Beautiful question.
You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.
You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.
Those who've never seen, or who were blinded very early, have auditory dreams. (They dream in sounds.) Those who were blinded after the age of around seven -- when the ability to form mental images necessary for dreaming develops -- are able to dream in pictures.
One can argue that 'seeing' goes beyond the perception of lights and colors. It's also about shape, so I guess a blind person can perfectly 'visualize' a rectangle, a cube, etc. And probably do geometry, or even 3D-object rotations.
Can anyone confirm this?