Color quest, fall edition

The leaves haven’t turned yet, but I’ve recently been encountering echoes of some of the images I found, during this year’s sometimes drab spring, in my quest to incubate some vivid color into my dreams. The spring quest took a lot of tries before I got dream color: I wrote three posts about my multiple efforts.

Bel Borba aqui

One of those posts mentions a DVD titled Colors of a Creative Culture, about street artists in and around the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, engaged in community art projects:

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Clichéd question

New York City has at least 14 summer venues for outdoor movies this year. Out of all the films scheduled, only a handful are in black and white, mostly at Bryant Park (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The 39 Steps, The Lady Eve, High Sierra; only the High Sierra screening is still to come, on August 15).

The preponderance of color in film culture for roughly 50 years now may explain why lots of people find the question “Do you dream in color?” a little silly (“Of course I dream in color!” many of us reply). This is the explanation offered by Eric Schwitzgebel in Perplexities of Consciousness, according to Nicholas Humphrey in last week’s New York Times Book Review (“The I of the Beholder,” July 29, 2011, online; July 31, p.17 in print). Humphrey writes of Schwitzgebel’s explanation:

Back in the 1950s most said they dreamed in black and white. Presumably it can hardly be true that our grandparents had different brains that systematically left out the color we put in today. So this must be a matter of interpretation. Yet why such freedom about assigning color? Well, try this for an answer. Suppose that, not knowing quite what dreams are like, we tend to assume they must be like photographs or movies—pictures in the head. Then, when asked whether we dream in color we reach for the most readily available pictorial analogy. Understandably, 60 years ago this might have been black-and-white movies, while for most of us today it is the color version.