There’s a dream I had years ago that has always stayed with me, mostly because it was so unlike anything I’d experienced before. I dreamed that I was sleepwalking down a hallway painted in the most vibrant colors I’d ever seen and covered in an unrecognizable, hieroglyphic-like language. Upon waking, I marveled at my brain’s ability to create such fantastic imagery that I’d never seen in real life. And then I wondered what brains come up with when their hosts have never seen anything in real life.
I’ve heard people ask questions like, “Do blind people dream?” The simple answer is yes, of course they do. Most land mammals—including our pets—can dream, so why should a lack of sight affect someone’s ability to do the same? The way blind people dream is quite unique, but dream they do, just as frequently as anyone else. On the other hand, “Do blind people see in their dreams?” has a much more complex answer.
When the Sightless See
In 1999, researchers at the University of Hartford set out to determine what, if anything, the blind can see while dreaming. They analyzed 372 dreams of fifteen blind individuals and found that the age of sight loss affected the visual quality of the subjects’ dreams. The study determined that people who go blind at age five or younger tend not to have visual dreams, whereas if blindness occurs at about age seven or older, chances are the blind will see some images. When people go blind between ages five and seven, their potential for dream sight could go either way.
It all depends on how long a person experiences the world with sight, as opposed to without. Someone who goes blind later in life could experience visually intense dreams for years afterward; however, the more time that person spends without sight, the less frequent such visual dreams become. And people who are congenitally blind (born that way) or lose the ability to see at a very young age have completely nonvisual dreams from the beginning.
It’s similar to the black-and-white dream phenomenon some older individuals experience. A 2008 study at the University of Dundee in the UK found that people who grew up when television was first invented sometimes have dreams in black-and-white, while those who have experienced only color television usually have colorful dreams.
