Eric Schwitzgebel

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445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

black and white.

And then I gave that same survey to people in 2003 in Southern California.

And pretty much the overwhelming majority said they dreamed

primarily in color.

So there seems to have been a change in opinion about whether we dream in black and white or in color.

I also looked historically before the 20th century at psychologists and philosophers and I did not find

I found almost no evidence, except for a couple early psychologists, of people being skeptical about the existence of coloration in dreams before the 20th century.

So there's this arc of opinion in the modern West, from assuming, basically, that we dream in color, and analogizing dreams to colored media, like tapestries and paintings, to, in the 20th century...

thinking that we dream primarily in black and white in the middle of the 20th century, and analogizing dreams to black and white films.

And then by the end of the 20th century, people returning to thinking that they dream in color.

Well, that certainly is a possibility, although I think it's unlikely.

One reason that I think it's unlikely is that if you look at the text of dream reports, just things that people write down about the contents of their dreams after they wake up, and you do a color term analysis, you just look for the occurrence of words like brown and orange and blue and red, the rate of color term use is virtually identical.

between samples from the 1940s and 1950s and samples from the 1990s and early 21st century.

So that's at least one reason to think that the coloration of dreams didn't radically change.

If it did, you'd think it would show up, I guess, in color terms.

Well, my guess is that what happened was that people don't really know their dream experience very well.

And so they tend to analogize it to media.

So as I said, before the 20th century, people analogized dreams to things like tapestries and paintings.

And then with the advent of film media, it seemed very natural for people to analogize dreams to film media.

So that's what dreaming is like.

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