I ask because it’s considered common knowledge that you can’t but I regularly have dreams where I continue books I’m reading irl (they usually devolve into naritive nonsense over time and then sometimes to blank pages, but the actual text is definitely deciferable), text messages, computer screens, and road signs, in both lucid and regular dreams. Am I the odd man out or is it actually just something people say?
Sometimes.
You guys have dreams?
I don’t think I ever look at anything or am presented with anything that has text on it in dreams, I’ve never been able to try. Even when I go lucid I end up wanting to do something fun like fly or breathe underwater and never try to test the limits of the dream.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.
I definitely do. I had a problem for a few years where I would wake up in the middle of the night, see a notification on my phone for a text or email, read it, and then take whatever action needed in the morning. This would be fine if I was actually waking up or the texts/emails actually existed. I was not and they did not, but I took MANY actions in the morning.
I heard that you can tell if you’re in a dream if you try to read something twice to see if it says the same thing both times. Probably true for some people. As it turns out, not a reliable method for me. I once dreamed up a whole damn cast list for a ballet I was working on which I could repeat verbatim the next morning. I proceeded to email my friend involved in casting with my hot takes on the choices and got a very confused reply about how they hadn’t even had the meeting yet.
The only solution I have found is to have a 100% no-exception ban on actually interacting with my phone at night so I am sure that whatever boring ass email I’m reading at 3am isn’t real.
I’d never heard of anyone else this happed to before! Less consequences for me but there was a ~4 year period of my life where at least once a week I’d have a dream wherei just got up and went through a normal day from 8:00 to like 11:00 or as late as like 16:00 sometimes. For example in the dream I would wake up, go to the gym, hang out with my friends as normal and then I would wake up and have to do the whole day again, but sometimes I thought the dream had been real and would brace myself to deal with leftover arguments or jobs from the dream
The only tell I ever noticed was that people were way meaner in the dream
I can read signs or short texts, usually a little slowly since I guess technically I’m spelling it out in my mind as I’m reading it.
Sometimes I see signs I can read but that’s about it.
A while back I had an incredibly vivid dream about getting to and on the tube at King Herod station. That tube logo roundel with the name in the strike through was so, so clear and in several places in the station, along with a map of the line I could read. Upon waking I spent a good ten minutes googling it as I was so convinced it had to be a memory and was a real place.
Books and the internet have never worked for me in dreams though and I’ve had plenty of dreams where I’ve been trying to text someone and couldn’t as the keyboard was gibberish and words didn’t work.
And kinda related I suppose- I had a dream I was trying desperately to unlock my phone throughout this long adventure, and when I woke up my memory of my phone unlock glyph was fried as I’d basically overwritten it by doing it wrong so many times in the dream.
The whole following day had me freaking out trying to unlock my phone, to the point of drawing the nine dots out in my notebook over and over and over again, trying to link them up in the way I knew had to be right but wasn’t working.
When it finally came back I realised that I’d been drawing it out mirror flipped all day. It’s made me slightly uneasy ever since for some reason. It hasn’t helped that I’ve started to notice other mirror flipped things in dreams after that too.
Yeah, at least I can remember getting a phone call and looking at my phone and reading the caller ID. I don’t think it comes up much though.
The fact that I read the caller ID and thought “oh yeah, that’s my 4 year old daughter’s lawyer” when I saw the name, that should have been a clue I was dreaming.
you can read in dreams but there’s no “continuity” of what you’ve read – within the dreamscape, you think (or you tell yourself) you’re continuing to read a book you’ve read in real life
this lack of “continuity” is one of the main tricks of lucid dreaming – read something twice (ex. time on a digital watch (not an analog watch)) – if the content changes, you’re dreaming – the secret of lucid dreaming is if that change triggers enough frisson for you to “wake up” inside the dream without kicking you out of the dream completely
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I’ll have to try that next time I’m lucid, never noticed(as far as I remember anyway)
I can’t think of any dream I’ve ever had where there was any text to even try and read. Common knowledge about “how dreams work” doesn’t seem like an exact science - like you said, you can read in dreams.
In the movie Waking Life there is a claim that you can tell if you are dreaming by trying a light switch, and that light switches don’t work in dreams. I had a lucid dream where I tried it and the light switch did work. So I don’t think there are any rules.
The only rule for me is the Doctor Who’s “do you remember how you got here?” as in, a dream is a collection of edited scenes instead of a long one shot. Like, I’m in my house an them I’m in a park with no memory of getting out of the house and traveling there.
At least, that’s the only consistent rule in my dreams
I’ve had both, “now I’m here, now I’m here”, as well as ones with continuity where I went through a forest, down a hill, across a road, through a field to a tennis court, and it was all the “same place” connected like in the real world.
Maybe there are different “dream rules” or trends among individuals.
For me dreams are usually somewhat surreal landscapes with not much happening. If there are man-made structures they are warped like the Dreg Heap area in Dark Souls 3, or the city bending in Inception. Sometimes I’m myself, but other times I’m no one, like a ghost observing and wandering the space. Very rarely are there other people or animals, and when there are it’s usually only one of them.
I have not heard of this as “common knowledge.” I can’t particularly remember reading in a dream, but I don’t remember much about past dreams. Is there a source here, or is it just something you’ve kinda heard a few times?
I remember seeing this claim in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series
that holds more weight in my mind than it probably should…
edit: it’s true-ish, and apparently many people associate it with BTAS! https://www.inverse.com/science/can-you-read-in-your-dreams
Hahaha, amazing!
It’s somewhat common for me to read in my dreams but I can barely see the text for a second (it is decipherable though): My perspective instantly shifts “inside” the book, or rather the story it’s telling becomes the new focus of my dream and I can visualize it just fine (sometimes I don’t even come back to the previous world, my dream is now about this new story). Same thing if i’m playing a game: for a second I see the frame of the monitor on the borders of my vision but quickly it disappears and all I see is the content of the screen. Sometimes it keeps looking like the game (like, Civ always looks like Civ) and others it becomes more flexible and cinematographic I guess, a new story that can go anywhere.
I once tried to read a license plate and couldnt read it multiple times until the car was gone.
Normally this is a good Lucid Dreaming trigger.
One of the few times I’ve been able to do it was when saw a billboard (ordinary) and remembered “Hey written text is supposed to be nonsense in dreams, I wonder if I can take control?” and it worked!
Nice. I am way too unconscious for that.
I think the key is to be aware and undistracted while awake, as its way harder when sleeping
Yes but I always lose track after a sentence.
In some of the languages I know, yes. In others, no.
