Thread: Eye vision effect on dream vision.

I'm very nearsighted but my visual impairment doesn't impact my dream vision at all. The fact is, I am always wearing contacts or glasses, and my brain is used to seeing as clearly as if I had 20/20 vision. So since the expectation is that I will be able to see, I can see fine without any visual correction.

so the eyes have little to nothing to do with generating the images you see?

the images are generated inside your brain and you are seeing them from inside your brain?

huh..........complicated and interesting

I have never thought about this. I wear contacts/glasses and am actually legally blind without them. I have had dreams before where everything was blurry (as though I wasn't wearing my contacts...) but the majority of my dreams are very clear.

Let's think about it in another way, do blind people dream? Can they "see" their dreams? I honestly don't know the answer to this...just thought perhaps that track of thinking may get you closer to your answer.

Yes, dream images have nothing to do with your physical eyes. Your eyes are simply the conduit for raw visual information from the environment. What comes through your eyes is upside down, full of holes, and lacks any 'motion'. Only your brain fills in the holes, flips the image, and creates the sensation of motion when you see things. So everything you see in a dream is purely generated by your brain.

As for blind people dreaming with visual imagery, that would probably depend on whether they were blind from birth. If they were, they probably would not. It's like dreaming about an extra sense that humans don't possess (or thinking about another color that we can't see). But blind people who were once sighted most likely dream visually (as long as their visual cortex isn't damaged, I guess).

Originally Posted by mel_noah

Let's think about it in another way, do blind people dream? Can they "see" their dreams?

yes, easy to see using the example of a blind person.
ive heard cases of people who where blind from birth and in their dreams they are still blind.

while a 20 year old person who might have gone blind at the age of 10 still dreams with images.
so it seems your mind searchs your memory for a model to use as its image.

However, if your eye sight is blurry and that is all your mind has to draw from your memory, do that make your dreams blurry?

interesting stuff

Very interesting. Ever wonder if two people actually "see" the same color? What if the color I have come to know as yellow is actually blue to you? How would we know? The color yellow is held up, both of us agree it is yellow whether we truly "see" the same thing or not because we have been trained at birth that that color is yellow. Understand? Makes you think

I'm for the most part color blind when it comes to darker colors (which sucks when I go and pick out a "cool" new black shirt and i get home and my lady ask me "why did you get a purple shirt?!") So I would think that would have an impact on my dreams. I haven't really got an example to reference it with though since i've never really known any other types of vision except my own XD