Blind people have four times more nightmares than sighted people

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A new Danish study shows that blind people have considerably more nightmares than people with normal sight and those who became blind later in life.

It’s something that 41-year-old Heidi Andersen, who was born blind, can recognise. She is often plagued by nightmares and her sleep interrupted by fears of being hit by passing traffic, falling on the ground, and being followed.

“At the core of my nightmares is a feeling of complete helplessness,” says Andersen.

She is not the only blind person to experience such nightmares.

In fact, the study, recently published in the journal Sleep Medicine, shows that an average of 25 per cent of the dreams experienced by people born blind are nightmares -- while nightmares account for only six per cent of the dreams of people whose sight is intact.

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“The study confirms an already existing hypothesis that people’s nightmares are associated with emotions they experience while awake. And blind people apparently experience more threatening or dangerous situations during the day than people with normal sight,” says study lead-author Amani Meaidi, a research assistant at the Danish Centre for Sleep Medicine at Glostrup Hospital and BrainLab at the University of Copenhagen.

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Blind people have a greater need to process things
We presumably use sensory input from our everyday lives as a way of processing impressions, says Meaidi.

“Because people who lose their sight later in life have previously seen their surroundings it might be that their brains do not experience being threatened by circumstances to the same degree as people who are born blind. For this reason they may not need to process impressions from everyday life to the same extent by means of nightmares,” he says.

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