Dreams and Perception (Poolside Musings)

After spending a hot Nashville afternoon poolside with Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," I haven't been able to stop musing about the possible ways in which dreams can provide important information. I'm not talking about a Freudian analysis of dreams, but rather the possibility of dreams revealing aspects of the way our minds work. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" is about a clinical patient, Dr. P, who has a certain type of visual aphasia that caused him to make very odd mistakes, including mistaking his foot for a shoe and his wife for a hat. As Dr. P got older this visual aphasia worsened. I would highly recommend reading the article as it is a short read and is full of very interesting information. An aspect of this article that interested me was that Dr. P's dreams ceased to have an visual component as his visual aphasia worsened, but his dreams still had content expressed in other ways. Patients with similar problems have reported image-less dreams as well. It is also worth mentioning that Dr. P was a musical genius and never lost his musical abilities or other cognitive abilities such as his ability to play a mean game of chess.
Some studies in psychology have suggested that different people learn differently; there are "visual learners" and "auditory learners," etc. etc. etc. Different peoples' ways of seeing the world are all very different. For me, personally, my dreams have never had striking visual components to them. They are almost always based on emotion and physical sensation. Upon further reflection, I really am not a very "visual" person (thus being a philosophy major fits, I suppose!). There seems to be a connection to the way a dreams' content is presented and the neurophysiology of the mind. Further study into this area would be very interesting and also very fruitful for clinical psychology, neurology and philosophy of mind.