Illustrated Dreams

Hey guys! Sorry for not being able to post over the weekend. I was at my natives and I had a major connectivity crisis (Yes I hail from India). Thus, I will post all the material today. But due to the way I manage my blog, the dates mentioned will be their respective dates (when I was supposed to update), so don’t get worried about that.

Initially (when I was small, around 10-ish) I used to have a lot of dreams and many of them felt like movies while some of them felt very real and close to my heart. But I have always had dreams that were visual. I never had a dream where I would just be listening to someone or where it would be just dark and not visual. So, I often wonder (honestly, I started wondering after a friend of mine asked me this):

Do Blind People Dream in Visual Images?

I read an interesting article on this (Here’s the link). It’s actually a blog by a scientist (Dr. Christopher S. Baird), and he claims that blind people do have visual dreams. The post elaborates on how the brain scans of blind people and normal people tend to be similar and even blind people tend to show brain(visual circuitry)-eye coordinated movements.

Baird explains that human vision experience consists of three steps:

• The transformation of a pattern of light to electrical impulses in the eyes
• The transmission of these electrical impulses from the eyes to the brain along the optic nerves
• The decoding and assembly of these electrical impulses into visual sensations experienced in the brain
  He claims that most blind people have a defect in their eyes and thus, they have intact parts of brain circuitry that can lead to the sensation of vision and visual images.

It is a quite convincing article in the beginning, but I tend to find it a bit difficult to digest. It is particularly easy to think that people who once had vision but lost it in their lifetime may have visual dreams. But it’s quite difficult to believe that people who never have seen the world can have visually illustrated dreams. Here is the link to a YouTube video by Tommy Edison (a blind youtuber), who says he doesn’t see any visual dreams.

I guess it’s settled.