Although blind people cannot see, they often still possess the brain regions that enable vision. Does this mean that blind people can dream in visual images?
In some cases, they can. A 2014 study found that people who were not born blind but had lost their vision later in life sometimes reported visual experiences in their dreams. These dreams likely drew from memories from when they still had sight. However, the earlier a person had lost their vision in life, and the longer they were blind, the less likely they were to see images in dreams, the study noted.
“A person blind at age 7 or before who has been blind for, say, 20 years, loses virtually all visual experiences in their dreams,” study co-author Maurice Ptito, a visual neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, told Live Science.
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