I read all the time in my dreams, and last night I even wrote a few paragraphs. I can’t remember the exact words from the last time I read, it was a few weeks ago, but I can explain the event.
In my reading dream, I was trying to assemble something (connecting electronic components in a stereo system, or something), and I read a whole page and a half (small paper booklet-sized pages) of the instruction manual, all the while trying to tune out people talking around me. I remember losing my concentration after step three or four, and having to go back to re-read the first few steps, looking at the thing I was putting together, realizing that I wouldn’t have to keep reading the earlier steps if people would stop talking and making noise, and continuing to the top of the next page (steps five, six, and seven). I wanted to consult a diagram of the final assembly, so I even flipped through the book, landing in the German section, then Spanish, before backing up to the end of the English section. I even wondered for a few seconds if the ordering of the languages had anything to do with the relative sizes of the markets this device was sold in, and then a noise from the other dream people annoyed me, and I went back to the top of the page with five, six, and seven. I completed the assembly, and I probably moved on to another dream.
The reading was almost exactly like what I do with the instruction booklets in real life. I think it must have been a Sony or other big name brand device, because I don’t remember any errors in the English.
In a dream I had last night, I came home to find the contents of my apartment spread randomly across the floor, and a few things in the wrong rooms. Nothing was missing. A whole bunch of boring stuff happened, and days later people started hanging around my building, walking by my windows, and doing other suspicious things. A group of men stood by a tree a few yards from my bedroom window, and I decided I should write down descriptions. I grabbed a ball-point pen, a piece of yellow (I dream in color, too) legal-sized paper, and tried to write down a description of the clothes they were wearing. I had a very hard time writing. I wasn’t trembling or shaking, I just had to work very hard to get all the letters in line. Many times I had to scratch out half a word I’d written and start over. I remember thinking it was probably due to my infrequent use of pen and paper since school, since I type most of my correspondence these days.
Anyway, I got two sentences down on their appearances, and started to summarize their actions when they spotted me and walked away. I looked at my poor handwriting, decided the text didn’t need to be in sentences (and would be more complete as a list), and made it a list, and added the date and time.
Many of my dream sequences are task or goal-oriented, and if I need to read or write to complete the goal, I do it. And because words are involved, I often wake up that day and wonder just why my brain chose to use those words to describe whatever was read or written. I have no idea why I need to read instruction manuals or write scene descriptions in my dreams. And the second dream was most certainly triggered by the Scientology thread I read late last night.