How Our Age Affects Our Perception Of Dreams — Dreaming In Black & White?
First of all, here’s something interesting age-related:
how old do people want to be?
The age most participants answered with would be 21.
People younger than 21 wish they were older and people older than 21 wish they were younger.
When people are asked if they could be a certain age forever, the average American chooses 36.
Furthermore, the older you get, the smaller jumps back in age you wish you had because you most likely become content with your situation and life choices.
What Do Dreams Have To Do With All Of This?
Old people are more likely to think they dream in black and white, not because it is part of the aging process, but because they are veterans of the great black and white dream epidemic of the 20th century.
Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, and everyone who wrote on the subject reported that dreams contained color, but as humanity moved into the 20th century, the number of people reporting color in their dreams declined as quickly as the popularity of new black-and-white movies and television shows.
In the 1960s, as color television and movies became more common, reports of color dreams increased again, and even today, people who grew up with black-and-white television are more likely to report black-and-white dreams than those who did not.
So have black and white movies and television literally changed our dreams?
Well, first of all, it’s not clear if the dreams themselves have actually changed or if people just thought differently about their dreams.
We are trying, but we have not yet found a way to get direct access to the dream content.
Philosopher and Psychologist Eric Schwitzgebel has pointed out that, as far as we know, dreams are not in color or black and white or sepia or whatever, but that they are primarily indeterminate colors when they happen, and that it is only later, when we remember them, that we confabulate details about the color.
He compares dreaming with reading a novel.
Dreams, hazy as they are, are something we simply cannot understand, and movies and television shows give us the illusion of understanding them.
Eric Schwitzgebel has speculated that smells and touch sensations are rare in dreams today, but future people with smelly, touch-sensitive VR shows might think they’re dreaming with lots of textures and smells.
But why should we think that dreams are like moving pictures and not normal waking life?
No one knows, it could be that moving images are simply the closest thing to dreaming and are not dreamlike.
Moving pictures and dreams are not made of anything even remotely resembling what they depict.
They are both images made of phantoms and uncanny things.
A person in a picture is frozen in time and yet can seemingly grow old.
This is called the “Dorian Gray Effect”.
Our own image can depend on what we are called, and they are the closest thing to what our mind does when we are away.
Huge thanks to Michael Stevens from Vsauce for bringing light to this phenomenon.
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