Several scientific sleep laboratory studies have shown that dreamers who were born blind and those who became blind in infancy do not have visual imagery in their dreams, whereas those blinded in adolescence or young adulthood often retain visual mental imagery in their waking life and in their dreams.
These controlled experiments confirm what has been reported in a number of earlier self-report studies reviewed by Kirtley (1975), who concluded that individuals blinded before the age of about 5 report no visual imagery in dreams as adults, whereas those blinded after about the age of 7 are likely to retain visual imagery in dreaming.
Source: http://psychology.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html
How can researchers be sure that they understand blind individuals, while they are not blind, and have no such experience?
ReplyDeleteShall we learn from blind people and their experience, that is possibly much greater and more intuitive than ours? Visual images give us a very limited sense and understanding of the world.