h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

From where do they draw images? past lives? imagination? but where is the imagination from? do they dream in concepts?, but how can you dream without a picture? Do they have sounds in their dreams? do you?
Anyone know the answer?

Well, the blind who do still make images (not dreaming but on paper for example) probably could see at one time. It is very easy to dream without pictures... the deaf don't think with words but rather with concepts, I don't see how blind dreaming would be any different using concepts and words, sounds. And, of course they have sound in their dreams as much as any other person (blindness affects the eyes, not the ears), yes, i have sounds and music in my dreams...

I dont have sounds in my dreams (that ive ever noticed anyway), maybe i do, ill have to pay more attention.... I just thought if they (blind people) didn't have images, maybe they had sounds, but you have both - no fair!!!

A friend who went blind when he was 9 reckoned he still dreamt in colours, but thought they were getting more muted as he got older. Definitiely heard sounds and also felt textures: eg could feel cat fur or hairy tweed jeckets.

There is a theory about symbols and themes that recur in dreams and in the subconscious which are intrinsic to our thinking patterns. Tiny babies dream, too. They dream a lot in fact, have a higher proportion of REM sleep, which drops as you get older.

Some objects or events occur in peoples' dreams which they can never have experienced in real life. Some of these are even supposed to be independent of the culture you grow up in. So blind people presumably have these images stamped on their subconscious, too.

I remember reading a study on a small girl who painted endless pictures of horrific spiders and stuff. This was interpreted as a hatred or fear of her mother, due to her mother basically rejecting the child, when the second child was born. The spider is universally a symbol of female domination, but this little girl can't have consciously KNOWN that, it was an image that she used instinctively to express what she was feeling.

All theory, perhaps something that still has to be researched. I'm not sure if I believe it. But these studies always sound so convincing at the time.

So perhaps blind people still conceive these basic symbols, or perhaps they are so used to perceiving with their other four senses, that they dream more with them. After all, people do have conversations in dreams. I can't remember ever smelling anything in a dream, but I may have done, so why shouldn't a blind person, whose sense of smell is more developed?

So where do we get these images FROM? Is this conclusive proof of past lives?.... I mean we cant just make them up now can we? or can we?

I have a friend who theorises that everything we dream comes from some aspect of our current life, something we have seen or heard or even just read about or heard described, that we have 'put images to', sometimes we haven;t conciously recognised that we have seen it or heard it or whatever, but it's made its way into out subconcious and resurfaces in the form of dreams.

I personally prefer to think that dreams are the way our 'higher power' communicates with us (whether that higher power be your subconcious or another entity or whatever you choose to believe), So all our dreams have some sort of message. Some of us are better at interpreting than others, and sometimes we, unfortunately, get the wrong message, but then 'they/it' just tried another way of letting us know. In that case blind people would dream just the same, but without the images..... Hmmmm

Through countless aeons I have spoken in the dreams of man, but I can't remember ever leaving a bad smel

Nor smell, for that matter.

Supposing we do draw images from past lives then, what about in our first life, what do we dream in that?

which brings me back to new-born babies. No one's explained that yet either.

they could dream "pictures", but not know that they are pictures if they were born blind...if they were not born blind, then well...they saw at one piont in thier lives didnt they?
they need to make the internet accecible for the blind

But indi where do they get the pictures FROM?????

I agree they should make the internet accessible for the blind, in fact i beleive they sort of have, with the use of talking computers and voice activated commands etc, most blind prople would have access - if only one of them would come to this conversation and tell me what they dream - Ive been humming and haahing about this for years, Id love a definitive answer, but i dont know any blind people...

This is just a theory.

For some reason I am reminded of something I heard about / read about / saw a show about that mentioned that all human beings project a magnetic field created by the flow of electrons along their nervous system. With that in mind it could seek to describe many "psychic" phenominon, including this where does dream imagery come from. Say you think of a domineering woman, you make the subconscious comparison to a black widow spider, this whole association gets "ghosted" onto your magnetic aura (much like a badely tuned television). Now say several people make this association. Or even hundreds. Or thousands. Or more. All these people are making this association and unknowingly projecting it into their magnetic aura. These magnetic auras overlap and, as magnetic fields effect one another, this association is passed on person to person. Your conscious mind can't interpret these random bits of information but your superconscious can and it communicates these associations back to your conscious through your dreams via the subconscious. You with me? Basically I'm theorizing that there is this field of superconscious knowledge that is constantly flowing around us, created by us. I read somewhere that people that hermit themselves away from large populations begin to suffer certain mental breakdowns ... much like people who suffer from lack of sleep (ie. lack of dreams). Maybe dreams are simply the interface humanity (and other dreaming species like dogs) uses to tap into the web of collective thought. Maybe we are a "hive mind" or even some sort of strange supercomputer created to solve a problem for a race of transdimensional beings.

I like your thinking Tenebros......

A major current theory is that "Dreaming" is the brain's way of checking that it is functioning correctly. The images you see would be when it is checking the memory bit , and then the differenct cognisence areas are checked. If a person was blind because there eyes didn't work (the most usual cause) then this area of the brain would work just fine and so the blind person would dream in pictures. Whether these pictures would be recognisable to the non-blind person as the objects they are to the blind person is unknown.

However, a simple experiment: Get a friend to put something which is unknown to you in a lightproof bag. Using touch only try to discern what the object is...you should "see it in your mind" as you get more and more information from touch - and I'd guess that a blind person would "see" these same sorts of thing in their dreams.

Great theory Duncan- I like it....

Id be interested what you think about my other conundrum
(see 'colour behind your eyelids' conversation, or 'colour' from my page)

a sort of nightly scandisk?

This question is one i have given a little thought to, and i have asked the few blind people ive known, some of them cant actually explain what it is they dream of, they say you have to experience it.

Personally id just like to know what it is that _I_ dream about, i can never remember my dreams even though having them is part of the sleeping process (so ive been told).

Ive been told that on average humans have 3 dreams a night and that they lst on average 30 seconds - how amazing is that.... they seem to take so much longer.
I almost always remember my dreams, but only as soon as i wake up, the memory fades as the day goes on and even though I may remember the initial feeling of the dream I cant actually seem to 'get hold' of the images or even really remeber what happened - kind of like trying to remember a movie I watched when I was drunk - cant wuite figure out the plot even though it all made so much sense at the time.

i had a friend who kept a 'dream diary' next to his bed and wrote down his dreams as soon as he woke up. He started waking up during the night and writing before he was really awake and before too long noticed that his dreams seemed to follow on night after night adn that people he'd never met, where all getting together in his dreams night after night and having long and complicated conversations with each other that he had no idea about nor could understand. Understandably he got a bit freaked out and stopped the dream diary - he refused to show it to anyone (fair enough) but it freaked him out and gave me a new perspective on dreams. He said there was all sorts of stuff in them that he'd written down that then went on to happen in the ensuing days. Scary!!! When he read it in the cold light of day it was in about 3 different hand writings (ie each time someone different was talking there was different hand writing), and he didn't even remember writing it, let alone dreaming it. makes you wonder whats going on in our heads doesn't it!!

i think that blind peeps do not actually see objects like chairs and gallons of milk...but coloured shapes....? Maybe they can feel stuff too....i dunno...

Does anyone else here things in thier dreams....? Like music...?
I hear music...U sually it is the same....but i dont remember ever hearing it any where else...I usually wake up in the middle of a dream and will have the music stuck in my head for the rest of the day...