I don’t know about you, but my dreams are predominantly visual, and I understand that this is the case for the majority of people who remember their dreams. So if someone is blind from birth, how do they dream? They have no visual memory bank to draw on. Are their dreams totally aural?
I have nothing to contribute, other than to say what a fascinating question!
The short answer is, people who have been blind all their lives don’t see in their dreams, but blind people who USED to be able to see often do still see in their dreams.
Well that short answer was to the wrong question. 
The OP asked how blind people who have never been able too see do in fact dream. All you said was “they don’t see their dreams”. Well duh.
I don’t know about you, but my dreams do not generally involve me being a deaf person, or indeed the loss of any of the senses I am accustomed to in my everyday life…
I wish some people would read the OP before replying to it.
I did read the OP. What do you wish I had done differently?
They dream the same way everyone else does - it’s muddled subconscious that reflects everyday life.
No blind person ever wakes up and thinks, God! What a weird dream! I couldn’t even see!
Ok, but what would a description of a blind person’s dream sound (or read) like?
What would a description of their conscious life sound (or read) like?
It’s the same as any other person’s - muddled. I mean, if you’re blind and dreaming, you’re going to have weird stories in your head about aliens, teeth falling out, whatever. There’s also tactile sense in dreams - a different kind, sure, but it’s implied.
add: Maybe this helps.
Why not let Cecil answer?
Or check this previous thread. Essentially, the question could just as well be “What are the kinds of sensory stimuli that blind people experience when awake?” If they’ve never experienced vision in their life, then they won’t “see” in their dreams, but they could well hear, smell, feel, etc.
Some of the links I posted (together with extensive discussion) in the previous thread:
The Dreams of Blind Men and Women
Do the Blind Literally “See” in Their Dreams? A Critique of a Recent Claim That They Do
Visual Imagery Without Visual Perception? [PDF]
Imagery and Spatial Knowledge in the Blind (for context, notes and bibliographic details see here)
For more citations to scientific and philosophical research on this topic, go here and search the page for the word “blind”.
The take home message, as I argue at length in the other thread, is that although congenitally blind people almost certainly do not have visual experiences in their dreams, they are not as different from the dreams of sighted people as you might thereby think. Much (not all) of what sighted people take to be visual experience in their dreams, is really spatial experience, a sense of how things are laid out in space, where things are relative to where we are (and relative to each other). Sighted people rely very heavily on their sight to get such spatial information, so we tend to think of our experience of it in visual terms. It is also deeply entwined with the language we use to talk about spatial relationships, to the extent that even congenitally blind people will often use visual metaphors to describe their knowledge of spatial relations. However, sight is not the only source of such spatial information even for the sighted, and the blind are capable of sensing quite a lot about spatial relations using their other senses. They are also just as capable as the sighted of dreaming about spatial relations: that is, they will often ‘know’ where other people or objects are, relative to themselves, in their dreams. In describing a dream they might even use visual language to describe this sort of experience, e.g., “I could see he was over to my left.” However, if questioned further it will turn out that this “seeing” had no specifically visual components (i.e., color or brightness). It is probably the case, however, that a lot of the time the sense of spatial relations that even sighted people have in their dreams is also not particularly connected with specifically visual (color and brightness) experience in the dream itself (even though it is natural to use visual language to describe such experiences).
Assume that as originally posted, I’m talking about the congenitally blind.
Fascinating, but I’m still puzzled by the visual component of dreams. Last night I dreamed about being in a tent and seeing a man coming down the block selling navy blue sweaters, among other things. How would a blind person dream that, not knowing what a tent or navy blue look like? Or even having a sense of distance beyond the general area of his or her body? How does a blind person conceptualize “a block away” or the space in a tent or room, or color? In fact, how does a blind person arrange physical components of any scene, with no frame of reference or visual memory bank?
Are their dreams filled with… what? Fog, or solid black or white? What do you see when you’ve never seen anything?
So, they can’t see in either case?
That’s interesting. To your knowledge, do they ever (or often) say analogous things about remembered waking experiences?
So, do blind people’s eyes move during REM sleep? Are there equivalent physical indications of reaching this stage of sleep?
Nothing! There is no visual component.
You’re looking at it (ha!) from the perspective of a sighted person. Someone who has never possessed the sense of sight has no conception of blue or tents or sweaters at least in the sense you are describing. What they have are sound, smell, and tactile sensation. Re-read what njtt wrote.
Ok, you got me. That was a made up quote, and I don’t know whether real blind person would say something quite so direct. However, here is a real quotation (that I have now found time to look it up) from a blind person describing her dream (about a cancer clinic). It repeatedly refers to how things* looked*.
“I was in a room that looked similar to my instant banker at work, but it was a big machine with lots of buttons… And I don’t know why I was there but I guess there was a screen and there were other buttons you could push, you could look in and see how different cancer patients were doing… I knew that others could see what was going on through all the little panels… Maybe because I imagined it in my mind, it was not that I could really see them with my eyes, but I know what that board looks like, and the only reason that I know what it looks like is by touch, and I could remember where the buttons were without touching them on the boards…It seemed to be a large room that was oblong in shape…it looked like the bank where I do my instant banking, except it was larger and more oblong.” [Kerr, N.H., Foulkes, D., & Schmidt, M. (1982). The Structure of Laboratory Dream Reports in Blind and Sighted Subjects. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (170) 286-294.]
However, when asked directly whether she could actually see these thing in her dream. She said she could not.
As for whether blind people use similar visual language to describe waking experiences, apparently they do:
“Blind people sometimes do employ visual language to describe their dreaming experiences, but they also use visual language to describe waking experiences that clearly do not include “seeing” things. Blind people talk about “watching TV,” “keeping an eye on things,” “seeing what you mean,” “taking a look at something,” and “visualizing a scene,” although these visual terms do not imply a visual component. These colloquial expressions are simply the most convenient phrases that blind people have for communicating their experiences. It should be noted that blind people also use the term visual to describe imagery experiences that do not fit neatly into any other category of sensory experience.” (Kerr & Domhoff, 2004)
Of course, some of those ‘visual’ expressions would be metaphorical even as used by a sighted person, but not all of them I think.
Their dreams are filled with the impression of undergoing the same sensory experiences as in their everyday life. As CitizenPained said, “No blind person ever wakes up and thinks, God! What a weird dream! I couldn’t even see!”.
Your question isn’t really about dreaming, is it? How does an awake blind person experience being in a tent and having a man coming down the block and sell sweaters? Well, they experience it in terms of various thoughts and senses apart from sight. Same, then, for how they would most likely describe dreaming such a thing (only with that trippy dream logic coloring it all).