Do we dream less as we get older?

Zinnat,

That’s just not true. As a child, I never remembered my dreams. As an adolescent, I never remembered my dreams. I’d sleep and just wake up. Now I remember like 3 dreams a night.

All I can hope for here is that you might make the attempt to take us through what you experience in your dreams. How would you describe what you experience.

With those not blind [like me] descriptions seem to revolve more around what we see in the dream. I see people at my old job or in my family or from my political activism years. I see us doing things. I see events unfolding as I see them in the waking world.

In the film Children of a Lesser God the attempt was made to explore the way in which those who hear and those who are deaf are and are not able to bridge that gap.

Admittedly, I have never had many experiences with those who are blind. So I wouldn’t pretend to understand the way in which the world appears to them. In or not in dreams.

There is only grappling to the best of our ability to communicate with those who, in any number of important ways, are different from us.

Blindness of vision is forgivable.

Blindness of the mind, is not.

It’s probably best if I describe a specific dream, one that sticks in my mind more than any other (which I’ve mentioned before). I had it when I was at school, a few days or so before we came home for the summer holidays.

I was crawling through a massive pile of rubble, consisting of bricks, broken glass, pieces of splintered wood, that sort of thing. I could feel all these things scraping the bare skin of my knees and hands, cutting them open till they bled. I could smell the dust in the air and I felt a terrible sense of desolation and destruction. It was all so vivid, even more so than real life.

That doesn’t really mean that Zinnat is wrong, much of what we remember we dream is dependant upon our state of mind, and how life is treating us. It is as he says, we dream all the time, but we don’t always remember them.

I know that I dream a lot at my advanced age, but I don’t hold on to those dreams when I awake. Maybe I should, but I know that sleep and dreams can also be a method of escapism for people in my condition, so I try to engage with the world rather than hide in sleep.

I should add that I’ve kept a daily journal, or diary, since the age of 11, and went through a phase of recording my dreams in it as well as daily events. Eventually it got to the stage that the dreams were taking up something like 90% of the text, so I eventually stopped doing it. I suppose this may have something to do with why I seem to remember them less now.

Again, for many who are not blind, it might be difficult to grapple with dreaming about bricks, broken glass and splintered wood in ways that did not involve having first seen these things in the waking world. To dream more in terms of how these things feel when the body encounters them is just something that sighted people will only be able to grasp up to a point. They are more likely to wonder how a blind person can experience a brick without ever having actually seen one.

On the other hand, blind or not, dreaming or not, we all come to have our own understanding of what a “sense of desolation and destruction” feels like.

But here the communication between people can become all the more difficult to translate into an understanding that both can agree on. Here, instead, others are thought to be blind because they don’t understand something the same way you do.

I find this interesting… as a profound hearing impaired person, soon to be
totally deaf, I have never had a single issue in my dreams with hearing loss…
always during my dreams, I can hear quite well… whereas in real life, not
so much…my handicap has never been a problem in my dreams…

my dreams are not so much about what I can’t do, as my dreams
are about how much I can do…I can fly and sing and fill an entire
room with laughter… things I can’t do in real life…are dreams some
sort wish fulfillment? things that aren’t possible in real life are possible
in my dreams…are dreams possibly, an intention to seek out
and identified what my possibilities are? what is possible for me,
is what dreams are all about? not what you can’t do, but about what you can do?

I wonder…

Kropotkin

It’s the same for me, of course. No matter how many times people try and explain to me what it’s like to see things, I just can’t imagine it. And it’s something I’ve tried to do my whole life. It’s endlessly fascinating, mainly, I think, because it’s impossible to ever comprehend what the other person perceives. I have probably bored people to distraction asking them to describe things.

This is very much the experience of people who lose their sight at some point in their life, too. Their dreams are full of visual imagery.

I recommend that you keep your fears to yourself and those you trust most, because people will tend to use them against you throughout life.

Of course for me, here at ILP, the fascination and the frustration revolves more around endless failures to communicate regarding all of our conflicting moral and political value judgments. But I suppose the exasperation can be even more the case with something that everyone does in fact agree exists. In or out of a dream, a brick, broken glass or splintered wood can be held in our hands, touched, the weight of felt. We can come to experience what we ourselves perceive them to be through various senses in different contexts. But if someone is not able to actually see the brick in her hand or as part of a wall or a building…that’s just a fact of life. Communication here between those who see and those who don’t can only go so far.

It’s like that scene in the movie A Scent of a Woman where the blind Colonel Slade has Charlie Simms come to the limo and, with his hands, explores the contours of his face. His own way of “seeing” him. Here I suppose beauty would be in the fingers of the beholder. But, as they say, when someone lacks vision or hearing, their other senses often become all that much more acute.

Bricks, and all the other things, are just objects. I suspect you can’t remember the first time you saw one or in what context, but you know exactly what they are. Likewise for me, I can’t remember the first time I felt one, or picked one up, for example, but I nevertheless know exactly what they are, by touch. It’s rare that I’ll touch something and not know what it is, or at least have a pretty good idea, and even if I don’t, a little investigation will soon provide the answer. All these memories are no doubt imprinted on us when we are very little.

As for that face thing, I know it’s common in fiction, but blind people don’t actually do it, or request it (at least, almost never, I suppose in the history of the world there may have been exceptions). Touching someone’s face is a sign of intimacy. And also quite unpleasant and extremely invasive, in the wrong context. Beauty and attraction are always in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and for me, the first thing I always notice about a person is their smell.

True. But then we are still confronted with the question, “Is there any difference at all between the reality of those who can see bricks and those who cannot…given a particular context?”

I’m not blind myself and I have had no extensive personal experiences being around those who were blind. So, sure, my reaction to that question would be more intuitive. It seems that the reality would be different but I’m not able to explain how. Here we would need the input of those – blind and sighted – who have thought it through in a far more sophisticated manner.

On the other hand, if someone was blind and another was throwing bricks at him, a lack of sight could make all the difference in the world.

Again, the gap between what I think I know about blind people and what blind people know is not true – or seldom true – is no doubt significant. Some of the misconceptions are explored here: lifeofablindgirl.com/2017/07/06 … blindness/

From the life of a blind girl website.

And I’m sure that within the blind community itself there are conflicting points of view about any number of things.

Everything here will revolve around each of our own actual experiences being in a relationship with someone who is blind. We can learn new things with each encounter. But it would seem inevitable that the communication will eventually breakdown over some things simply because someone is not blind or someone is not sighted.

Then it’s back to similar complexities explored in regard to hearing and deaf people interacting in Children of a Lesser God. Although [to the best of my recollection] the William Hurt character was not himself deaf. There the controversary revolved around whether deaf people should learn to speak.

Or think of the “sense of reality” of someone like Helen Keller. In or out of dreams.

Are you asking if there’s any underlying difference in the reality of something, depending on how it’s perceived by a blind or sighted person? I can’t really answer that. What I know is that I find it impossible to imagine what it’s like to see something.

A lot of people who have been blind since birth have a very good sense of echo-location. I’d have a pretty good idea if someone was throwing something at me, bricks or otherwise.

There are indeed a lot of misconceptions around. One of the worst, in my opinion, mainly because it’s really annoying, is that sighted people should avoid saying the word “blind” around blind people, or anything to do with sight. It’s really embarrassing when that happens.

I know there’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about cochlea implants, and they’re very into the idea that sign language, specifically BSL (British Sign Language) is a genuinely separate language in its own right, and is central to their identity. If they learn to speak, using cochlea implants for example, this will be taken from them. Or so some of them believe, anyway.

There are going to be different perceptions…reality understood in different ways…but the difference itself is always going to be more or less important depending on the context.

If both a blind and a sighted person are able to hold a brick in their hand and have come to understand why bricks exist in the world – what they are used for – that might be as far as it need go.

But if a sighted person is told to place the brick on a table that was just brought into the room, she sees the table and immediately walks over to it. The blind person may have be instructed as to where the table is. The sighted person immediately sees a brick in a building or in a bridge or as part of some other structure while the blind person may or may not have to be told about the building or the bridge or the structure…and without ever having actually seen it.

Or suppose the discussion shifts to whether or not a house someone wants built would be more appealing if constructed of brick or stone or wood or glass and metal. How here would a blind and a sighted person discuss it given the differences in perception?

Here, to me, there just seems to be a greater possibility for gaps in communication. But, again, what can I really know about the many possible implications/consequences of this unless I do become involved in a relationship with someone who is blind.

Here of course it would be the sighted person’s turn to wonder how that would works.

Perhaps the best solution for both blind and sighted people who meet for the first time would be to get that part right out in the open. How much experiences does the sighted person have being around blind people? What assumptions or prejudices about the blind does the sighted person have? Then through the experience of being together both can learn from each other where the communication may or may not break down. They are just going to have to accept that from time to time there may not be a frame of mind able to be shared in the same way.

Again, in the film Children of a Lesser God, I recall the biggest controversy of all revolved around the deaf learning to speak. And this revolved around the extent to which the deaf may or may not want to interact at all with those in the hearing community.

Given your own experiences, are there similar controversies/conflicts within the blind community? As it relates to the community itself and insofar as the blind interact with the sighted community.

I would know immediately where the table is. I click my tongue and I can judge where objects are in a room, and the size of the room too. I can also tell if a wall I’m near is made of brick, or something else that deflects sound differently. Personally I prefer wood, it’s much nicer. Softer somehow, and more natural. I don’t have to touch it to know what it is. Stone is good for monumental purposes, rather than a place to live. I don’t like metal structures at all, though. I also get claustrophobic, and hate being in cars, for example.

I have to admit to having mixed feelings about the blind community and the extent to which it’s something I’m happy to be a part of. Since leaving school I have increasingly distanced myself from it. The controversies and arguments keep going round and round, without any resolution, but each time getting more political. I do, however, miss playing sports, which we did at school.

Here, of course, everything is turned around. You have this capability which creates a reality in your head that most who are not blind would find very difficult to understand. But, as with all people, blind and sighted, there is the complex interaction of factors in the lives we live that predispose us to like certain things. And, with regard to most of these personal prejudices, there does not appear to be a way for us to pin down whether we ought to prefer bricks or stone or metal or glass.

That’s the part that is always tricky. And in almost all communities. There are those things that, in being part of the community, come to fulfil you. But whenever you have people interacting in a community there are going to be differences of opinions about any number of things. Do something this way, or that way? Sometimes compromises can be reached, sometimes not.

So, someone can be pulled and tugged into and away from the community. Stay or go? It’s almost always a very personal thing that you may or may not be able to communicate to another. Like trying to understand what pulls and tugs on those in, say, an Amish community.

It’s just that those who have had little or no interaction with the blind or the Amish [either in or out of a community] may find it hard to grasp why some things become controversial.

It’s all a question of taste, of course, for everyone. I like wooden structures because I very much like being in the woods, in nature, among the trees. This is also why I like camping. Tents can be pretty small, but I don’t get claustrophobic in them as they are not solid. If it were practical to do so, I would live outdoors all the time, where I feel most free. As it is, I still make the effort to go camping whenever I can.

As for the blind community, I have a particular disagreement with the RNIB, the UK’s main organisation for blind people, especially with a new set of policies they adopted a few years ago, and have had nothing at all to do with them for a long time. They perform valuable services, and help many people, but have become far too politicised, in my opinion. Perhaps they felt they had no choice, but it can all get very tedious.

Yes, this is true for both the blind and the sighted. So, it would really come down to a blind person and a sighted person going camping together. They share the same experience but one can embody it visually and one cannot. And here the communication would seem to derive more from the extent to which they knew each other. If someone who was sighted met someone who is blind and they went camping, everything would seem to revolve around figuring out a way to share the experience, to communicate what they experience from two different frames of mind. The times when that doesn’t matter and the times when, depending on the people as individuals, it might matter. The closer they become the less that part about being blind or sighted matters.

This and the attitude that the sighted person has acquired about those who are blind. All the complexities intertwined in a relationship in which being blind might become a factor. What is the right attitude to take? How ought one who is not blind to think and feel about someone who is? For me, with very little experience being around blind people, I suspect I would be concerned about saying or doing the wrong thing.

Would you be willing to explain in more detail what that disagreement revolved around? What new set of policies? Why did you choose to back away from this organization?

With politics, that can revolve around either personal relationships in a group or social relationships among groups. It can also pertain to who has the power to reward or punish certain behaviors. Specifically, what those behaviors are and who is able to actually enforce certain rules regarding them.

Or do you mean something else here?