prase comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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That did occur to me, but I doubt the real influence of movies can be that big as to make all dreams of 80% of people black and white. What seems more likely to me is that the colour of dreams (or actually the whole visual quality of dreams) is hard to remember, a person familiar with b/w movies would be likely to assume that dreams are similar to movies, and therefore report that they were black and white. But the two theories seem very hard to distinguish empirically.
You could have people watch only black and white movies for a while and see if they were more likely to report dreams being in black and white. This would work since people today know that entertainment isn't in black and white. Alternatively, one could take black and white media and project it in some strange color scheme (like say orange and blue) and see if people started dreaming in that.
That would distinguish the hypotheses
But it will not decide between