Dreaming in Shadows

Navigating Blindness Through Dreams

Muhammad Talha Masood
Know Thyself, Heal Thyself
5 min readAug 18, 2024

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Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Dreams are perhaps one of the strangest phenomena in this world. A state of mind in which you relive the best or the worst moments of your life, in which your heart’s innermost desires come to life, in which you face your greatest, most terrible fears. Desires and fears that, although not known to you, affect you as if they are real. Thus, dreams mirror one’s deepest thoughts, reflections of the feelings hidden in a person’s innermost recesses, like a movie directed, produced and written by your subconscious for you to watch in a surreal mental cinema.

However, even more peculiar are the dreams of those who can hear the songs of the birds, but can not see them fly, who can feel the warmth of the sun on their faces, its redness behind the closed eye, but cannot see the sun rising or setting, who can listen to the laughter of their family and friends but cannot see the smiles etched on the faces of their loved ones, who can only dream, envision and see through a blackening haze, the merest whisper of a shadow, a blurry silhouette, perchance a figment of a blind man’s imagination.

Dreams, amazement and confusion among the sighted are even more peculiarly strange to the not-so-unsighted.

In the early days of my blindness, I did not actually register the change in my dreams. Perhaps I got used to the darkness around me because I was just a child of eight years old when I met my accident. Nevertheless, it was not until my sixth grade of schooling that I gave the thought any real consideration, as in thought about the real matter itself.

I was sitting in the lounge, listening to a TV show, when the telephone rang. I went to answer it and discovered that a student named Amna of FJ University was doing a project on blinds and their dreams.

She wanted to know everything about my dreams. I told her that at the beginning of my blindness, I could distinguish colored outlines of shadows. I call those images shadows because shadows are nearest to those vague, incomprehensible, vapour-like images. I then explained to her the complete absence of light and described that curtain of darkness that had suddenly fallen upon my life. My dreams became secondary, lost and broken in the fragments of my now not–so–seeing eye.

Still, in my early dreams as a blind young man, I used to have glimpses of blurred and broken images of the places I had visited and distorted pictures of my family and friends, mostly of my parents and siblings, with fear and anxiety wrapped around me like a strong python who intends to kill you by coiling itself around your body. Such dreams resulted in my waking up and calling for my parents. Also, they haunted my nights and made me sleepless, but how long can one avoid sleep?

So eventually, I returned to my sleepless slumber at night. With the passage of time, I grew accustomed to my unusual dreams; I was evolving even as a blind man, oblivious to the so-called real world; I created a world of sound and memories, I gave colors to voices, each person having a distinct personal shade, a hue; dream life or real life, it was my life, the one that I lived with a calm and a poise, and with frequent bouts of temper losses to add color to my life.

As I journeyed deeper into the world of sounds, the memories of the past became half-forgotten, and so the shadow-like people in my dreams lost their coloured outlines to become denser darkness, but mother nature is not so unkind to deprive me of the ability to distinguish people from one another. Hence as a recompense for my loss, I was given a unique gift of distinguishing people by the colors of their voices. Thus, people in my dreams, who had become mere darkness with little density, evolved into voice lamps in my lightless world. Their colored voices became as precious to me as water is to fish, water to the thirsty, sunshine to deprived-forced-into-isolation-inmate. And they fell on my ears as rain falls on a barren land, reviving it.

After listening to the metamorphoses of my dreams, Amna asked me to narrate one of my recent dreams. I could not, however, because it is challenging to narrate a dream in which only voices can be heard. She concluded my interview, thanked me and dropped the call.

Since that interview, I had been waiting for a dream that would be rich in detail. After three years, when I was struggling with the school administration, I finally had such a dream. I found myself in the garden of our home in Sialkot, guiding my present-day friends. The memories of the old days returned with the sharpness of a knife, each detail etched in my mind with intense clarity.

That night I found myself in Sialkot, in the garden of our home, as a guide to my present-day friends. My heart was full of dread and anxiety, which made it harder to breathe, and as I moved about in the house, I realized how things had changed; everything was the same and yet distinctly different. I was actually seeing it all but through the veil of a thick mist. The outline of the swing on which my sister and I played was half visible, and so were many other little things, which jarred and pierced my soul, all that and more, lost in the shadows of my blindness. I was nostalgic for things I remembered, not sights from another lifetime, another existence. The darkness within is far more terrifying than the darkness outside. My entire life was a halo of overwhelming darkness surrounding me like air, inescapable, everywhere. The darkness again engulfed me; voices ebbed, diminished and then got lost in the blur of my dreams, my waking dreams and my sleeping rages. And I woke up. And then an odd tear in the corner of my eye, the mist that flowed, unchecked and unabashed, this unbridled sorrow that knew no bounds, took me unaware in my dark sleep.

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Muhammad Talha Masood
Know Thyself, Heal Thyself

"Cast away an honest friend and you cast away your life, your dearest treasure." -- Oedipus Rex, Sophocles