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?
Color vision is an aspect of sensory experience that we can do without for most upstream perception, largely because our eyes actually have a grayscale mode for low-light conditions.
People are surprisingly insensitive to sound quality or even mono vs stereo under ordinary conditions. This theory predicts that the population in question would in fact dream in mono sound, but might have a hard time noticing or reporting that fact.
Visual static or noise tends to be filtered out by perception, except when it overwhelms the signal. This theory would predict that people who live in areas with decent reception would not have static or noise in their dreams, while people who live in areas with unacceptable reception also wouldn’t (because their brains wouldn’t even be able to entrain to the story), but in a critical band where TV signal strength is highly variable dependent on atmospheric conditions, people might sometimes experience bursts of visual static in their dreams.
Visual artifacts of film/video/TV that are plausible to the brain as actual optical phenomena, such as softly glowing halos around bright edges, might sometimes be incorporated into the experience of dreaming.
People whose experiences of storytelling predominantly involves a foreign language would tend to dream in that language.
When consuming media with subtitles, the visual stimulus of the subtitles is removed (and potentially even inpainted, as with the eyes’ blind spots), with the subtitle information rerouted to a language-processing area, which uses it to fill in the missing meanings from the audio stream. So, in reversed-perception dreaming, people whose experience with storytelling was heavily subtitled would experience dreams where the visuals lack subtitles, speech sounds like the foreign language, and yet speech also somehow has a meaning that feels more like the subtitle language.
Rewinding and pausing are “out of band” elements that are understood during consumption not to be part of the story, like if you ask a human storyteller to go back to an earlier part and tell it again, or to take a short break while you get a drink of water. So this theory says they typically wouldn’t show up in reversed-perception dreaming. People who have a lot of experience with rewind and pause controls are more likely to fantasize about those mechanics (“I wish I could just rewind and do that differently”), so they might show up in the content of dreams that way, but people wouldn’t report the presence of such controls as “just the way that dreams are.”
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?
My pet theory would answer as follows.
Color vision is an aspect of sensory experience that we can do without for most upstream perception, largely because our eyes actually have a grayscale mode for low-light conditions.
People are surprisingly insensitive to sound quality or even mono vs stereo under ordinary conditions. This theory predicts that the population in question would in fact dream in mono sound, but might have a hard time noticing or reporting that fact.
Visual static or noise tends to be filtered out by perception, except when it overwhelms the signal. This theory would predict that people who live in areas with decent reception would not have static or noise in their dreams, while people who live in areas with unacceptable reception also wouldn’t (because their brains wouldn’t even be able to entrain to the story), but in a critical band where TV signal strength is highly variable dependent on atmospheric conditions, people might sometimes experience bursts of visual static in their dreams.
Visual artifacts of film/video/TV that are plausible to the brain as actual optical phenomena, such as softly glowing halos around bright edges, might sometimes be incorporated into the experience of dreaming.
People whose experiences of storytelling predominantly involves a foreign language would tend to dream in that language.
When consuming media with subtitles, the visual stimulus of the subtitles is removed (and potentially even inpainted, as with the eyes’ blind spots), with the subtitle information rerouted to a language-processing area, which uses it to fill in the missing meanings from the audio stream. So, in reversed-perception dreaming, people whose experience with storytelling was heavily subtitled would experience dreams where the visuals lack subtitles, speech sounds like the foreign language, and yet speech also somehow has a meaning that feels more like the subtitle language.
Rewinding and pausing are “out of band” elements that are understood during consumption not to be part of the story, like if you ask a human storyteller to go back to an earlier part and tell it again, or to take a short break while you get a drink of water. So this theory says they typically wouldn’t show up in reversed-perception dreaming. People who have a lot of experience with rewind and pause controls are more likely to fantasize about those mechanics (“I wish I could just rewind and do that differently”), so they might show up in the content of dreams that way, but people wouldn’t report the presence of such controls as “just the way that dreams are.”