They’re blind!
I know enough blind people to know that they use the language the same way sighted people do, even when it’s not “appropriate” for them, like “keeping an eye on things.” Those are largely metaphors anyway and as such, are available to everyone.
But yes, actually, my original question IS about dreaming. I’ve long wondered what blind people “see” when they dream, because for most if not all sighted people, dreams have powerful visual components, mostly drawn from the visual memory bank. So what’s behind their eyelids when they dream?
I feel my dreams are not any more visual than my everyday conscious life. They are visual only to the degree that even my conscious experiences and memories have powerful visual components. Do you feel your dreams are more visual than your conscious life?
The point is that actually distinctively visual components (that is, color and brightness) do not usually play all that large a role even in sighted people’s dreams (see the other thread, linked above, for evidence). What does play a large role in everybody’s dreams is the sense of spatial layout, which sighted people tend to conceive of in visual terms, and which even congenitally blind people often describe in visual terms, even though they actually sense it non-visually. Normal, sighted people’s dreams are not as genuinely visual as you, and probably most sighted people, tend to think (until they reflect carefully on it for a bit). Blind people’s dreams are much the same as sighted people’s, except that (if congenitally blind) they do not have the occasional dream experiences of color and/or brightness that sighted dreamers sometimes do.
I asked the OP’s same question of the congenitally blind guy who had just finished taking us on a guided tour of the Invisible Exhibition in Budapest a couple of weeks ago. He said his dreams are auditory and tactile, that he remembers the shapes of things he encounters. And as he had demonstrated to us on the tour, the auditory component includes both the sound and the spatial component, because as a blind person he uses echolocation to sense the physical configuration of his environment.
2 minor points –
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He said blind people are not offended by terms like “I see what you mean” or “Look out for that car in front of you.” etc. They understand the world runs on visual language to a great extent.
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He said any time you’ve seen a scene in a movie where a congenitally blind person feels the face of another person to “see” what he/she looks like, that’s a myth. The blind person really doesn’t gain much useful information that way (his words, not mine) and is no closer to understanding what the person looks like.
Color and brightness are not the only elements - there’s form and shape, which are the primary components of my dreams. None of these things are available to the congenitally blind. So other than sound, what is?
But WHAT is spatially laid out? If they’ve never seen anything, what form, other than amorphous black, does spatial layout take?
As for the components of sighted people’s dreams, my dream last night involved specific, recognizable people and things and places, all in living color. Yes, there was some dialogue, but to an infinitesimally smaller extent than the visuals. Were I blind, what would that dream have “looked” like?
Thank you for making my point. If you don’t have a visual waking life, consciousness or no, what do your dreams look like?
To a blind person, dreams almost certainly look exactly like real life.
If their real life is devoid of any visual look at all, then almost certainly their dreams are the same.
If their real life involves a completely black visual look, then almost certainly their dreams are the same.
Etc.
What am I missing?
Close your eyes. Now listen to the sounds around you. Some things seem to sound like they come from in front, some behind, some above, some below, some to the left, some to the right.
There’s your spatial layout.
Yes, but what does it LOOK like? Sounds coming from various places is auditory, and I have no questions about that, although my dreams are largely either silent or very nearly so. But what is projected on their eyelids?
Nothing. That’s what I was looking for. If your waking life is black, then your dream life is as well. Thank you.
Most likely nothing. Their brains are used to their eyes NOT being input devices, therefore they don’t get used that way. If they don’t use their eyes for getting around in every-day life, why would they “imagine” visual input in their dreams? There’s no point to it - they don’t need it.
On the planet of Gorgonflax, where creatures come with senses of smorp, blarg, and jonk, they often wonder what humans smorp when they dream (or whether it even makes sense to have a smorpless dream), and how humans can have any spatial understanding while being completely blargless, and so on.
No. That is not what Frylock said, and it is not correct.
This will depend on the cause of their blindness. Many blind people actually do have some light perception. They can tell the difference between light and dark, perhaps, or even make out vague shapes if the contrast is high. However, for most people who are totally blind and congenitally so, and for even for later blind people if the cause is in their brain rather than in their eye, they will not experience anything as if it were “projected on their eyelids,” either in dreams or in waking life. The world does not look black to them. It is not like what sighted people experience when we close our eyes or are in total darkness; it is more like our visual experience of what is behind us. What do things look like, behind you, now? Nothing at all. That experience does not exist for us, and we do not miss it; likewise, for a profoundly and congenitally blind person, the experience of vision does not exist for them and they do not miss it (any more than sighted humans miss having the electric sense by which a shark senses its prey, or can imagine what it would be like to have it).