People who are blind do dream. The dreams of people who have been blind from a very early age (called ’congenital blindness’) tend to be different to those who are blind now but who had sight before. Those who are congenitally blind often have dreams that include more instances of sounds. Both groups experience dreams as imaginatively rich as those of sighted people.
Dreams are a universal feature of the human mind. Carl Jung even believed that visions in our dreams offer glimpses into universal archetypes, instinctive primordial images derived from a collective unconscious built into the very structure of the human brain. You might think, then, that even blind people could tap into this instinctive pool of primordial images and see them in their dreams.
There have been studies into whether or not congenitally blind people dream in visual images, but the findings have been mixed— some studies conclude that congenitally blind people do not dream in visual images, whilst other reports conclude that may do. The general consensus is that although people who are blind certainly do dream, their dreams are believed to be visual only to the extent that they can see, or could see before their blindness, in their waking life. People who are blind from birth are believed to have dreams that are primarily auditory, with their other intact senses participating to about the same degree that they do in a sighted person’s dreams. Such people are not thought to dream in visual images. People who are legally blind but are able to see blurs of movement, light and color would have a visual dimension to their dreams matching what they see when they are awake.
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