Can blind people see visuals in their dreams?

Dream is one of the most powerful words in one’s vocabulary. There are two kinds of dream, one that occurs while we sleep, and another that keeps us awake. But what about those who cannot see? They can certainly achieve the second, but what about the first kind, the one we see when you doze off to the dreamland?
Can blind people ‘see’ in their dreams? Are visual imagery part of those dreams? If so, how is it possible? In order to understand that we have to dial back to the most important question of all. What are dreams?
What are dreams?

Dreams are experiences that occur in a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive, and emotional occurrences during sleep. They are a series of thoughts, images, sensations, and emotions that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Dreams happen during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep when the brain is most active. However, dreams can also occur during non-REM stages.
Our experiences, fears, desires, memories, and daily life can influence dreams.

Do visually challenged people ‘see’ in their dreams?
Blind people can see visuals in their dreams. Because dreams are drawn from memories, and people who lost vision at some point in their are still able to draw visuals from these memories.
In the 2014 study, ‘The sensory construction of dreams and nightmare frequency in

congenitally blind

and late blind individuals’, the researchers confirmed that people who are not born blind and lost vision later experience visual imagery in their dreams.
Christopher S. Baird, author of The Top 50 Science Questions with Surprising Answers and Associate Professor of Physics at West Texas A&M University states that people who are congenitally blind too can dream in visual images.
Human vision involves three steps. The first is the transformation of a pattern of light to electrical impulses in the eyes. The next step is the transmission of these electrical impulses from the eyes to the brain through the optic nerves. The final stage involves the brain decoding and assembling these impulses into the visual sensations we experience.
“If any one of these three steps is significantly impaired, blindness results. In the vast majority of cases, blindness results from problems in the eyes and in the optic nerves, and not in the brain. In the few cases where blindness results from problems in the brain, the person usually regains some amount of vision due to brain plasticity (i.e. the ability of the brain to rewire itself). Therefore, people who have been blind since birth still technically have the ability to experience visual sensations in the brain. They just have nothing sending electrical impulses with visual information to the brain. In other words, they are still capable of having visual experiences. It’s just that these experiences cannot originate from the outside world,” Baird shares in his blog.
A 2003 study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences confirms the same. Individuals who were congenitally blind were scanned with electrodes on their scalps as they slept. They found evidence of brain waves associated with vision during the study. A 2023 study, which observed 180 dreams of seven individuals who are blind by birth also found supporting evidence of vision-like experience in dreams.
(Pic courtesy: iStock)