Other Senses Take the Stage
Research has shown that blind people demonstrate very little to no rapid eye movement (REM) during the REM phase of sleep—the deep-sleep stage in which we have vivid dreams and the most brain activity during the night. As time progresses, the movements stop altogether. But that doesn’t mean that dreams aren’t happening—the eyes just aren’t involved in them.
People with sight tend to have highly visual dreams with some auditory qualities. Very rarely are any other senses, such as taste or smell, part of the process. But the opposite is true for blind people. Studies like the aforementioned University of Hartford one suggest that their dreams activate the other senses—touch, taste, smell, and hearing—to an intense degree. Since our brains draw on real-life experiences to shape dreams, it makes sense that blind people dream the way they experience their environment. Because they rely on nonvisual cues to make their way through the world, the same heightened sensations come into play in their nighttime worlds, too.
Regardless of how we see, almost all of our dreams have a narrative quality. Most of the ones we remember also have some sort of troubling aspect to them, which is why they stick out in our minds. What we’re worried about in our daily lives often becomes the subject of these types of dreams, usually via symbols that require interpretation. So it seems logical that blind people tend to dream more about issues related to traveling and transportation, since getting around safely and efficiently is one of their greatest obstacles. In the University of Hartford study, 60 and 61 percent of the male and female participants, respectively, had dreams revolving around such problems. Among the sighted people surveyed, only 31 percent of men and 28 percent of women had similarly themed dreams.
We may never fully understand the way blind people dream, since they experience life in a totally different way than those of us with sight do. But we do know that their dreams can be just as vivid and intense as ours, perhaps even more so because they utilize four senses instead of one or two. Still, I wonder how one goes about applying dream-interpretation techniques to these types of dreams, since such analysis usually relies on visual symbols. The analyst would have to use other clues as a way to find the dreams’ hidden meanings, but what would those clues be and what would they imply? Who knows—more research on blind dreaming could bring about a whole new way of looking at dreams.
Updated October 18, 2010
