This evolutionary choice has influenced the evolution of human consciousness by privileging visual symbolism over purely auditory information. The development of articulate spoken language has tended to sway the conscious balance back in the direction of language and the domain of abstraction, but primarily unconscious constructs still tend to be much more "concrete" and visual. When a child is having difficulty telling you a dream it is often the case that he or she will have no problem drawing the dream.  

Even people born blind are still the inheritors of the evolutionary choice pre-hominids made for narrower, more detailed 3-D vision - with all its implications for conscious relations with the unconscious.  

When someone consciously chooses an active imagination practice that is primarily visual, like drawing, painting, photography, etc., then one result may well be  an increased connection to unconscious material, even when awake, through what is seen rather than what is heard, or even thought.     

Despite the fact that Western civilization has put tremendous emphasis on words, language and abstraction, our dreams still seem to me to grow spontaneously out of much older and much more concretely visual symbolic forms.

-Jeremy