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Meera Seth's picture

Do Blind People Dream?

Submitted by Meera Seth on Mon, 02/19/2007 - 10:46pm.

The short answer to this question is, in fact, yes.

A relatively recent study conducted by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz has built on this information, providing interesting details to this phenomenon. They took a sample of 372 dreams from fifteen blind individuals, resulting in two independent analyses.

For the first analysis, a particular kind of software program created for the purpose of working with dream narratives was used to register the presence of the five senses in the dreams. With this equipment, it became clear that those individuals who had been blind from birth or very early in childhood had no visual imagery whatsoever, however did yield a high percentage of taste, smell, and touch references.

The second analysis revealed that according to several coding categories, the dreams included a high percentage of locomotion- and transportation-related dreams. Both the presence of sensory references and movement in these dreams are apparently evidence for the link between a dream's subject matter and conscious thought.

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