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One of the less-talked-about side effects of being blind: fielding many (many!) questions from us sighted folks -- enough questions, apparently, to program a YouTube channel. Tommy Edison, who is blind, hosts the popular YouTube series "The Tommy Edison Experience," where he answers viewer questions: How do blind people use an ATM? How do blind people use paper money?
In one of his latest videos, he posts his answer to a fascinating question: How do blind people dream?
Edison explains that he's been blind since birth, so, no, he doesn't "see" in his dreams. "I think because I’ve never seen in real life, that my sub-conscious doesn’t know what it’d be like to see, either, so, no. I don’t see in my dreams,” Edison explains in the video.
“I mean, the way it works for me, is just the way my life occurs, right? So it’s all smell, sound, taste and touch," he continues. "That’s all there is. Just like your life works. I mean, you see in your life, so, obviously, you’d see in your dreams."
To someone who's always been able to see, though, that description might be surprising. (Edison dreams in Smell-O-Vision?) Most sighted people remember the images and emotions from a dream -- but smells, sounds, tastes and touches, maybe not so much.
"You guys, you’re visually driven," Edison said to me in a phone interview. "I don’t know, 'cause I’ve never seen, but I would think if there was something very prevalent -- like if there was a fire in your dream -- I would think you would remember the smell of it. Or take a bite of the hamburger, and it tastes like lobster -- that’s going to be a funny thing you'd remember."
In the video, he explains a typical dream: “I mean, just like you guys, right? Weird things happen in dreams. I mean, so here I am, it’s the bottom of the ninth. Runners on second and third, two men away -- and all of a sudden, it’s my seventh birthday. Strange!”
And as it turns out, the question "How do blind people dream?" has been tackled a surprising number of times by academics.
"One of the interesting things about this idea is people have actually studied it, specifically looking at what kind of content (blind) people have in their dreams," says Dr. Rachel Vreeman, assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, co-author of "Don't Cross Your Eyes ... They'll Get Stuck That Way!" and frequent answerer of some of our odder questions.
"It shows in these studies that people who have been blind since birth or very early in childhood have no images in their dreams," although that seems to vary, Vreeman explains. Some studies report that if a person loses his or her sight before the age of 5 will almost never have images in dreams, but a few exceptions exist. For those who go blind in middle childhood, it seems dreams can go either way -- visual or non-visual. And, as it logically follows, those who become blind later in life continue to experience some images in their dreams -- but that can fade over time, Vreeman explains.
She says at least one study suggests that transportation is a recurring theme in the dreams of many blind people -- perhaps because that's something that often gives them trouble in real life.
"The key with that is it’s your brain that’s making the dream ... It’s really what your brain has experienced and what your brain continues to experience," Vreeman says. "People who are blind tend to have a lot more smells, hearing, tactile (sensations), which people who have vision tend to not have many of those. I can’t remember a dream that I’ve ever had, and I feel like a lot of sighted people feel the same way, where there were lots of textures, lots of smells."
Edison's videos are an offshoot of his main online presence as the Blind Film Critic -- he reviews movies from the perspective of a blind person. He says after he reviewed "Inception" -- which he says he found easier to follow than most sighted people seemed to -- his viewers started asking him the "how do blind people dream" question. (A question, incidentally, he parodied in "Sh-- Sighted People Say To Blind People," his take on the sh-- X says to Y meme that was everywhere a few months ago: "Hey, when you're dreaming, can you see?")
In each video, Edison cheerfully, charmingly, gives us sighted folks his take on what it's like to live life the way he does.
"You see people -- they’re not sure what I can and cannot do. People raise their voice: 'HI, IT'S NICE TO MEET YOU.' People don’t know how to be, and that’s OK," he says. "People are curious. You don’t run into a lot of me in the world. Really, you don’t -- there’s not a lot of us, especially people who have been blind since birth."
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Interesting.
very interesting.
I've had a lot of fantasy dreams where physics were seriously disconnected from that reality, but come to think of it, I don't recall colors in dreams, or smells. I hear and see and talk and feel.
In fact, the article is kind of a let down. After all, if our dreams are key to our imagination but our dreams are limited to our senses, then our imagination can't go beyond variations on our existing memories.
Hmm, wonder what Freud would say about that?
Amazing
I'm not sure that I believe this. I have never breathed under water but in my dreams...I totally can. I have never flown with only my own body, but in my dreams I can. There is no reason that someone who can't see, shouldn't see in their dreams. Dreams come from the sub-concious, not the physical. Imagination has nothing to do with reality.
Actually theirs a very simple reason; someone who has never seen anything from the day they were born would not see things in there dreams. They don't know what it is to see. They don't know colors. Shapes they can only discern through touch. They have no idea what there favorite foods look like, only how they smell/taste and yes, even feel.
Your correct in saying that our dreams come from our subconscious. The thing is a person who has never seen anything from the day they were born doesn't have visual memories at all, much less ones hiding in there subconscious.
For people who lose there vision later in life, as they mention, it's possible for this to happen because they have visual memories to draw on. There was a time in there life when they knew what it was to see. Though it doesn't surprise me the older they get the more infrequent these visual dreams become.
I think your subconscious/dreams can only draw from what you have experienced, seen, felt, heard, tasted or smelled while awake. For example: I doubt cave men dreamed about being in cars, operating machinery, or eating cake and ice cream. And while you may be able to string together dreams of a science fiction nature from movies and books we do not actually dream of alien life forms and their environments, machinery, foods, etc. I would think blind people could easily dream of flying or breathing underwater but would experience the dream with all senses except sight.
How often have you dreamed about making out shapes with your bat and dolphin like sonar? Or visualized the world like bees do in the ultraviolet spectrum? I can't say I've ever had a dream like that, ever. Not once.
Poor Heather. You were obviously never taught anything about how the human brain develops. This is a sad commentary on our education system.
Your logical inferance that because you dream of things you can't actually do in real life, blind people MUST be able to see in their dreams, is naive at best and tragically ignorant at worst. In a nutshell, when people are infants and the brain processes stimuli (or information) from the eyes, and the part of the brain that interprets that information develops neural connections to process it. If the brain NEVER gets visual information, it NEVER develops the means to process that information of , so it doesn't know how. In poor countries where they cannot afford simple cataract surgery, doctors have found that when they fix they eyes of a person who went blind as a child, they still can't see, because the part of the brain that would have interpreted that information from the eyes never developed, so even though, they have healthy eyes, they still can't see. It's really sad.
I think blind people can see a virtual nothing within the nothingness that they see, like a ghostly depth in space that although is not full color or complex shapes... is enough to say that they saw, and for someone special to them it be all in the world and brighter than anything.
@Paramed - If the mind could only draw on what has been experienced, then there would be no sci-fi movies, books, or any other advancement of culture or science. Dreams... whether awake or asleep are what drive us to innovate and create new inventions or artifacts. If cave men did not dream, we would still be living in caves.
As someone that's been a polysomnographist, I can tell you that those blind their entire lives have had PSG's whereas they're constantly in tonic REM when dreaming, at least per what's measured on their study; they've no rapid eye movements, and thus dream sleep must be discerned by all other criteria involved in REM sleep.
Some that have lost their sight have very vivid dreams about what they've seen, especially those put on CPAP or the like and get their proper sleep stages back; some claim them to be much more vivid than when they could see, as the brain processes what it can draw on more intensely. Those that have never seen tend to move more in REM sleep, and do recount other senses being the main theme in dreams.
Dreaming is almost like the brain exercising in sleep; it's a very active stage of sleep, and the brain exercises what it knows, what is past the limits of physical possibility. For those that have always been blind, no sight..... the brain exercises what it does know and also pushes those limits. Hands, mouths, legs, etc... will move more in patients during REM sleep than what is normally expected for sighted individuals; in the sighted, it would almost be considered diagnostically abnormal REM or behavioral REM disorder.
It's always been interesting at the end of studies for patients to explain their dreams if blind; they attempt to explain 'impossible' tastes or sounds or sensations which many of us can't really understand. But, they awake refreshed; there's light sleep, deep sleep and dream sleep that should cycle throughout the night. If they're getting these, then they're fine. And, some blind do get the flying or floating senstation without the background images.... they more or less feel the weightlessness and sensation of movement.
This makes me think about the notion that God speaks to us or shows us things in our dreams. If that were the case, I would expect blind people experiencing this would see images that reflect reality as it is and not only as they are able to perceive it themselves when awake.
Heather. You dreamed you can breathe underwater. Well, you know how to breathe and your imagination just added water. That's what dreams are. Kids have nightmares all the time, it doesn't mean they were ever really chased by skeletons or purple pumpkins. You imagined what you think it would be like to breathe underwater. We all have flying dreams. How do you know you're flying? Because you see the world beneath you. If you have never had any visual images, how can you have visual dreams. How on earth can a person, blind from birth, see anything when they're asleep? Where is their point of reference?
LordP, we take what we have already experienced and string it into new and different ways of doing things. The fact that we do not dream of things that we have never had heard of or had exposure to or experience with does not limit the imagination.
I'm so glad that I stopped going to bars and getting blind.
My dreams were nowhere near as bad as the nightmares when I was awake.
Tommy E seems like an interesting, intelligent and entertaining guy.
I'll be following him in his vids.
I think you're making that up. Or you may be reflecting the ideal of 'dreams' - day dreams - not actual dreams you have experienced yourself while asleep. Dreams are very much based on reality. If you are underwater you should be experiencing breathlessness and anxiety in your dream - it's nature's way to learning how to deal with the reality, if it were to happen. I doubt you've ever flown like superman in a dream, without 'knowing' something is going to prevent a fatal fall.
I can imagine flying because I've seen birds and bugs fly. I've been on roller coasters and free falls, so I can kind of imagine what the sensation of feeling is like. But for someone who's blind, how can they see in their dreams? You don't know what a color is, you don't know what a TV looks like (a box? A round tube? What?) If I were to tell you to describe what the color blue is, how could you? It's impossible
now the question is, how many people that can see had a dream they were blind????and if you did what did you see???
Porkchop is right. You can imagine variations on anything you've experienced.
Except, how do people imagine scientific or mathematic principles that become founded in science? How does one imagine molecules, atoms, bacteria, viruses, multiple dimensions, time space warpage, black hole phenomena, etc.?
The person that tries to stiff a blind person better not let me catch'em.
Of course blind people can dream if their brains aren't damaged. Their imagination would still exist even if they had a physical problem connecting with their eyes.
Fail wildcat... epic fail
I had an aunt who was blind. She lived a totally, perfectly normal life. She worked a job in a foundry, owned her own home, cooked her own food, did gardening, had her favorite TV shows and went to the movies. She always had a seeing-eye dog who helped her (and some of them, being dogs, could be rather fiesty, like the one who would eat my aunt's lunch if she left it on the kitchen table when she went to get a cup of coffee), but beyond that she was totally independent. I remember one time when she made an entire Thanksgiving Day dinner, from the turkey to all the side dishes. In her dreams she could "see" and would describe everything.
Though all my senses are fine, there are apparent psychological limits in my dreams. While friends and relatives tell me of meeting deceased persons in their dreams and asking them how they are after death, I meet deceased persons, like my parents, in my dreams but it never occurs to me they have died. Whatever's going on: eating dinner, planting the garden, talking about TV or the kids, it's as if they're just a normal part of everyday life and I expect them to be there.
Meanwhile, my sister has dreams like the one where she met our father, knew he has died, and in the end of the dream dad begins to walk through a glowing doorway, looks back at my sister and his features have turned back into that of the young man we knew in our childhood, and he smiles and tells her to tell everyone he's fine as he disappears through the doorway.
Me, I get nothing spectacular like that, just things like, "How's the chicken?"
Maybe sis needed to reassured about the afterlife and I just missed their company!
I bet you he sleeps great. That little green light on the smoke detector lights up my entire bedroom!
Change it for one with a red light. Your eyes won't adjust to red light.
I have one with a red light, but it just seems..."creepier" XD
yeah at least he dosent have to look at lights....duh huh huh...wow what abunch of pricks...
blind people dreams, cos dreams comes from the inner most part. get info on
How does a human fly in dreams? Well, we just do. So, how can a blind person see in a dream? Well, they might simply just see. Can they see in out-of-body experiences? As in, on the afternoon I fell into a siesta and for no reason stood up walking forth and took a jump into space rotating like the milky-way extending outwards through the stratosphere into the exosphere. I once dreamt of a blind girl and her eyes zerod in unto me and our noses touched, they fell back into place as if she focused on me. Mother Teresa and her helper nuns took ahold of her though from me before we could hug. Some people, like myself don't like to be touched some certain physical bounderies become purposeful limitations respecful people set for themselves and who in order to evolve can vividly perceive what you are omnipotently imagining and do not play against your feelings, therefore if you think you see us and we're actually there then you probably see me more than anyone else could because you must have a bigger heart and see my truth. My blind aunt when I first traveled to Mexico, I went into her house and in dimlight I could swear she saw me and smiled as I approached her and hugged. She saw me for not only what I was, but who I could end up becoming as I am named after my father and the smallest of my family. I love her a lot and she lives happily with my sister in Mexico with 10 playful children around her to take care of her.
AmadoC, what are you talking about?!?!?! That was the most tangential post I've read, EVER! But you forgot the part about how the nuns rode in on the back of a dinosaur, which doesn't exist because evolution is a lie, so the nuns killed it and the blind girl was like, "what the hell is going on, I can't see". And you were like, "I don't know. I can't see either because our noses are touching and all I can see is your eyebrows". Which was weird because you have certain physical boundaries that have become personal limitations that respectful people set for themselves, which apparently doesn’t include touching someone's nose with your own, so that makes me wonder how you're going to evolve vividly after all this scandalous nose rubbing. I mean, what would your blind aunt say?! Probably nothing, because she wouldn't have seen it unless there was one of those closed captioning narrators in the room with you, the girl, the nuns, and the corpse of the dinosaur. Did you ever come back down from the exosphere?
But surely he conjures up images in his head from stories, radio, movies and stuff. He has to know what alot of things look like therefore be able to create the same thing in a dream.
Did you read the artice? The man said that his dreams contain no images.
It simply isn't possible for a person who is blind from birth to conjure up images. Their brains have no references for colors, shapes, shadows, contrasts, dimensions, etc. and can't simply create them out of thin air.
Does your brain invent colors that don't exist in our light spectrum in your dreams? No, you dream in the colors that your eyes can perceive. I'm also going to paraphrase a comment above - can you dream in sonar?
Don't assume that because your brain can create situations in dreams that it can also create an entire sensory experience. The brain is quite amazing, but there are some things that it simply is unable to do.
People who have been blind from birth can't conjure up images because there are no images in their minds to conjure. They have no idea what anything looks like and can only identify physical objects by other senses like sound and smell. Touch provides a general idea of the size, shape and texture of things but still does not provide a visual image.
@Crying shame...So even though he's possibly held a baseball he will never dream of anything round?
i have been color blind since birth. i cannot tell you how many times people will ask what is it like? what is it like for you? i think to myself. with a point of commonality to compare and contrast there is NO way for anyone who is blind, color blind, to tell someone with normal vision what it is like or vice versa. if you have had vision at one point and lost it that doesn't translate because you have seen at one point in your life so you have mental imagery to pull from. it is indeed a fascinating question but i honestly cannot think of any valid means to compare.
@Mikencolorado.. great point. I have a collegue of mine who has been "legally blind" since birth and she says she gets such questions all the time. When asked if she misses having "normal vision," she tells them she misses it as much as they miss seeing out of their elbow.
@howmanyfingers, no, at least not in the sense that you or I perceive. As human beings, it's difficult for us to perceive a view point that is so completely out of our realm of experience, but even so, I guarantee you that while his dreams may not contain visual stimuli (or his every day thoughts), that doesn't make them any less vibrant. What a blind person lacks in visual cues makes up for in the rest of their senses; Meaning, the other senses make up for the lack of sight by being more pronounced, which is why he and others who are blind can "feel" and "smell" things in dreams, whereas we cannot as well, because those senses aren't as developed.
Renee- I don't think it would go so far as to confuse blue with orange, but I do know that people with different colored irises see slightly different shades of colors. For example, my father and I debated for quite some time whether a color we both saw was a light blue or light gray. He has brown eyes and mine are hazel.
As light enters the pupil, it reflects off of the iris, so some colors like blue-grays, blue-greens, etc., can be seen as different colors by different people.
@ Renee-252019 I have often wondered the EXACT same thing. What if what I'm seeing in the sky is red and what you are seeing is purple when in fact it is all green instead but we're calling it blue? I don't know how many people I have tried to explain that question to and they don't know what I'm talking about and they say, "But because we both know that blue is blue!" But what if what I'm CALLING blue is actually red to my eyes/mind and what you're CALLING blue is actually purple to your eyes/mind. I cannot think of any way that we could know that we were seeing something different because we are both calling what we see "blue." I cannot figure out a way that this could be proven or disproven, except maybe with the dotted pictures they use to ascertain color-blindness...but still. How do we KNOW we are all actually seeing the same thing not just naming our perceptions the same way? I love that question. I'm so glad someone else wonders it, too.
Go Google amazing stories about people who have been blind since birth still can describe anything. They say they get there knowledge from previous life's. They teach the blind to tap previous life's.
I was trained in the area or Orientation & Mobility (COMS) which
teaches travel skill to person who are blind. As part of the training
(esp a long time ago) we spent almost 3 hours a day, 5 times per week
under blindfold. During the training period (almost one year I often
dream non-visually; though it has been a long time ago, I still have
"non-visual"l dreams. They are not frightening or "weird" to me, I just
don't see, but still experience the full spectrum of any other,
sometimes fantastical dream- similar to any other. In my current role
as a university professor training individuals in O&M, I conduct
"mini-research" regarding my students' dreaming. Interesting, those
who have adapted to travel without vision often experience this
phenomena; those who are still having difficult may have them but
consider such dreams nightmares. Some indicate, for lack of another
term" a dual referent in that they are exppeirncing the non-visual
dream, but simultaneously are experiencing and visul out-of-body
referent where they are visually watching themselves under blindfold.
Interesting stuff- at least to me. As a side note, just because a
person is "blind" does not mean they can't see anything. There are many
definitions and legal components of being labeled "blind" with the
majority of "Blind" people actually have quite a bit of vision - they,
in my research, will often have sighted dreams, but always within their
own personal "visual referent."
If you are interested in the vast, albeit highly specialized, field
of professionals that work with persons with visual impairments, contact
your local blindness services agency. Probably not a good idea to call
a local university as these programs are few an far between.
This is stupid, i doubt that being blind translates into one's brain being different from a seeing person.
I think you missed the point. It's not that the brain is different, it's the memories that are different.
The same way I do.
I generally have my eyes closed when I dream.
Another tree falling in the forest but no one hears it. Does it make a sound.
Media filler, so we don't have to talk about Gas prices. Imagine that !
I am an MD and I can tell you with certainty that blind people can only dream through sensors that exist in their nostrils. People of sight do not have these sensors, therefore dreaming with and through their eyes. If a person of sight loses their vision permanently, they would then develop the nostronial sensor needed for dreaming.
I assume I dream. The reason I say that is I do not remember anything I dream about. Absolutely nothing.
Both my mom and dad are blind, and they describe dreams in terms of how they "see" through things they have touched, smelled, and heard. Their descriptions are shifted to how they perceived things, and often not how we perceived them. Their reference is what they can discern, or have been told. Like my mom continually tells me I have brown hair, even though I am a blond, because that is what she thinks I should have since she has been told her and my dad have brown hair. Btw stopped trying to convince her otherwise.
Very interesting.......this is the first time in my whole life that I have been presented with this question and given the answer too.
I have a friend who is blind - he had vision until he was two. He dreamed, mostly sightless - then, he'd get a 'flash', his word, I think, and it would scare the bejesus out of him. FGK4
Well, now, there's a question for the ages...thanks again, MSN, for giving us insight on a subject that we've all wondered about -- just yesterday, I asked my wife the same question. Next to "Do dogs think?", it's one question that all inquiring minds want to know.
If dogs thought, they'd treat humans as bad as humans do.
I love this guy's way of explaining things to those of us who are sighted. He doesn't take offense that it's hard for us to comprehend what it would be like to be blind, just like it's probably hard for him to comprehend what the color of red looks like...let alone a sunset. It's refreshing to see someone who has some sort of uncommon attribute about themself (blindness, in his case) not just take offense when people ask questions. My family is bi-racial, so we get asked a lot of questions also and we take no offense. There is no need. I love this guy's attitude and how he educates the rest of us. Thank you, Tommy Edison!
How would a person blind since birth KNOW if he dreamed with images? Having never experienced them in his conscious life, what words would he use to describe them? Without a conscious context, he would simply "have a feeling" about something that, in his subconscious mind, was an image. There may be quite a lot that people know in their subconscious that remains eternally unknowable to their conscious mind. I haven't seen the studies cited, but I wonder how a scientist would even go about communicating the question of "do you dream in visions" to a person who has never possessed sight when there would be no common experience upon which to base the question.
SO what would happen if you gave someone who was blind from birth extremely potent psychedelic substances like DMT or LSD? Would they truly not see anything from it?
If they did, they would not be able to describe them as images.
I've always wondered how babies dream since they don't know language. I guess this helps explain it.
Ooo, cool question for a future post!
Edit: Hmm, this was meant to be in reply to economykiller.