Even after decades of watching color TV, my Abuela still says that she dreams in black-and-white. Maybe her dream-generator was more impressionable in her younger years.
You’re probably right that a big component of this phenomenon is the vagueness of consciousness latching onto cultural cues to fill in the missing details. But there could also be something else going on.
Our conscious minds are constantly constructing narratives of our personal experiences, trying to make sense out of a complex and confusing world using relatively simple stories. These narratives are encoded by the hippocampus and regenerated for the rest of the brain during sleep as a form of offline learning and regularization.
Stories are what our hippocampus craves. The accumulation of new stories is probably what fuels our curiosity drive, and building shared narratives is central to building community identity.
When we experience life, it’s up to us to construct our own stories. When we watch movies, we’re getting a multimodal story superstimulus delivered to our hippocampus on a silver platter. The saliency is probably off the charts compared to real life.
Based on that theory, it would seem more surprising if dreams didn’t look like movies.
Disclaimer: The preceding was just a simplified story, constructed to make sense out of the complex and confusing reality underlying the qualitative content of dreams. Please take it with a grain of salt.
Even after decades of watching color TV, my Abuela still says that she dreams in black-and-white. Maybe her dream-generator was more impressionable in her younger years.
You’re probably right that a big component of this phenomenon is the vagueness of consciousness latching onto cultural cues to fill in the missing details. But there could also be something else going on.
Our conscious minds are constantly constructing narratives of our personal experiences, trying to make sense out of a complex and confusing world using relatively simple stories. These narratives are encoded by the hippocampus and regenerated for the rest of the brain during sleep as a form of offline learning and regularization.
Stories are what our hippocampus craves. The accumulation of new stories is probably what fuels our curiosity drive, and building shared narratives is central to building community identity.
When we experience life, it’s up to us to construct our own stories. When we watch movies, we’re getting a multimodal story superstimulus delivered to our hippocampus on a silver platter. The saliency is probably off the charts compared to real life.
Based on that theory, it would seem more surprising if dreams didn’t look like movies.
Disclaimer: The preceding was just a simplified story, constructed to make sense out of the complex and confusing reality underlying the qualitative content of dreams. Please take it with a grain of salt.