I don’t really wish to dispute what Cecil says in it, except that his answer may give some readers the erroneous impression that those who are born blind never have dreams with much fantastical content. He’s right that there’s no visual content in them, of course. My real question, however, is this:
Why, as Cecil rightly says, do so many people want to know about this? It’s almost the first thing I get asked a good 50% of the time. I mean, it’s not that it bothers me or anything, but why? Can I pose this as a formal question for Cecil to answer?
But actually, the main reason I joined here is to say that I’ve been reading through Cecil’s archives and I think his column is really funny.
People are notoriously curious about things they can’t experience for themselves when it is in contrast to something they can experience.
Most of us know what dreaming is. We know our own experiences of dreaming are inherently visual. So it creates a sense of fascination of how a dream would work without a visual element.
It’s not the kind of thing that keeps us awake at night, but it is the kind of thing someone mentions and then it makes us ponder for a few minutes.
BTW, I suspect that a lot of blind people use their visual cortex for other things, and that some may have “visual” experiences that they don’t call “vision” since they have no context for it. I found a bit of reinforcement for that suspicion in Ramachandran’s book, “The Tell-tale Brain”. He was the guy who invented the therapy for pain in lost limbs where you see the remaining limb in a mirror and trick your mind into believing it’s the missing one. He also studied synesthesia.
It’s pretty well documented that many congenitally blind people use parts of their visual cortex for hearing.
In any case, my guess is that blind people dream the same way everyone else does, which is oddly distorted versions of normal life sensations. We might as well ask them what they see when they’re awake.