Dreaming is sometimes overlooked in terms of its importance to our health and well-being, but the connection can be informative. Many therapists consider dreaming to be an important gauge of our mental health and/or recovery from traumatic events or relationships. While interpreting dreams is usually left to the individual who experiences them, their importance should not be downplayed!
Absolute sleep deprivation can be fatal if it persists for long enough. During sleep, our brain “washes” itself, in a sense. Fluids carry toxic substances out of the brain and prepare us for a new day of healthy engagement with the world. It may be that this “washing” process is what creates the experience of dreaming, while short-term memories also solidify into long-term ones.
Study on Deaf Dreaming
A study conducted in Bonn, Germany in 2010 looked at a small sample of congenitally deaf-mute and paraplegic participants. The study relied on self-reported dream experiences, to determine whether the individuals experienced their dreams with the same handicaps they had in waking life.
Most of the deaf-mute participants (80%) were able to speak and hear in their dreams, while the same percentage of paraplegic individuals were able to move normally. This differs from the dream experiences reported by congenitally blind people, who have more auditory, olfactory, and touch sensations but do not dream as visually as sighted people. A small subset of deaf-mute participants was able to speak and understand spoken language in their dreams—a surprising result.
More Vivid Dream Experiences
In a 2016 study, called “Dreams of hearing-impaired, compared with hearing, individuals are more sensory and emotional” published in the journal Dreaming by the International Association for the Study of Dreams, researchers looked more closely at the subjective emotional experience of a larger sample size of participants, which included 86 high-school aged students (15–20) attending a special school for the deaf, and 344 normal-hearing participants at an ordinary high school (aged 15–18). Hearing impaired students all had at least a 60 dBHL (decibels hearing level) loss in both ears.
All 430 participants filled out the same 25-item questionnaire about the dreams they had had over the last month. The questionnaire covered how often they remembered their dreams, how vivid their dreams were, and how often they experienced 9 sensory modalities and 10 emotions.
After controlling for the frequency of recall, it was found that hearing-impaired students had more nightmares and lucid dreams than normal-hearing students. This is telling because, in general, nightmares and lucid dreams imply more vividness of the dream content, with nightmares being more intensely negative and lucid dreams being more intensely positive. They also experienced more hope, anger, fear, tension, surprise, and shame. They recalled more smells, tastes, temperatures, and pain than their hearing counterparts—and much less hearing.
Understanding the Results
Interesting in this study is that the hearing-impaired students did not experience more visual dream content than the normal-hearing students. Instead, their dreams emphasized more secondary senses (taste, smell). This could indicate that auditory deficiency tends to emphasize these other senses, in general, more than vision, even in waking life.
The emotional content of hearing-impaired participants’ dream experiences is also telling. It may be that these individuals’ social experience as hearing impaired could make them more prone to experience negative emotions like tension and shame, even in the course of their childhood development in waking life.
Does the scope of emotion experienced in dreams indicate a higher frequency of these emotions being experienced in waking life? This is not clear, and outside the scope of the study. But it is an interesting starting point for further exploration into the effects on mental health and emotional balance in hearing-impaired individuals.
Hearing Solutions You’ve Dreamed of…
If you have been experiencing hearing loss, make an appointment for a hearing test today and find out how hearing aids can improve your life! Hearing aids allow us to participate in the world of sound much the same, in many cases, as we did prior o the onset of hearing loss. Speech can be understood with great clarity in most cases of mild-to-moderate hearing loss, with a set of hearing aids, and hearing aids are better than ever at improving speech recognition and intelligibility. Take charge of your hearing health, and make an appointment today!
