Thread: Blind people, daydreams and lucidity

If they were born blind, they can't daydream visually, they don't understand what seeing is like and can't form an image in their mind. If they remember being able to see, probably yes.

I'm not 100% sure to the second question, though I imagine if they were born blind it would actually make it harder to become lucid since some dreamsigns can be visual and this limits their ability to have visual dreamsigns. On the flipside, if they weren't born blind, being able to see in a dream would be a dreamsign on its own.

Blind people can have visual dreams if they have had sight at some part in their life.
However, if they were born blind then they wouldn't even know what vision is, it would be as alien and unintuitive to them as four-dimensional space is to us.
It would be as if an ordinary person heard of some sense called "awesomeseption" or whatever, and tried to understand how one does to "awesomesept" things, just as a comparison.

But I suppose one way to explain sight to blind people could be to explain that it is a sense that allows them to navigate their surroundings without needing to use echolocation.

Do blind people daydream with images, as we all do, or not ?

Congenital blindness, or people who have been blind since a very early age (born, or as a children), don't daydream or dream with images.
People who became blind at some point but could see before still dream with images.
What's interesting to consider is that "dream light" is not the same as sensory light, they are simply 2 signals that the brain interprets in the same way. I could be wrong, but I think this is the reason why you can dream with images if you had the ability to see at some point in your life.

And the same question for any kind of acquired sensorial impairment like deafness

I'd say same, but with greater chances of lucidity, because of the arguments mentioned above.

One last thing: if you became blind/deaf at some point in your life, the best way to achieve lucidity seems clearly to be checking whether you are seeing or hearing something. It can only mean one thing: you are dreaming, or someone implanted something in your brain without asking you (extremely unlikely xD).

And regarding lucidity, would it be easier for them, specially if their condition is old ?

Hm, I wouldn't say so. The smashing majority of sensory information you receive is visual, so you would be depriving the individual from reacting to a large number of dream cues: they would have an harder time perceiving their surroundings, an harder time identifying some errors with the plot, a long with some other inherent benefits from being able to see.

None the less, they could still use many tools to become lucid such as PM/habit, context (why am I hearing my uncle that lives in the other side of the world if I'm not using a telephone), etc. As you can imagine though, their dream content is different from people who can/could previously see, mostly composed by sounds and sensations, making (imo) the experience much less susceptible to create lucidity from.