Before Colour TV, People Dreamed in Black and White

I’m not very compelled by the argument (which Schwitzgebel also makes) that “it’s extremely unlikely that black and white TV actually changed the contents of people’s dreams.” I agree that reporting bias is a strong contender, and perhaps twice as plausible a hypothesis as the naïve one, but not much more.

Here’s an ad-hoc explanation of the mechanism by which black-and-white film/TV/newspapers/photos could actually change the process of dreaming. (Epistemic status of the following sentences: pure speculation, but seeming not-implausible.) Dreaming is a top-down reversed-perception process, like the way generative deep networks can hallucinate a plausible image that would be captioned with a certain sentence. Only, in dreaming, instead of generating sensory experiences to match “captions,” our brains generate them to match stories, with “story” being a relatively primitive type in the brain’s type system. In premodern times, most human experience with storytelling involved direct sensory experience of a storyteller speaking and gesturing, and imagined sensory experience of what the action might have looked like (based on memories of first-hand experiences, and perhaps paintings, stained-glass windows, etc). But in the US in the 1950s, most experiences of storytelling were mediated by mass media with grayscale visuals. A viewer might add imaginary touch, or perhaps even imaginary taste and smell, but thanks to our brains’ ability to process nighttime scenes (without color vision), it isn’t really necessary as a passive viewer to imagine a colorized version of a story’s visuals. So, when the brain was in REM and generating sensory experiences to match a story, it was quite biased towards generating the visual ones in grayscale.

Be aware whether you are making an assumtion that dreaming is repetition or recreation of sensory input. Apparently I am pretty aphantastic and some weird things I noted about dreams is that they don't neccearily have any concrete shape. That is in a dream there can be a car but the car doesn't have any shape. Trying to understand dreams as kind of hallucinated images is going to have very hard time with that. But one can try to understand this as the brain making a scene, rendering it to image and then using image recognition to "read in the scene". For same kind of experience it can make sense to skip the rendering and image recognition steps and just go directly from scene construction to scene experience. Thus you can have a "car" "there" without a shape (or even pinned down location) as it was never assigned one. Thus the existence of "unrasterised" experiences might be easily missable for people who think throught very concrete and vivid terms.

Thus I claim we don't know whether people see dreams.

The distinction can also enter into the waking world. I had some earworm songs stuck in my head but at some point when the stuckness was really deep I started to actually hear them. And when I actually heard them I realised that before I only referenced them in detail rather than hearing them. I could imagine that individual persons are likely to be very constant in their aphantastic-fantastic characteristic and production of that contrast of differently coding/experiencing data would be rare.

Less sure about this one as I don't have direct experience but apprently if there is particularly evocative pictures that describe events that are strongly associated with sounds being generated some people will synesthetically hear the sounds. In this case as it can be physically asserted that no external audio data is available that part of the experience is pretty surely edited in by the brain. I wouldn't be surprised if the upper parts of the brain would have a hard time figuring out which part of the lower parts data is based on external data and which part is guesswork. If a tree falls and you hear it but there was no athmosphere did it make a sound? 

I know for a fact that I see colors in dreams. When I have a Lucid dream I can experiment with my experiences, and I could confirm that I saw colors. I could also feel taste, cold, touch, hear sounds and sometimes experience pain (I once was stabbed in a dream and it hurt like hell, even for several minutes after I woke up). In fact, I found the amount of details objects had to be surprising - when I looked at a stone wall, it looked like a texture of a real wall. When I touched the wall, it felt like a stone wall. Other senses did not get the details as well - when I tired tasting snow, it was kinda cold-ish and kinda tasted like snow, but not really. When I tasted food, it tasted really weird and not really like I expected.

For whatever it's worth, I have memories of dreams having distinct colors of things. That is, not just a vague sense that I "dream in color" but actual memories of "I dreamed about this large blue balloon floating in a field of green grass under a grey sky" or something like that. I'm not sure how common that level of specificity is when people claim they dream in color or black and white.

When you say that consciousness is vague and people look to cues from others for how to interpret it, I think you're onto something very important.

Some parenting books treat that as trivially true for kids. It's a bit the basis of CBT. And yet I have an intuitive sense that its implications are critically under-explored. It feels like a nagging intensity in my perceived environment that i reflexively try to focus my eyes on and rising unease when i can't.

Is that the same or different to your reasoning? When that criticality is communicated, what happens next?

Suppose that TV experience does influence dreams - or the memories or self-reporting of dreams. Why would it affect specifically and only color?

Should we expect people who watch old TV to dream in low resolution and non-surround sound? Do people have poor reception and visual static in their black and white dreams? Would people who grew up with mostly over the border transmissions dream in foreign languages, or have their dreams subtitled or overdubbed? Would people who grew up with VCRs have pause and rewind controls in their dreams?

Some of these effects are plausible. Anecdotally, I watched a lot of anime, and I had some dreams in pseudo-Japanese (I don't speak Japanese). I don't remember ever dreaming subtitles though.

Does either the explanation of the black and white effect make predictions about which other effects should be present, and why?

In my childhood we had only black and white TV. My dreams were with colors.

I had a similar experience where I didn't know whether there was sound in my dreams. At some point I had the distinct experience of simultaneously noticing that I was dreaming, remembering that I had previously wondered about this question, and then checking that, yes, I was hearing sounds.

Even after decades of watching color TV, my Abuela still says that she dreams in black-and-white. Maybe her dream-generator was more impressionable in her younger years.

You're probably right that a big component of this phenomenon is the vagueness of consciousness latching onto cultural cues to fill in the missing details. But there could also be something else going on.

Our conscious minds are constantly constructing narratives of our personal experiences, trying to make sense out of a complex and confusing world using relatively simple stories. These narratives are encoded by the hippocampus and regenerated for the rest of the brain during sleep as a form of offline learning and regularization.

Stories are what our hippocampus craves. The accumulation of new stories is probably what fuels our curiosity drive, and building shared narratives is central to building community identity.

When we experience life, it's up to us to construct our own stories. When we watch movies, we're getting a multimodal story superstimulus delivered to our hippocampus on a silver platter. The saliency is probably off the charts compared to real life.

Based on that theory, it would seem more surprising if dreams didn't look like movies.

I typically dream in color, but have occasionally dreamed in black and white. I have also occasionally dreamed in cartoon-ish environments, or 90s/2000s computer graphics-like animation. These were very distinct experiences when they happened, there was never any doubt in my mind on waking that the dream I'd just had was different than usual for me.

I'm curious for anyone who has lucid dreams: is this a change you can make mid-dream?

[P]eople don’t know whether they dream in colour. Dreams may not even have associated colours one way or the other! Indeed, when I asked a few friends and family whether they dreamed in colour, a surprising number of them answered “I don’t know”.

I don't know much about the science of dreams, but I suspect that the answer may be that many dreams activate rods but not cones (or, at least, activate the parts of the brain that receive signals from rods). When it's dark, and my cones are not receiving enough light to function, I wouldn't describe the world I see as "black and white"—it seems different than that—but I also can't see color. Perhaps many people's dreams work the same way. (I find that, in many of my dreams, the dream world is dark enough that I can't see color.)

I have a suspicion that a similar thing is true of the whole "some people say they imagine in full color and others say they don't" thing.