finds its most suitable _métier_; it is in this direction that this
dream narrative, reflecting, as it does, her rich emotional nature
and enthusiastically sympathetic temperament, presents its most
distinctive and attractive aspect.
IV
Returning to the general data regarding the dreams of the blind, the
question that next suggests itself is whether and how, in cases
where blindness ensued after a remembered period of vision, the
pre-blindness period is distinguished from the post-blindness period
in dream-imagery. It was noticed, for instance, that the blind and
deaf young man mentioned above, though seeing in his dreams, never
thus saw the shop in which he worked. It is easy to imagine that the
more or less sudden loss of sight, the immersion into a strange and
dark world, would for a time leave the individual living entirely
upon the past. His remembered experiences are richer and more vivid
(we are supposing his blindness to occur after childhood) than those
he now has; he is learning a new language and translates everything
back into the old. His dreams will naturally continue to be those of
his seeing life. As his experiences in his new surroundings increase,
and the memory of the old begins to fade, the tendency of recent
impressions to arise in the automatism of dreaming will bring the
events of the post-blindness period as factors into his dreams. I
find in my list only seven who do not have such dreams; and in these
the blindness has been on the average of only 2.8 years standing.
The average age of "blinding" of the seven is fifteen years, making
it probable that the adaptation to the new environment has here been
a slow one, and that such dreams will occur later on. On the other
hand, cases occur in which, after three, two, or even one year's
blindness, when the persons so afflicted were young, events happening
within that period have been dreamed of. Heermann cites a case of a
man of seventy who never dreamed of the hospital in which he had been
living for eighteen years, and to which he was brought shortly after
his blindness. This and other cases suggest that the more mature and
settled the brain-tissue, the more difficult is it to impress upon
it new conditions sufficiently deeply to have them appear in the
automatic life of dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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