Dreams II
I had a very, very strange dream last night. I don't remember much of it, but at one point I was - I think - in some kind of mirrored golden palace, pressed up against one of the walls, and a huge green snake had coiled itself around me, its angular, reptilian face mere inches from my right ear. It was very strange. I was simultaneously viewing the scene from a third-person point of view (somewhere behind the "me" being embraced by a snake) and actually feeling the hot serpentine breath on my neck. I was also terrified out of my mind.
Later, I appeared on BBC News Online for the snake incident. I showed the article to the snake. It did not seem impressed.
Dreams...pah.
While on the topic...I meant to write about this earlier, but for some reason I didn't. Anyway, I wonder how a blind person dreams. Not someone who became blind, but someone who has never seen anything (blind from birth). If a dreaming experience is mostly visual, what could a blind person dream about? They couldn't possibly dream that they are seeing, because they have never had the experience of seeing anything. Does that mean that blind person's brain dreams differently from a brain that has experienced sight? How does that work?
I suppose it's entirely possible that their dreaming experience consists of stimuli from their other senses, e.g. if both a blind person and I dreamt of walking down a street, I would see the street and the cars and skyscrapers, while the blind person would feel the cobbles beneath his feet and smell the hotdog stand on the corner, and hear the cars zoom past...but that's just mindboggling, isn't it, because how can (for example) your nose interpret smells that aren't there? It's not really the same as "seeing" things in your dream that aren't really there...or maybe I'm just saying that because I can't imagine it. Can you really dream a smell? I'd like to meet a person who's been blind from birth. I have a lot of questions.
What does the world look like to a blind person? They could trace the outline of a pencil with their fingertips, put it in their mouth and taste the lead, or smell the musky, light odour of shaved wood...but what would it look like in their mind's eye? Can they even have a mind's eye, if they've never even experienced sight before? When they imagine something, surely the "image" in their "mind's eye" would be a "picture" of it in terms of their other four senses? (See how reliant our everyday language is on sight?)
When I was much younger, in my old days of Year 10 GCSE English Language class, I was given an essay title - "The First Time" - and told to write a creative essay on it. Firmly shutting out the perverted sniggering and snickering of the bunch of boys behind me, to whom the words "first time" were plugged directly into their hyperactive libidos, I wrote about a blind person seeing for the first time (which might just go to show that mentally I haven't really changed from 4 years ago). I tried oh so hard to capture the sheer astonishment of seeing for the first time ever...but reading back on it, I realize how naive my attempts were. While I understood the philosophical dilemma (I wrote a conversation between my blind main character and a friend trying to explain the colour "red" to her), I certainly didn't appreciate the mindboggling depth of it. Even now, I don't think I could manage it. Oh well, it was a noteworthy attempt, anyway.
So anyway, if you had to lose one of your senses, which would it be? I think I'd choose to lose smell. I couldn't deal with losing my sight (for the above reasons and more). Music is too important for me to be able to cope with going deaf. Touch...well, no. And taste, well, between taste and smell, I think I'd rather deal with not being able to smell food than not being able to taste it. So...well anyway. I seem to have digressed from my original topic, which was that I was being strangled by a snake. I wonder what it all means. Something Freudian, no doubt.
I think that, on the whole, I preferred my tennis grip dream1.