I’ve often wondered exactly how films and television affect the way we dream. Growing up, I remember hearing that most people dreamed in black and white. This was something that made no sense to me. My dreams were in colour. All of my friends dreams were in colour. It was only adults who claimed to have dreams in black and white, and there was something very sad about the idea that as we aged it was possible that the colour would be drained out of even our dreams.

As I got older, though, and continued to dream in colour, I suspected that people who dreamed in black and white did so because they were used to black and white television and films. Dreams, after all, are like movies in our heads. This has always been the case for me, at least. Dreams even tend to use devices like close-up, slow motion, and change of perspective that are common in film, but totally foreign to our everyday experience with vision. It seemed reasonable to me that the brain was borrowing from these media to make our dreams, so if someone thought of films as being in black and white, they would dream in black and white, but if they thought of films as being in colour, their dreams would be in colour as well.

A new study from Ewa Murzyn, a post-grad student at the University of Dundee seems to have verified exactly that. People who grew up with black and white television dream in black and white, those who didn’t mostly don’t. Now I want more in-depth studies about how the media primes our dreams. Do people who never watch scary movies have scary dreams? What about the correlation between pornography viewing and sex dreams? Do people who play a lot first-person shooters have murderous dreams? Is there any way we can find out what dreams were like in the golden age of radio?

One thing I’m fairly certain of is that my son will grow up having dreams in beautiful colour and high-definition. That’s a lovely thought.