Lightless Eyes, Dreaming
A Poetic Essay on Blind Souls and the Illusion of Sight
There is a theory—unwritten, unspoken, perhaps unthinkable—
that the soul is blind. Not metaphorically. Not tragically. Just… essentially.
It has no need for eyes because it was never meant to see—only to know.
And yet, here we are: tethered to bodies with retinas and rods and cones,
obsessing over light frequencies and shadow play,
as if the visible were sacred, and the invisible a lie.
But what if the opposite is true?
What if vision is the most elaborate hoax ever agreed upon—
a shared mirage among blind souls pretending to be sighted?
We wake up in a world already translated.
The sky is “blue.” The trees are “green.” The light is “morning.”
But who decided these names? Who approved the palette?
We inherit these truths without question,
like pre-installed dreams in a machine that forgot it was dreaming.
The soul does not remember red.
The soul remembers vibration.
The soul remembers warmth, ache, the pulse of beingness.
But color? Shape? Object permanence?
These are add-ons. Expansions. VR goggles on spirit.
We were told the eye is the window to the soul.
But maybe the eye is a cage—
and the soul, too radiant for this world,
dimmed itself to fit inside.
Blinded itself
just enough
to bear the illusion of form.
Maybe we never see the world.
Maybe we only echo it—repeat it—because we are afraid
of what the silence beneath it might say.
Maybe “reality” is a song we all hum together,
each of us pretending we know the words.
But the blind soul does not hum.
The blind soul listens—
not for melody,
but for memory.
Not for answers,
but for the pulse beneath the question.
When a blind soul dreams,
it doesn’t imagine colors or light.
It dreams of being held without hands.
It dreams of a language made of feeling,
where to be understood is to be touched by recognition,
not by flesh.
It dreams of reunion.
Because somewhere, deep inside,
it remembers when it was everything—
when it didn’t need to see
to know it belonged.
And so perhaps
we are not creatures learning to see,
but souls learning to forget.
Not students of truth,
but actors in a shared hallucination
too beautiful to break.
We name this hallucination “the world.”
We call the blindness “vision.”
We call the knowing “delusion.”
And we go on pretending
that sight is sacred
because if we admit it’s not,
the veil might fall
and we’ll see nothing—
only to realize, with holy dread,
that the nothing
was everything
all along.
For those of us who’ve begun to see through the seams—
don’t be afraid of the dark.
Sometimes, it’s just your soul remembering what it is without the mask.
I’ll leave a light on for you,
—Rebecca M. Bell
