Can blind people dream visually?

The short answer: it depends on whether they ever had sight, and for how long.

What the studies find

• People blind from birth report no visual imagery in dreams. What they report instead is unusually rich in other channels: sound, touch, taste, smell, movement. Their dreams are not impoverished; they are constructed from the senses they have.
• People who lost sight later in life often continue to dream visually, and the imagery tends to fade over years rather than stopping at the moment of sight loss.

The rough dividing line reported in this literature falls in early childhood, though it is a gradient rather than a switch.

Why this is more than a curiosity

It supports something the rest of the sleep-science section keeps saying: dream imagery is generated, not received. It is assembled from the same material the brain uses to imagine and remember. Where there is no visual material to assemble, there is no visual dream, and the machinery simply builds from whatever is there instead.

It is also a useful corrective to the idea that dreams are essentially pictures. For a congenitally blind dreamer they are not, and the dreams are no less complete for it.

What the same principle predicts elsewhere

If dreams are assembled from available material rather than received, the pattern should hold for every sense, not only sight. It does, and the record database shows it from the other end.

Smell is the rarest thing in dream reports by a wide margin, and when it does appear it is almost always familiar rather than novel: a person's perfume, a house, a hospital. Taste is rarer still. Pain is close to absent.

None of that is about dreams being visual by nature. It is about which senses leave material rich enough to rebuild from, and vision leaves the most by a distance for most people.

The other direction

It also predicts something checkable about yourself. A person whose days are dominated by one sense should dream that way, and musicians reporting far more musical dreams than everybody else is the clearest case on this site.

The general rule underneath all of it: dreams are built from what a person has, and what they have is a fact about their life rather than about dreaming.