Dreams of the Disabled
This is now the fourth installment of our dream series. Previously we’ve talked briefly about hypnogogic hallucinations (and compared dreaming to watching a movie), compared dreaming to a computer simulation, and described a rather bizarre dream about camping. All of these examples and insights, however, have come from two very average, completely able-bodied individuals. If you’re blind, dreams aren’t much like movies or computer simulations. They don’t come with the bizarre visuals of floating around a lake atop of a couch. If you’re deaf, you aren’t going to be woken in the middle of a REM cycle to a hyper-realistic noise in your dreams. So…what do the dreams of blind and deaf individuals “look” like? And what about those with other disabilities?
A group of researchers performed a study in 2014 to find out some of the differences between how sighted versus blind people dream. The most staggering (and possibly most obvious) difference found was that all of the non-blind participants reported visuals in their dreams, whereas none of the congenitally blind (blind from birth) participants did.
The congenitally blind used many more of their senses in their dreams than the control group did. 26 percent of the blind participants tasted in a dream, compared to 7 percent of controls. 40 percent of the blind smelled, compared with 15 percent of controls. 67 percent of the blind used their sense of touch, compared to 45 percent of controls. And 93 percent of the blind reported hearing, compared with 64 percent of the controls.
Overall, both the blind and non-blind participants reported dreaming about very similar things — just in different ways. The most notable difference, however, was that the blind participants had around 25 percent nightmares, whereas the control group only had around 7 percent. This may be a nod towards the “threat simulation theory” about why we dream, which we touch on briefly in a previous blog post. Essentially, since the blind do, unfortunately, have to deal with a lot of more-threatening situations in their day-to-day lives than the average sighted person does, it makes sense for their brains to be more likely to rehearse these threatening situations while they sleep.
In a similar study conducted on deaf individuals, it was found that they experienced more sensory vividness in their dreams (notably taste, smell, pain, and temperature), as well as a higher rate of nightmares and lucid dreams than the controls.
This all makes it seem like the way we dream might just be a direct mirror of the way we experience consciousness: using the senses that we use every day, communicating with others the way we always do, and feeling familiar emotions. But that might not always be the case. In this study, it was found that congenitally paraplegic individuals found themselves experiencing movement in their dreams to the same extent as the control participants. One of the deaf-mute participants in the study also described speech in her dreams as being experienced without sign language and without speech, as if it were telepathy.
Scouring blogs and forums for some first-hand reports also presented some interesting findings. There are many accounts from individuals with a wide array of physical disabilities who lose their disability in their dreams. Hellen Keller claimed to have “visions of ineffable beauty” in her dreams. Some deaf or blind people have a sense of “just knowing” where things are in their dreams. Some deaf people also communicate in a more telepathic way, or a way free of language in their dreams, whereas some see their dreams portrayed like movies with captions, or communicate with others using sign language, even if that person doesn’t know sign language. In one Reddit post, a common dream (or perhaps nightmare) among the visually impaired was one of driving a car, followed by realizing that they are blind and why are they driving?!
Dreaming is a completely individual experience, but maybe the experience doesn’t vary as greatly between people as we might think. Blind, deaf, disabled, or able-bodied, we can all be wowed by surreal experiences in our dreams, wake up with our hearts racing after a nightmare, or be jolted awake by that sinking feeling in our stomachs when we’ve fallen off an edge. Let us know how you dream in the comments below!
