Key takeaways
- Yes, blind people dream.
- What they dream depends on when they lost their sight.
- People born blind generally dream through sound, touch, smell, taste and emotion rather than pictures.
- People who lost their sight later often still see images in dreams, and those images tend to fade over the years.
- In one study, people born blind reported more nightmares than people who lost sight later and sighted people.
Yes, blind people dream. People born blind dream through sound, touch, smell, taste and emotion, and rarely see images. People who lost their sight later in life often keep seeing images in their dreams, though these tend to fade over the years. Research also suggests that blind people report more nightmares than sighted people.
Can Blind People Dream?
Yes, blind people dream. Dreaming comes from the brain during sleep, not from the eyes, so it does not depend on being able to see. What changes is the material the dreams are made from. That depends on whether a person was born blind or lost their sight later.
What Does the Research Show?
The most cited study on this question comes from a Danish and Canadian team led by Amani Meaidi. It compared 11 people born blind, 14 people who became blind later in life and 25 sighted people. Each person kept a dream diary for four weeks, so the researchers were comparing real dream reports rather than answers to a one-off questionnaire (Meaidi et al., 2014).
A later systematic review pulled together 41 studies on the dreams of people born or early blind. Its authors concluded that visual imagery in the dreams of people born blind is disputed and, if it happens at all, very rare, and that the evidence is limited and contested (Ilic et al., 2023). That is why this article says “researchers disagree” rather than giving a flat yes or no.
Do Blind People Have Visual Dreams?
It depends on when sight was lost. Researchers do not agree on every detail, so it helps to take the groups one at a time.
People born blind
Researchers disagree about whether people born blind ever have visual imagery in their dreams. Many studies find none. What they do find is that these dreams contain more sound, touch, taste and smell than the dreams of sighted people.
People who lost sight in early childhood
Researchers believe these people have some visual content in their dreams, more than people born blind and less than people who lost sight later. Studies use different age cut-offs, so there is no single age at which this changes. Proposed thresholds range from roughly two and a half years old to somewhere between about five and seven, and the 2023 review notes that these figures come from small studies and are not settled (Ilic et al., 2023).
People who lost sight later in life
Many keep visual dreams, with faces, places and sometimes colour. In a Danish study, the longer a person had been blind, the shorter, less clear and less colourful their visual dream images were. Touch and body sensation also become more prominent.
| When sight was lost | Visual images in dreams | Other senses |
|---|---|---|
| Born blind | Generally none; whether any visual imagery exists is still debated | More sound, taste, smell and touch than in sighted people |
| Early childhood | Some, more than people born blind and less than later-blind people | Varies; age cut-offs are not settled |
| Later in life | Often faces, places and sometimes colour, fading over the years | Touch and body sensation become more prominent |
Can Blind People See in Their Dreams?
Some can and some cannot, so people who ask whether blind people can see in their dreams get different answers depending on the person. People who lost sight later often see images in their dreams. People born blind generally do not experience pictures, but their dreams are still full of experience: the sound of a voice, the feel of a cane on pavement, the smell of a kitchen, and the emotion of a situation.
Yes. People born blind dream. What differs is the content: in the Danish dream-diary study, people born blind reported no visual content in their dreams and more sound, taste, smell and touch than sighted people (Meaidi et al., 2014).
How Do Blind People Dream?
Dreams draw on memory and on the senses a person uses while awake. A person who has never seen has no visual memories to replay, so their dreams are built from sound, touch, smell, taste, movement and feeling. This is not a lesser kind of dream. It is a different one.
What Do Blind People Dream About?
Mostly what anyone dreams about: family and friends, work, travel, worries, and everyday situations. The difference is in how those scenes are experienced, with more sound, touch, smell and taste than in sighted people’s dreams. A conversation may be a voice and a feeling of where someone is standing, not a face.
If you want to go deeper into how the age of vision loss changes dreams, read Do people born blind dream differently from those who lose sight later?
Do Blind People Dream in Colour (Color)?
People who once saw may dream in colour, although the colours tend to fade the longer they have been blind. People born blind do not dream in colour as sighted people know it. They may describe their dreams in terms of sound, touch and feeling.
Do Blind People Have Nightmares?
In the Danish study, people born blind reported more nightmares than both people who lost sight later and sighted people. In that study, about 25% of the dreams reported by people born blind were nightmares, compared with about 7% for people who lost sight later and about 6% for sighted people. The researchers suggested this may be linked to more threatening experiences in daily life, such as collisions or getting lost, and many of the nightmares involved everyday threats like traffic. The people born blind who were tested did not show signs of pronounced anxiety or depression, so higher anxiety did not explain the difference (as reported by ScienceNordic).
What Do Blind People’s Dreams Look Like?
For people who once saw, dreams can look much like sighted dreams, though the images fade with the years of blindness. For people born blind, “look like” is the wrong frame. Their dreams are closer to a lived scene: voices and footsteps, the texture of objects, where things are in space, and what the situation feels like. Whether anyone born blind has true visual imagery is still debated.
Do Blind People Have Imagination?
Yes. Imagination and dreaming do not require sight. Blind people imagine places, people and events using sound, touch, memory and spatial understanding, and the same is true in dreams.
Do Deafblind People Dream?
Yes, people who are both deaf and blind still dream. Research on the dreams of deafblind people is limited, so there is not much that can be said with confidence about what they experience.
Do Blind People Move Their Eyes During Dreams?
Sighted people make rapid eye movements during REM sleep, the stage when most vivid dreaming happens. A 2019 sleep study reported reduced rapid eye movements during REM sleep in blind people (Christensen et al., 2019). Researchers have long debated how eye movements relate to visual dream imagery, so this is a clue rather than proof of what any one person dreams.
Why Is This Hard to Study?
Dream research depends on what people remember and report, and nobody can check another person’s dream from the outside. Most studies of blind people use small groups, which makes it hard to say how far results apply to everyone. Studies also define groups differently (born blind, early blind, late blind) and use different age cut-offs. For these reasons, treat the figures above as findings from particular studies, not facts about every blind person.
Related reading: how blind people use computers and how blind and visually impaired people read and write every day.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a blind person see their dreams?
It depends on when they lost their sight. People born blind generally do not see images in dreams but experience them through sound, touch, smell, taste and emotion. People who lost sight later in life often still see images, which tend to fade over the years.
Do blind people have dreams?
Yes. Dreaming comes from the brain during sleep, not from the eyes, so blind people dream. Their dreams include emotion, movement, places and conversation.
Do blind people have nightmares?
In one study, people born blind reported more nightmares than people who lost sight later and sighted people.
Conclusion
Blind people dream, and the dreams reflect the senses and memories each person has. If your own dreams differ from what you read here, that is normal. The research describes averages from small groups, and every person’s dreams are different. If you are blind and want to share what your dreams are like, please leave a comment below.
References
- Meaidi A, Jennum P, Ptito M, Kupers R. The sensory construction of dreams and nightmare frequency in congenitally blind and late blind individuals. Sleep Medicine, 2014;15(5):586–595. PubMed 24709309.
- Ilic K, et al. Visuo-spatial imagery in dreams of congenitally and early blind: a systematic review. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 2023;17:1204129. Full text on PubMed Central.
- Christensen et al. Journal of Sleep Research, 2019;28(6):e12866, as summarised by the Sleep Foundation.
- Sleep Foundation. Can blind people dream? Overview of the research.
- ScienceNordic. Blind people have four times more nightmares than sighted people. Report on the Meaidi study.
