Blind hear, feel dreams more than see
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BY DEBORAH KENDRICK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
A Cincinnati reader wrote this week to ask a question.
''How do blind people dream?'' the person asked. ''If people are blind since birth, do they have visual images in their dreams or is everything audio? It's probably a stupid question, but I've always wondered.''
Well, it's not a stupid question, and it's one that seems to fascinate everyone I ask - blind or not.
Because my own dream life is the one I know best, I'll begin with it.
I lost my sight as a child and can still remember a few very visual (and highly emotionally charged) dreams from childhood. As a teen-ager, I remember waking from a dream and realizing there was no color - there once had been - and experiencing a real sense of loss.
Later, I began to realize that solid visual images had dimmed to outlines. Today, I think of it as ''seeing without seeing'' in my dreams. In other words, I have the awareness that sight would bring without the visual component.
Clinical psychologist Michael Lichstein, who also lost his sight in childhood, explains it much more coherently.
''My dream world,'' Dr. Lichstein says, ''is very much like my non-dream world, except that there's a sort of ESP quality to it. I may know that a person is endorsing something I've said, for example, by shaking their head. I don't necessarily see that motion, but have an awareness that it is happening.''
For people who have never seen, however, dreams are purely audio, void of visual images.
''It's like old-time radio,'' says Jim Tudor, a local broadcast professional who was born without sight.
''Except there must be some kind of physical element to it. I know I must experience touching and feeling in my dreams as well as the audio because I know where I am, know the environment. Something is cluing me in as to whether I'm in an old house or an office building, so there's more than just the passive listening going on.''
For someone who loses sight gradually over a period of years, dreams seem to follow the pattern of vision in reality.
Bryan Bashin, executive director for the Sacramento Society for the Blind, began losing his sight with a serious illness in his early teens. Vision diminished gradually through the years, so that a dream reflecting his reality today, at age 43, might include ''an amorphous blob'' drawn across everything in the scene.
''At first, after a dramatic loss of vision,'' he recalls, ''my dreams were perfect. But after four or five years, they reflected the same limited vision that I knew in reality.''
From there, Mr. Bashin's dreams have continued to lag behind his real-time vision loss by a year or two.
''I remember one dream where I was having a conversation in French, and the whole focus of the dream was the mental exercise of constructing the sentences. In another, the tactile experience of holding a coin was the central profound image. That first dream with absolutely no visual component was a shock. Usually, my dreams pretty closely match my (minimal) vision in real time.''
Like any question connected with dreams, this one has no simple answer and an intriguing range of possible configurations. To understand how a blind person dreams depends clearly on two things:
The time and degree of vision lost.
Some understanding of the experience of blindness itself.
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