Our dreams are often full of visual and audio sensations. Do the visually impaired people dream the same way as we do?
People who are congenitally blind or acquire blindness before the age of five will not dream of visual content. Dreams are in fact connected to the real world. It contains vivid images and visual memories. People who have never perceived any images at all or do not remember any imagery cannot create visual clues in their brains. Their dreams contain only sound, smell and tactile experiences. Since they are deprived of the sense of sight, their other senses are much more acute as a result of sensory compensation in their brains. They can therefore dream with a rich mix of sensory information other than visual data.
On the other hand, people who lose their sight after seven years old are able to see images in their dreams. For those who experience vision loss between five and seven, the result varies. Some of them can dream visually and the rest cannot.
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