Dialog in the Dark

Last Tuesday, I went to Dialog in the Dark last night. It is an experience in sightlessness. You are handed a cane and led to a dimly lit room. The lights fade out and you're met by your tour guide - all the guides are legally, if not totally, blind. S/he leads you down a path that includes a park setting, a grocery store, going up a ramp, crossing a street. There are six people in each group.

I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I expected. I was a little disappointed, mostly because we were forced to share physical space. There were few moments when I wasn't bumping into or inadvertently touching the back or elbow of one of the others. I imagine the experience of sightlessness to include many moments of isolation, of finding your way alone. That was not possible during Dialog In The Dark. Their literature says this will be an experience that will forever change your perspective. Not so much. I learned some interesting things from our lovely guide, Joyce, but I feel about the same as before.

Joyce told us that folks like her, totally blind from birth, dream in sound. It seems like a no-brainer, but it had never occurred to me to think of how totally blind people dream. That, more than the experience itself, made me think. I've met only one truly blind person - a professor in college who went blind as a complication from ignored diabetes. I know a couple of legally blind folks, but these people live lives as full and perhaps more rich than mine. They work, they get about, they shop, they entertain. The only time I think about their eyes is when crossing a street. To have to cross Peachtree with only sound as a guide would petrify me. Literally.

Until Tuesday night, I had never before thoughtfully considered what it might be like to be blind. I confess, I want to wear a blindfold around the house. Not as a lark, but as an alternate way of knowing my space. For example, when you think of all the stuff piled up in a room, without sight, most of it is useless. Then follows the thought, do I need these things that fill my personal space? Books I've read, a pillow I've never used, yarn I may never knit. Clothes for my niece when she's three. Well, the latter can be shucked off into my sister's basement. Right, J?