It is obvious that blind people cant see, but I’ve always wondered, can they see their dreams???
It’s a WAG, but I would imagine they experience dreams in the same way they experience their waking life - as noises, feelings, touch, etc.
I know my deaf parents don’t “hear” in dreams.
My aunt, blind since birth, says she seee in her dreams. In color, no less.
I don’t know how she knows…but I’ll take her word for it.
I can believe a difference between deaf and blind dreamers. The human brains is wired for visual input, even if you’ve never seen anything. The need to fill in a mental image is still there, and my aunt says she pictures everything around her. God only knows what it looks like…but she does. But deaf people probably don’t have the need to mentally replace the missing sound information in their environment. So I can see how they could easily have silent dreams.
thsi topic has already been discussed. try searching. it was kinda old though, so search “any date”.
Cecil Adams on What are the dreams of the blind like?
I highly doubt that. Being blind from birth, she has no idea what seeing is. I mean, I’m sure she understands how it works and all that, but she can no more comprehend what vision is like than you can comprehend what dolphin sonar is like.
Now, you could dream that you had dolphin sonar, but I 100% guarantee you that your dream will in no way represent what it is actually like to have sonar.
See, she doesn’t know. That’s the point. Likely, she has some sort of internal representation of something (like a room, or an object) that can allow her to think about it and perform mental manipulations on it, just like you and I can visualize something in our minds. But she can’t actually visualize it, because she doesn’t have any sense of what vision is like. She probably tactilizes things, to coin a phrase.
Only if your eyes actually work. A lack of visual input will eventually cause the function of the part of the brain wired for vision to be re-wired for something else. In fact, blind people show activity in the visual cortex when reading braille, with those who are blind from birth showing the greatest amount of activity. In effect, they no longer have a part of the brain that is wired for visual input at all. Instead, they have a part that is wired for braille input.
No doubt she does, but she doesn’t “picture” things in the same way as you or me. Her mental images are not images at all, but use other senses that she does have.
** Joe Random**, you speak as if you think I’m unaware that her mental imagery is probably unlike real vision. Don’t be so condescending.
Of course it isn’t accurate. Of course she doesn’t understand the concept of color the way you and I do. She could be experiencing what she describes as vision as a sort of synaesthesia. But the point is that she senses something that she knows is not one of the other four senses she’s used to. For that, you have to take her word for it.
It’s not so hard to believe that a sense that is controlled by such a large chunk of our brain is capable of functioning enough to provide imaginative sensation despite not having the external “sensors.” And I never asserted that it was creating realistic images, just some sort of vestigial sense of sight. (Philosophical aside: how can you be so sure your brain is creating realistic imagery, even directly from sensory input?)
The problem with this argument is it’s hard to prove either way. If you knew what sight was, you wouldn’t have been blind since birth. So you have to find someone who was. You can’t very well explain sight enough to see if they’re getting it, and you run into the same problem with color.
I didn’t say she has a complete “picture” of her environment. I didn’t say her dreams are anything like yours or mine or anyone else’s. I just said that she says she sees. She knows the other four senses well enough to know she’s not hearing things, feeling things, smelling things, or tasting things. Therefore, to her, whatever she’s seeing an analog to sight.