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| source: nytimes.com |
Even blind
people dream, but the quality of their dreams depends upon the time or the age
when they lost their ability to see. According to Doctors Nancy Kerr of the
Department of Psychology at Oglethorpe University and G. William Domhoff of the
Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in
their December 2004 issue of Dreaming, they write that "individuals blinded before the
age of about five report no visual imagery in dreams as adults, whereas those
blinded after about the age of seven are likely to retain visual imagery in
dreaming". Blind persons do not lose their ability to dream, the only
difference is that if a person is blind since birth or before the age of five,
their dreams only consist of the smell, sound, texture, and other observations
that they perceive from their environment. According to the Physics Van,
people who were blind by the age of seven and above, those who have experienced
seeing in their lives, will still dream in the same way as a normal does
including the colors, although the faces of people they know do not get old in
their dreams. They still picture their relatives in the same way when they last
saw them.
So, who are
these people who do not dream? Seldom can a person encounter someone who does
not dream. It is more acceptable if a person just cannot remember his dream or
whether he dreamed or not. One of the facts about dreaming is that five minutes
after the end of the dream, half the content is forgotten, and after ten minutes,
90% is lost. A more convincing explanation is that people just cannot recall
their dreams or that they had a dream, in comparison with the claim that there
are some who do not dream at all. But these rare people who do not dream really
do exist. People who suffered from stroke often report that they no longer
experience the magnificence of dreaming. An article from FuturePundit
entitled Stroke Victim Reveals Brain Location For Dreaming stated the
story of an elderly woman who suffered a stroke that cost her the ability to
dream. It was found that there had been a brain damage to a specific location
in the back of her brain. Such loss of dreaming following the damage to a
specific part of the brain was known as the Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome,
named for the eminent neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Hermann Wilbrand,
who first described it in the 1880s. Also, in the documentary of BBC entitled
“Why Do We Dream?” Heather Jones, a person who suffered stroke was
interviewed. She said that the nights following her stroke, she just literally
fell into sleep, that is, in total blankness, the dreamless sleeps. Prof.
Mark Solms of University of Cape Town believes that dreams originate in the
parietal lobe, the part of the brain which is affected by stroke.
Now that
the existence of non-dreaming people has been proven, then what are the effects
of the absence of dreams to a person’s life?
- Dreaming keeps people asleep.
VS. 
- Dreaming activates the motivation system of the brain.
Versus 
source: apartmenttherapy.com source: forbes.com
According to Professor Solms, the
fact that this part of the brain, the motivation system, is active during dreaming
suggests that dreams have some kind of motivated search in them as if the
dreamer is seeking something from his dreams. Professor Solms believe that this
seeking activity symbolizes the search for answers. “More likely, ‘cause it's
more general, an explanation is that we are grappling with some sort of problem
in our dreams and trying to find a solution to some matter of current concern,”
Professor Solms said. Another advantage of dreaming is that dreams help the
dreamer find the solutions to his currently occurring problems. Dreams offer
alternatives and the only task of the dreamer is to choose among these options.
Unfortunately, non-dreaming people do not enjoy this feature of dreams and will
just have to solve their dreams on their own conscious state.
- Dreaming maintains a person’s mental health.
Versus 
source: isucceedbook.com source: sodahead.com
Most experts nowadays make use of
a person’s dream in order to detect personality disorders and mental health
issues. According to the article “Dreams and Personality Disorders” written
by M.Farouk Radwan, personality disorders create unpleasant emotions,
and these emotions are being sent by the subconscious mind through dreams to
the dreamer in order to notify him about this psychological impairment. Also,
experts also have proven that waking people up just before they enter into a
dreaming state, just like what the stroke patients are experiencing, affects
their behavior. According to the article “The Importance of Dreams” from
People With Potential, in one particular dream study, volunteers are
woken up just before they are going to have a dream then allowed to fall back
to sleep. Even though the volunteers still sleep the same amount of time as
they normally do, they are still observed to be disoriented, depressed, crabby,
and quick tempered. This only proves that lack of dreaming activity may impair
a person’s daily functioning and mental health. As the study was continued over
several nights, the subjects became over-sensitive, and lacked concentration
and suffer memory loss. Also, Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that dreaming allows the brain to sift through that day’s events,
detect any negative emotion attached to them and then strip it away from the
memories. But, Walker emphasized
that dreams really do not make those emotional memories be forgotten, they just
make those memories become no longer emotional themselves. Dreamers are being
helped by their dreams to get rid of their negative emotions. Those who do not
dream, unfortunately find it difficult to let go of their negative emotions
which eventually result to a constant state of anxiety.
In time, Heather Jones made a recovery and once
more she was able to benefit from dreaming. For her, that contributes to her feeling that she
really had a good night sleep. In the end, science is able to reveal the
numerous valuable purposes of dreaming: a good night sleep, a way of finding
solutions to problems, and maintaining a person’s mental health. Unfortunately,
for people who no longer benefit in the magnificence of dreaming, they are
deprived of these wonderful features that dreams provide to mankind. As long as
the ability to dream is still consistent, people have to make the most use of
their dreams. One has to take a closer look in his dreams and must not wait for
the moment when these dimensions are no longer available to him, for the
importance of a thing will only be appreciated once it can no longer be felt.
