Glad so many people also remember the Batman episode.
Last night, I had a dream I was sitting in front of my class(I’m a teacher) and I had the textbook open.
The title of the story we were going to read was, “Pete’s Personality from his Point-of-View”.
So we can read. Heck, we can even create minor alliteration. Actually, I was thinking about how “personality” and “point-of-view” were vocab words for my students recently, so perhaps I wasn’t reading, but was seeing the whole word on the page.
I mean, reading is sounding out words from the letters that are there.
But it does work for many people. A number of the posters above have said they can read in dreams. My experience has been that I can read in dreams, too. How can not being able to read in dreams be diagnostic of distinguishing dreaming from anything else if many people can read in dreams?
Object persistence in dreams is very shaky (if it exists at all). Thus, if an object has properties in one frame, and you look away, there’s a strong chance the properties will be different. So-called “dream reading” is heavily affected by this because in actuality the brain is really doing more “writing” than “reading.” Thus, the content is likely to change.
If you think about it, your brain already knows what’s on the page before you even “see” it in the dream. (How could it not?). This is borne out by my own dreaming experience, where often the text arranges itself before my eyes into the message that I know “ought” to be there. Of course I can read it; I just finished writing it.
Thus, I draw the inference is that the illusion of “dream reading” is really not reading but just a very interesting way of the brain revealing information to itself.
(insert perfunctory cliche about the fascinating nature of the human mind as well as musing whether we will ever really understand it all).
I’m still not clear on how this tells us anything. Object persistence in dreams may be shaky, but wouldn’t it be credulous to leap from object persistence not being shaky = reality instead of dream?
What if you’ve merely had a dream in which object persistence wasn’t shaky?
I recently had a dream where I had a list of all my friends from junior high. It had all of their phone numbers on it. I had to study them in the dream for some reason. I woke up suddenly (crucial to remembering a dream) and I was so shocked that I jotted two of the phone numbers down. Later that day, I dialed the numbers and sure enough, their parents answering machines picked up. These were people that I hadn’t talked to in over 17 years and had no idea of what their phone numbers were normally.
I have read pages of novels in my dreams. These are novels that don’t really exist but they seemed really good. Likewise, I have listened to whole songs that were awesome complete with vocalists, great lyrics, and instruments that do not exist in real life. I have tried to jot some of them when I awoke but I have no musical talent normally and have no idea how to do it.
I often read in my dreams, and as I read, I am often struck by how profound or insightful the material I am reading is. Then, when I try to reflect further on it, or try to turn the page, I will either realize that it doesn’t really make sense (so I must be dreaming), or my focus will shift.
I have also written poetry in my dreams. If I awaken, I will only remember a short snippet of it, and I really doubt that the brilliant poem I was composing in my head ever fully existed in dream format.
I can remember two specific incidents of reading in my dreams, but neither involved paper. In a dream I had when I was a teenager, Eb from Green Acres had written my family’s name and address in the moisture on the sliding glass door of our patio. In the other, my Great-Uncle Arthur had somehow cut the letters EDDIE’S KING BURN into the grass on the side of a hill – his name had become Eddie in that weird dream-logic way, and the term referred to his estate, of which the hill was a part. I was even aware in the dream that “burn” was being used in its Scottish sense of “a river or brook”.
How can you really tell if you’ve read in your dreams though? You can never make any sense of dreams until you wake up, and at that point you’re usually taking random images you remember and trying to piece them together into a coherent story based on your logical consciousness. Maybe you remember holding a book in your dream, and you remember getting an idea, and when awake you look back and decide you must have read it from the book. But did you really? I suppose in this line of reasoning you never really do anything in dreams, you just dreamt you did. Or something.
Also, the Batman episode was the first thing I thought of when I read the OP. I feel vindicated.
I think it’s unlikely that you would take the time to read anything while dreaming. Dreams tend to be quick-paced, sporadic, fluid, and constantly changing…as quick as the never ending thoughts that pop in and out of your mind. Besides, your mind is the author of the dream, it has to make up the letter moment by moment. You’re too likely to suddenly be attacked by a zombie while picking up the letter due to the high-paced nature of your mind.
I’ve been trying to notice lately what happens when I read in my dreams. Sometimes it’s clear that I actually see words and am able to read a sentence or so. Sometimes though it appears that I hear in my mind what I’m supposedly reading although I apparently am not actually seeing the words.
I’ve done a ton of reading in my dreams, set variously in libraries, schools, and homes. I had a long library-research dream once in which I was pulling books from the shelves of 1) the library I frequented most as a child and 2) a university library in a different state, before taking the stack (of about 7 or 8 books) to a carrel located IRL in yet another university library, where I proceded to get through about half of the stack (subjective passage of time: about 3 hours) before waking up. Now, I didn’t read half the pages in that stack – this was “reading” for research purposes – just looking for the pertinent bits. But I did settle in and read chunks of cogent chapters, and putting one book down and going back to another, and checking the indexes and footnotes, etc. The texts themselves were remarkably stable in my dream; the titles didn’t morph or anything like that, their bindings and appearances were distinct and remained true throughout the dream, and the texts seemed to make perfect sense when I was reading them. The thing is, they were all on different subjects (one was, I think, on some engineering problems in architecture; another was a rather dry economic history of unionized textile workers or something) and IRL would never be grouped together for a research project. One book was on the physics of music – a topic I’ve always been interested in but never read anything about aside from maybe an article or two. I remember getting bogged down in the actual physics/acoustics-related graphs, charts, and formulas (so that was certainly realistic!)
But can you read anything more complex than that? I can read up to a sentence or so (often book titles like you) but anything more than that is horribly frustrating. Writing too. From what I’ve read, a sentence is most people’s max for making sense of dream writing.
I “read” an interesting proverb last week " when you use shark for bait, there will always be sharks in the water". That’s probably the longest thing I’ve read in a dream. It almost make sense…are sharks cannibals? I should put it on a t-shirt.
I precisely dreamed I was reading (or more exactly tying to read) some document the night before I noticed this thread.
Despite my best efforts I was unable to read the text. I could read bit and pieces of words, or even even some complete words, but nothing made any sense. I had to concentrate a lot on the text just to be able to read these bits, but still couldn’t read even a complete sentence, however short.
I absolutely cannot read anything more difficult than a simple blurb while dreaming and I’m pretty good at lucid dreaming, too. I’m a voracious reader and comic book fan. One recurring dream I have about once a month is stumbling into a bookstore or yard sale and finding all sorts of rare comics at ridiculously low prices. I find I can read the titles just fine, and I can scan blurbs (“Number One!” or “Collector’s Edition!”) just fine, because I’m not “reading” words but parsing familiar phrases based on shapes and colors. None of my comics have dialogue balloons on the covers when i’m dreaming.
I also read comics and novels in bed until I fall asleep… if a sentence I’m reading suddenly stops making any sense I know I’ve just drifted off to sleep.
