Even if they could... How could they put what they see into words? I mean, they have no basis to say like... It is a purple sky... they don't know what purple looks like... and it isn't a dumb question, I've wondered it myself.
You cant, and, as far as i know, blind from births dont dream shapes or depth of field or images. They may attempt to imagine them as daydreams, but the likelyhood of them being even remotely close is very small. As i said IIRC many of them do get flashing, of light and colour,... but thats all a bit random apparently
Um of course it can, i saw a programme on blindness a year ago that looked at it. They foud things out by asking blind people questions. The closest they seemed to get to imagining vision was 'blobs' with varying textures as surfaces
They 'know' in the same way anyone 'knows' anything. They describe what they 'know' and we draw conclusions from their descriptions
Presumably you could interview people who were blind from birth but had recovered their sight, who happened to remember "seeing things" their dreams.
I seem to recall reading that you dream in the state of your capacity for vision at birth - in other words, if you're born blind, you're probably not going to "see" much more than you would when awake. If you're born colorblind, you don't see those colors in your dreams either. If you were blinded, however, you still dream, and in my mind, that really fucking sucks.
When you reduce the question to "can" or more specifically "is it possible" the answer always has to be yes. Can't prove a negative and all that.
People born blind don't have any stored images in their mind that the brain can recall when constructing a dream, so whatever they "see" (if anything) is going to be incoherent and abstract. I know that people who have been blind for life and who regain their vision have a hard time processing what they see; they don't have our intuitive grasp of depth that we all gained as infants, for instance. They also can be quite troubled by how everyday things appear: I read one account where a person who regained their sight was horrified by the appearance of people's eyes and mouths.
^That reminds me of one case I read about, about a kid who was deaf for 4-5 years (?) and got an operation which let him hear. What he heard was something like horrible static - the brain needs to adapt to the new stimuli and learn how to organize it.
