Germany Day 6 - In the Dark

What it was like in
Dialog in the Dark Museum

I've never had an experience like this. We went to a place called Dialog in the Dark, a museum in Frankfurt that helps sighted people understand the world of a blind person. When you go through the museum, you're part of a group. Our group consisted of the three of us, my friend Tina and her 11-year-old son Kurosch, another party of three we'd never met before, and our guide Andy, who is blind. When you go through the museum, it's pitch black. You can't see anything, at all, for two hours.

We were given canes for the visit, the kind that blind people use to help them know what is ahead of them. We were led into the dark, where we were greeted by Andy, the guide whom we never saw, and then we started to get our bearings. There was a theme to the visit, which changes periodically through the year, so that returning visitors can have a different experience. This time it was a game to guess what country we were in. The answer was Canada. 

Sometimes as we were led through the exhibit, we were told to keep a hand against the wall to guide us to the next place, around corners, sometimes bumping into other people. Other times we were told to walk across the center of the room with nothing to guide us except the sound of Andy's voice. 

Nothing was ever unsafe, and we were never made to feel unsafe either. Our guide helped us and we were instructed to help one another, which we did, and which simulated the reality that blind people often have to depend on others for assistance. We were warned of steps up or down, or ramps, or where to stop and when to start, or when the surface we were walking on would change, from concrete, to gravel, to a wooden bridge. Still, unless you've experienced it, you can't imagine the claustrophobic feeling of the darkness closing in, and the urge to be done and to step out of the darkness, which doesn't happen until the end of the visit two hours later.

Kyra was as fascinated by the experience as everyone else, although the rapid pace of her chattering suggests that she was a little freaked out too. Paul and I were much more silent, trying to keep track of our daughter, and to manage her experience, as we were navigating our own. Silence wasn't helpful, though, as the guide tried to keep track of the eight of us visitors as we passed from room to room, and as the other people around us tried to keep themselves oriented by the sounds of voices. And we wanted to know where she was, and that she was with at least one of us, even though we couldn't see her or each other.

Tina and Kurosch

At some point Kyra dropped her stick, something easy to do but hard to deal with. I dropped my own later, without even noticing at first, in the café at the end, while buying a Coke. It took the whole group to help us find them. We were trying to help Kyra find hers, and to slow down the guide who had gotten a little ahead, but couldn't hear us well over the loud city sounds. We didn't know Kyra had gotten down on the ground to look, until she bumped her head and started to cry. So we had to find her, and find her booboo, and find her stick, and keep up with the group, and not fall off the curb into the street. No serious harm. It was all over in about two minutes. But it was a little overwhelming in the dark.

We were given many different experiences – reaching out to touch things to see if we could identify them, e.g. water sliding down a wall, a beaver pelt, a dugout canoe, the exterior of a brick house with windows. Other times we walked into rooms with unexpected sounds. Once it was a forest with animal sounds - some scary like howling wolves, or a growling bear, others safe like chirping birds, and others that we didn't recognize, and weren't sure about. Once it was a noisy, congested city street corner with honking and revving engines and people talking or shouting, and a persistent clicking sound that turned out to be at a crosswalk. It's great that the clicking sounds are there to help a blind person with a traffic signal, but it would be helpful to know that's what the clicking was for, and what the different sounds represented – does the fast click mean a red light or a green one?

We boarded a rocking boat, and felt as if we were sailing. We gathered in a room where a table full of percussion instruments was stored, various shakers, and drums with drumsticks, which were distributed to us all, with everybody getting and playing one, creating a mild chaos even as the instruments were still being disbursed, then re-collected and stored. We sat in a room where the floor amplified sound vibrations. We sat, we stood, we leaned, we walked, we slid. And we ended in a café where we listened to the list of the many menu options, waited at the counter, in the dark, to be served, paid with unfamiliar coins we couldn't see, waited for our change, and then sat at a table with the others to enjoy the snacks and drinks that we needed to keep track of.

We ended with a dialog with our guide and each other, to talk about our experience in the museum and Andy's experience with blindness. He answered questions openly, about becoming blind at age 10, and about how he pictures the new things he encounters in the world, such as smart phones, how he uses sight-oriented tools like his computer, and how he visualizes space. And then we left our guide, and gathered in a dim room to let our eyes adjust, and to really see the companions we'd just been with for two hours, who all looked much shorter than they had seemed in the dark.

And then we spent the rest of the day shopping, and hanging out in Frankfurt, on a bright, sunny day.