If you were blind would you dream? Maybe if you were blinded after birth you would still dream as you would have expereinced visual imagery but if you were born blind so you had never experienced visual images maybe you wouldn’t dream, or you would dream with your other sense? which would be quite fascinating.
These question would be best answered by someone who is blind so if you know someone who is blind , ask them. Except I don’t know how you would ask someone who had never seen anything before if they had dreamt, as you wouldnt really be able to define to them. i think.
There are a few different types of blind people. But in genereal, their dreams could probably be categorized into:
Sound/Touch/Taste/Smell dreams
and
Sight/Sound/Touch/Taste/Smell dreams
Some people are blind because of defects in their brain (the part of the brain that we normally call “the brain”, that is), and other is cause by defects in the eye (another part of the brain). People who have defects in their eyes but aren’t completely blind, only partially blind, have something similar to hypnagogic hallucination in the areas of their eye where they are blind. I would expect that people who are blind because of defects in their eyes would have dream of a shifting blackness, or perhaps some colors in meaningless shapes, but the ones who just plain do not have an ability to see because of their brain would have no visual sensations and they wouldn’t know they were missing out on anything.
If the people who have defects in their eyes and not their brains could learn to lucid dream, I bet it would be possible to teach them via hypnagogic imagery to visualize things in their dreams. Perhaps they could even learn to trick themselves while awake to have a mental image of their surroundings that was as “real” as what you and I see. Just some ideas… if anyone has access to any articles on the dreams of the blind please post them!