Inside the Dream of the Blind

By Udesinanna Stephen

I recently attended a workshop orchestrated by physically challenged persons demanding inclusion in State’s budgeting. Although, I was just there as a reporter, basically observing, and then the blind persons grabbed my attention. These persons are physically good to go but have no sight. I became curious to understand what vision, images, light, colours and dreams are like to them.

This curiosity provoked me to search, and in the process of my findings, I got some interesting secondary information. Firstly, blind people see the world differently from those that have sight or those that have seen before been blind.

As a background, seers are those who experience vision. When I use the word “seer”, it has no spiritual attachment but just one who can see or experience vision”. Vision is the possibility of relating with lights, colours and shapes. Those born blind can only relate to shapes which form the pillar of their mental pictures. A mental picture is an image you can describe without its presence but based on what you have physically seen or developed. So when a car is mentioned, there is an image in your head about a car, when fish is mentioned, you can relate because you have seen fish; this is a different case for the born-blind.

The problem, according to the Sun Newspaper, doctors of the eye found that there are 300 million blind people in the world and close to seven million people in Nigeria are blind.

Unfortunately, Sahara Reporter found that “Nigeria’s ineffective inclusive education policy, aggravated by widespread fraud and infrastructure dearth, is driving more of its blind population to beg for a living”. The need to understand how the blind thinks and see is paramount so that we can actually relate with them and make them feel among in the society. It is this very problem that has inspired this piece.

Going forward, what is dream? For me, dream is simply an audio, visual or audiovisual display that plays before us when we sleep; dreams are created by what we see from the outside world. It is developed from what we register in our brains. So both the blind and the seers dream what is registered in their brains. But how can those born blind dream when they have not seen any image?

Persons who became blind from an early age (e.g. 10 or 20); maintain images they have about people and things exactly how last they have seen them. So when their friends talk to them, the only mental pictures they create are that of 20 years old time, and when they dream, they only see people the way they saw them last.

However, concerning persons they do not see when they have their sight, they create and register in their memory an image about them. So when these persons speak, the image they have registered them with comes up.

In respect to those born blind, this is a critical one; they have never seen colours, lights or images. They create shapes about persons or things inwardly and register them in their minds. They dream in sounds.

Although, studies contend that in as much as they have never experienced vision, whatever image appears to them would not be recognised as an image because it makes no meaning since they have no visual experience.

In fact, what vision is can never be completely understood by these persons unless they experience it because sight requires experiential knowledge. If you have your sight, it will be challenging to believe that those born blind can never deeply understand vision.

To bolster the above, let’s see this analogue, honey is sweet and requires experiential knowledge; if you have not tasted honey, regardless of the description of honey, you will never understand its taste until you taste it. When you dream about licking honey, I can categorically say; you can never imagine the taste from dreams because it has not been registered in your brain.

This research would have been easy if people born blind could tell us what they “see”. No! They know little about the realism of images or light (vision). Although, scientists are developing techniques to help them unravel their mental image reserve.

For those that can see, they dream in black and white, never in colours. Can you tell what colour you have seen in your dreams? Notwithstanding, this piece is grounded in science; supernatural drives could alter these standards.

Conclusively, what you view as mango is not how the blind sees it. When you mention stars, what seers create in their minds differs from what those born blind create. Therefore, a better understanding of these people will help us relate with them and give them the chance to contribute to the development of the society. So next time you see a blind man say some kind words to their ears.