This is an interesting story. It seems that Scottish researchers at the University of Dundee have discovered that how you dream is influenced by the type of media you’re exposed to.
People 55 and over – who were exposed to a great deal of black & white movies and television – tend to dream in monochrome around 25% of the time, while people 25 and under almost always dream in color. Even more interesting is that, according to Eva Murzyn, a psychology student who carried out the study, is that “before the advent of black and white television, all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color”. Studies carried out from 1915 through the 1950s suggested that overwhelming majority of dreams were in black and white. This did not change until the 1960s, when color films became standard and color TV started creeping in to home. By that point, later results suggested “that up to 83-percent of dreams contain some color”.
Murzyn feels that something happens between the ages of 3 and 10 that affects the way we dream, and that whatever media we are exposed to during this time plays heavily into it. I wonder what it will be like for kids of the future that are exposed to 3D HDTV? Engadget thinks that they’ll “wind up dreaming in heavily-compressed SD stretched to the wrong aspect ratio, buffering endlessly before failing out due to a missing plugin”.