I can remember talking once to a blinded soldier about dreams. I have often wondered what kind of dreams blind people--those who have been blind from birth, I mean--dream, what kind of scenes their vision pictures, how their friends, and those they love, look who people this world of sleeping fancy. I have never had the courage to ask those blind people whom I know, but this soldier to whom I talked, told me that every night when he goes to bed he prays that he may dream--because in his dreams he is not blind, in his dreams he can see, and he is once more happy. I could have sobbed aloud when he told me, but to sob over the inevitable is useless--better make happier the world which is a fact. But I realised that this dream-sight gave him inestimable comfort. It gave him something to think about in the darkness of the day. It was a change from always thinking about the past--the past when he could laugh and shout, run wild and enjoy himself as other boys enjoy their lives. And this blinded soldier used to be reading--always reading. I used to chaff him about it, calling him a book-worm, urging him to go to theatres, tea-parties, long walks. He laughed, but shook his head. Then he told me that, although he never used to care much for reading, books were now one of the comforts of his life. "When I feel blind," he said--"and we don't always feel blind, you know, when we are in the right company among people who know how to treat us as if we were not children, and as if we were not deaf--I pick up a book, and, if I stick to it and concentrate, I begin to lose remembrance and to live in the story I am reading and among the people of the tale. And--_it is more like seeing the world than anything else I do!_"
[The end]
Richard King's essay: Dreams