Do Blind People Dream?

Blind people can dream and they do dream. In that way it is not an ability that is confined to only the sense of sight. Dreaming is produced by the amalgamation of different senses put together and it includes within it the senses of sight, hearing, smelling, and touching. Therefore, even if a person has lost the power of vision, he can still dream.

No two people who have lost the power of sight will, and can dream about the same thing. Just as no two people who have vision will ever dream about the same thing. What blind people dream about will depend on a lot of factors, like at which juncture in their lives did they lose their sight.

While we will get into that factor in the following paragraphs, one needs to understand that blind people will dream like a person with vision would―about regular everyday events or about things that they might have heard in the course of the day.

The fact that they are blind will not take away from the experience of dreaming. In fact, one can look into the dream interpretations of the blind as well.

A person who has been born without vision cannot dream visually because he has no understanding and experience of what 'vision' is. Such people will usually have what is known as 'auditory dreams'―these are characterized by sounds but no images. Though, the sensations that a person has when he dreams will be the same no matter if he's blind or not.

A person who was born with vision but lost it after a period of time, will have lucid dreams, just like any person who has vision. But depending on when he lost his vision and how young he was, the dreams might be blurred or otherwise. Like, he might only see the shapes or a hazy background and not the lucid details.

The dreams will revolve around those images that have been stored in a person's memory before they lost their vision. So when they dream about a person, the person will be of an age with the same features and the same body language as they had seen them before they lost their sight.

This point is debatable because this phenomenon can change from person to person, depending on the kind of experiences that a person has had. If a person has been blind throughout their lives or from an early age, then they will not dream in color―though they might be able to associate the color to certain things.

Like the mention of the color red will make them think of blood, or yellow, the sun. These will merely be words though, and they will not be supported by vision. People who have had vision before, will dream in color but the colors might become hazy after a point of time.

This is also seen to happen when it comes to the details of things. A person might only remember and dream about the background of a chair, but not the carving on it.

Blind people do dream, but it is different from what and how a person with vision will dream. For people who have the sense of vision, imagining dreaming without the inclusion of sight might seem impossible.

However, since dreaming does not merely depend on sight, you can try to concentrate more on the sensations that dreams produce, and connect to your dreams in a more primal way―this is exactly what the vision-impaired people do.