• Question: If you were born blind do you dream in pictures or in just sound?

    Asked by danrumford to Cat, Daz, Holly, Johnson, Pamela on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Cat O'Connor

      Cat O'Connor answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi again Dan,

      Gosh you do like testing me!

      Right this is what I think, it may not be 100% true but I think you’d have to ask a visually impaired person to find the through answer. I do wear glasses sometimes but that doesn’t count 😀

      I think if you were born blind you only dream using the senses you’ve always had, so I guess you could say they have ‘sound’ dreams but i wouldn’t be surprised if they also have tactile dreams! And i imagine if you ask a blind person to draw their dreams, i imagine they’d be able to draw shapes that they dream too!

      What do you think?

      Cat

    • Photo: Pamela Lithgow

      Pamela Lithgow answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Hi Danrumford,
      Another good an interesting question! What I have discovered is that people who are born blind probably don’t dream in pictures. What they say is they dream in sound and “emotion” which I suppose makes sense really. I found a quote from a blind person which said “I don’t “see” in dreams because I have no visual images on which to base anything” which I think makes sense. I think this is a difficult question to answer because only you know what is in your dreams.
      Hope that helps
      Pam 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: danrumford

    danrumford commented on :

    I would think that they would dream in sound as they wouldn’t have experienced colour so wouldn’t ‘see’ in dreams. Does the same go for deaf people, they dream without sound, do you think?

  • Photo: fayesedg

    fayesedg commented on :

    I don’t think they would see anything because when they ran a test on a person they discovered something quite cool, I’m not sure who or when but they blindfolded a person for some long amount of time and when they removed the blindfold and put a cube, a ball and a pyramid in front of them and said “Pick up the round object” The person still had to feel all of the objects to tell which one was round. So if a blind person only has a sense of ’round’ and ‘sharp’ in touch then I doubt they dream shapes.
    But still realy intresting question Dan!
    Faye

  • Photo: Pamela

    Pamela commented on :

    I think this is a really interesting question! really the question is if people without a sense sight/hearing can have it when dreaming. I agree with you that it depends if they ever had the sense and if they did not then they probably don’t dream with it because they don’t know it. It is difficult to be sure though as we can’t “see” what people dream. I think your reasoning is great! Some great questions and some really good thinking before you get answers from us! Do you think you always dream with all your senses?