In Anne Jarry’s dreams, there are nurses who persist in addressing her as if she were seeing.
” I do not see ! she then shouts. Anne Jarry lost her sight at the turn of adulthood, as a result of diabetic complications and a pancreas transplant. At night, she dreams that she lacks sugar. She is part of the group of blind people who lent their dreams for the realization of the Dream Voices digital project, at the Turbine center.
It was with the author Réjane Bougé, who has always been fascinated by the dream world, that the Turbine center embarked on this adventure two years ago. The idea was to create a website both oriented towards the blind and testifying to their experiences. Yves Amyot, who was then director of the Turbine center, raises the interest of probing the dreams of blind people. In a world obsessed with images, how do visually impaired people dream? “Each type of blindness causes different dreams,” he says.
“They were asked to remember their dreams. When people remember their dreams, they experience a kind of internal joy. It’s as if you were communicating with a part of yourself that you forget or ignore. It reconnects with something intimate,” says Réjane Bougé.
Dreaming of the view
In her dreams, Selma Kouidri imagines herself to be clairvoyant, driving a car, a symbol of autonomy. Nathalie Chartrand sees in a dream the face of a loved one, yet never seen. When she wakes up, she tries, in vain, to remember this image. “In my dreams, I just pretend to be blind,” she says. Sherri Wallace, synesthetic, still dreams in different colors. In life, she also has a device that allows her to identify colors.
Most of the visually impaired people met by the team have lost their sight. Only one is blind from birth. Another, François Côté, became one at the age of two. He is now a psychologist, and frequently uses the dream world with his patients. “I always know where I am, both in dreams and in reality,” he says. Another participant in the project, Stéphane Frigon, is also a psychologist, and uses dreams in his practice. Even if he himself no longer sees, even in a dream, “neither forms nor faces”.
“The blind develop superior listening skills. It is a handicap that can become a strength. Speech is super important in the therapeutic context,” notes Réjane Bougé. Stéphane Frigon also extensively explores, in his life, the world of languages and music.
Fear is often palpable in the dreams told. That of being chased in the metro, for example. Or running out of air. Other frights occur while awake. Marie-Christine Ricignuolo, who lost her sight late, suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. Her brain, which has accumulated images, sometimes reproduces them unrealistically when she is awake. It happened to Marie-Christine Ricignuolo to “see” a herd of green sheep or the image of a man dressed in yellow who was chasing her, a bit like people who have had a limb amputated and continue to feel the pain.
Fearing that her condition will be confused with a mental illness, she insists: “The blind are not retarded. Their brains are intact. »
Websites not accessible
The project Dream voices wants to be innovative. Nearly 92% of Quebec websites are not accessible to blind people, according to data provided by Anne Jarry. Even the Turbine Center team had to do twice to create a truly accessible site. First, Yves Amyot understood that the strange and unpredictable universe that the design company was trying to create did not suit the clientele of blind people, who prefer predictability above all else. Also, it was necessary to make sure that the site is perfectly accessible using the keys of the keyboard.
Back from New York, where she attended drawing workshops for the blind at the MET, Anne Jarry noticed that American sites are subject to more accessibility constraints than those in Quebec. She herself has a screen reader, or even a Braille translator. But these tools do not guarantee total accessibility to the texts.
“I can go to a site and consult it up to a certain point. Sometimes it’s missing some of it. So we don’t know if we have access to the full site,” she said. Filling out forms online is particularly difficult, she says. In general, Quebec does not impose guidelines on online accessibility. “There is no law,” she said. In university or college programs, particularly in computer science, this is not discussed much. »