black and white, at least most of the time. Color dreams were in the minority, although not unheard of.
Then something changed. Studies that occurred in the 1960s and later, show exactly the opposite. People almost always dream in color and rarely in black and white. Of course, that correlates well with the rise of color photos, movies, and television. What’s more is, while there is no scientific evidence gathering about earlier times, there is a suspicious lack of, for example, a Shakespeare quote about “The gray world of slumber…” or anything else that would hint that the writer was dreaming in black and white.
Interpretation
Judging from the paper, it seems clear that most people agree that color media played a role in this surprising finding. What they can’t agree on is why. It does seem unlikely that your dreams really change based on your media consumption. But it is possible that your recollection changes. This is particularly true since the way researchers acquired data changed over that time period, too. But even if the data doesn’t show that you dreamed in black and white, it did show that you remembered dreaming in black and white.
For that matter, it isn’t clear that anyone understands how you experience dreams visually, anyway. It isn’t like the back of your eyelids are little movie screens. You don’t actually see anything in a dream, you only remember seeing it.
The Question
If something as simple as black-and-white movies and TV can change how we perceive dreams, you have to wonder how much tech is changing our reality experience in other ways. Do we live differently because we have cell phones? Or the Internet? Will virtual reality alter our dream lives? It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.
“It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.”
Or with the increasingly massive amount of disinformation we’re continually exposed to, maybe reality will eventually become a subjective concept.
The disinformation has always been there, it has simply shifted from centralized to decentralized. I can’t believe people are so credulous about the “disinfo crisis” as if propaganda was somehow stopped for a few decades after the cold war and completely went away. Or never existed before social media.
If you think this just started, then you simply swallowed the preceding propaganda whole. It happens to most people after all. Most people are lying when they say that they didn’t buy it when Colin Powell held up the vial of baking soda and said Iraq had bioweapons and other WMD. Most people trusted the experts. Most people (including on the left) initially supported that totally unrelated and unjustified war, then retconned it afterwards. Info sources were just a bit more consolidated back then. And now those same people who pretend they never supported it are welcoming back the Cheneys with open arms. Ludicrous! Embarrassing!
Keyword is “increasing”. OP never mentioned that there was no disinformation in the past.
Your entire post is a response to things no one said here.
“Do we live differently because we have cell phones?” Yes, in so many obvious ways.
“Or the Internet?” Yes, in so many obvious ways.
“Will virtual reality alter our dream lives?” It already has, if you count dreaming that you are a character in a video game as “altering our dream lives.”
I don’t buy it. Do you only dream about TV shows? Do you only dream at the level of fidelity that is currently possible with photography and video? Did you dreams have VHS tape artifacts in the 1990s? Did people in Botswana with no TV or access to photographs in the early 1900s also dream in black and white, or color? Seems like some question priming is happening.
Especially in the early 20th century, people would not be spending much of their total time looking at black and white photographs or watching black and white movies. 99% of their waking life would be in full color, unless you think that cone cells evolved along with television. Why would they dream in black and white?
This sounds like a pet theory from some social “”scientist”” which he then went out and found some people to interview in a leading way to support it. One so-called study from 2008 which is merely a rehash of century-old interviews of uncertain providence isn’t convincing. My grandparents certainly never dreamed in grayscale.
Did people dream in color before the advent of photography, and then a suddenly a small portion of black and white media existing suddenly switched the way everyone dreamed? Or did they dream in lithograph? Did their dream-style track the popular styles in painting? It’s absurd, they mostly dreamed the way their eyes took in the most emotionally important moments of their lives and interactions with others, which was always in living color. They weren’t as plugged in to constant hours of media like we are today, either, so I’d expect that they wouldn’t often be having the kind of tetris-effect dreams we sometimes have.
“tetris-effect dreams”?
I find that I dream with enough fidelity to understand what it is I’m dreaming about. Sometimes that doesn’t require very much (for familiar things), while other times it requires a lot, and certainly can involve color.
Or at least, that’s how I tend to remember my dreams.
Gee, I’ve been too busy to notice. My bad = (
How can you dream only in monochrome when you have trichromatic vision?
How did people dream before photography?
Based on what you see and experience when you’re conscious…
Dreams are a lot like ai generated videos of you think about it
They don’t make a lot of sense when you think about it, because parts of your brain are communicating with parts that it doesn’t communicate while you’re awake
That’s why you can break laws of physics in dreams but not in reality
Ever fly around like Superman in a dream, felt real didn’t it? But you can’t actually fly In reality unless you own a pilots license and flying machine
Can’t read in your dreams, text will just look like a mess of unrecognizable letters and gibberish words
If you try you’ll wake up
Because you cause your conscious brain to activate in order to read it.
Same with other things that people lucid dreams about
If you think you’re dreaming but can read text and do conscious actions
Something may be out of place