“I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT”

I usually love my dreams. Once I got so wrapped up in a dream I fell out of bed. Best of all, my declining vision is fully restored in my dreams. According to a recent article on the web site Medicaldaily.com [link] that my vivid dreaming is not unusual. People like me who had years of normal site carry visions from the past, but the vitality of the dreams may erode over time.

Ninety percent of people who are legally blind are not totally blind. Total blindness (sometimes called “No Light Perception” – “NLP”) means seeing nothing, not even seeing black. People with NLP dream about the same things as other people, such as social interactions, successes, failures, and even really weird ones just like sighted people.

A recent Danish study found a fascinating difference between blind and sited people: Folks that are blind had four times as many nightmares as sighted people.

The Danish researchers examined 50 adults: 11 blind from birth, 14 who became blind sometime after age 1, and 25 non-blind individuals (referred to as “controls.”) Over a four-week period, participants filled out questionnaires about their dreams as soon as they woke up.

The questionnaires asked about several aspects of the dream: the sensory impressions (Did you see anything? If so, was it in color? Did you taste? Smell? Feel pain?); the emotional content (Were you angry? Sad? Afraid?); and the thematic content (Did you interact with someone? Did you fail at something? Was it realistic, or bizarre?). The questionnaire also asked whether the dream was a nightmare.

Nearly 30 percent of the blind reported smelling in at least one dream, compared with 15 percent of controls. Almost 70 percent of the blind reported a touch sensation, compared to 45 percent of controls. And 86 percent of the blind reported hearing, compared with 64 percent of controls.

Despite these sensory differences, the emotional and thematic content of dreams isn’t much different in the blind and the sighted. Both groups reported about the same number of social interactions, successes, and failures in their dreams. They had the same distribution of emotions, and the same level of bizarreness.

The biggest difference between the dreams of congenitally blind participants and control participants: The blind had a lot more nightmares: around 25 percent, compared with just 7 percent of the later-onset blind group and 6 percent of controls.

What might explain this plethora of nightmares? The researchers don’t know.

Other new research indicates that people who have been blind from an early age view the world in black and white. But, more research needs to be done. Some totally blind people say they have the ability to use echolocation, the same phenomenon that allows bats to navigate their physical space.

Some people who are totally blind report seeing images of parents, grandparents and other relatives in dreams. 

Psychologists who use Jungian Dream Theory believe this is an attribute of the Collective Unconscious. 

The hypothesis is that person’s DNA carries imprints of the family’s Collective Unconscious.

 So, you are what you dream you are.