# Reading In Your Sleep?? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 22, 2002, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335 "2002-12-22T06:01:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Cumberdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8c91f0/32.png) [@Cumberdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cumberdale)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2020, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/41 "2020-02-11T19:34:16Z")
When I’m reading and doze off, I often dream I’m still reading. Although the plot gets increasingly crazy. When I wake up and continue it is nothing like what I dreamt up. ---
**Author:** ![Zeldar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b77776/32.png) [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2020, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/42 "2020-02-11T19:42:37Z")
> [@Cumberdale](#): > > When I’m reading and doze off, I often dream I’m still reading. Although the plot gets increasingly crazy. When I wake up and continue it is nothing like what I dreamt up. Wow! I’ve been having this sort of thing to happen often in recent times. Usually if I’ve been up well past my “usual bedtime” (which is getting to be pretty often these days) I will begin to “nod off” without actually falling fully asleep in the middle of something that I would normally be paying full attention to. TV usually, but even reading things on the web, I’ll catch myself just before going into real sleep and startle myself back to “awake” just long enough to begin dozing again. Lather, rinse, repeat! It’s weird and messes with what passes for my mind! ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2020, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/43 "2020-02-11T21:45:37Z")
Definitely read in my dreams. But after a while it becomes more like attempting to _write_ in my dreams–an active thing–and it fades away or turns to gibberish, or often wakes me up. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2020, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/44 "2020-02-12T00:33:19Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Probably from those of us who can’t, mistakenly thinking that our own experience applies to everybody. > > People’s minds vary a whole lot more than many people seem to realize. Yeah, my father surprised me a few weeks ago asking me if I see color in my dreams. Apparently, he doesn’t. Meanwhile, as a male, this may be TMI I’ve never had the common and what seems to be almost universal experience of “nocturnal emissions.” I do very occasional dream about sex, but it never gets that far. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2020, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/45 "2020-02-12T02:44:28Z")
I once read that most men dream in BW, but nearly all women dream in color. Nowadays, I sometimes watch a TV movie, and can’t tell you afterward if it was in color. Sometimes, I can’t tell while I’m watching it. Someone once told me that you never dream about money, and I couldn’t then remember having done so. But then I went to sleep that night and dreamed about money, so there. I’ve done that several times, having contrarian dreams… ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2020, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/46 "2020-02-14T03:37:18Z")
Last night I dreamed I had a library book to look something up, about the Falklands War. I could read a whole paragraph with no problem and good comprehension, but the reference sucked. It read like it was written by the society page editor in a small town weekly newspaper. But heretofore, I never successfully read, the words kept changing. I was inspired last night by this thread, I guess, but did not go to bed thinking about it… ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2020, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/47 "2020-02-14T07:14:59Z")
This happened once or twice while I was reading aloud to my girlfriend. My mouth didn’t notice when my brain suddenly fell asleep, so it kept going on autopilot. But without my eyes being able to read the book, my mouth improvised nonsense without my conscious awareness. Something like “Ántonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop until… _way the what them for and_…” This has also happened when I was typing; it was hilarious for my hands to keep going, suddenly veering off the subject into unrelated nonsense. I remember translating a medical report late at night when I suddenly fell asleep and started typing something about a guitar. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2020, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/48 "2020-02-16T02:03:12Z")
> [@misling](#): > > I can read a paragraph or so in a dream. They rarely make much sense. (They may seem to at the time but once I wake up I realize they are not coherent.) But the odd thing is, while dreaming of reading, as soon as I look away from the page and then look back, the page is totally different; the paragraph I read is something else now. Sometimes words change WHILE I’m reading them - I’m on the next word or phrase and I notice the previous one(s) mutating :). > I’m a lucid dreamer generally. The movie “Waking Life” pointed out that you can use this phenomenon (looking at a word or a clock and seeing different results every time) to tell that you’re in a dream. Shortly after I watched that movie, I had a dream where I was playing Scrabble (I was playing a lot of Scrabble at the time) and the words kept changing every time I looked at them. And just as the movie said, I was able to turn that into a lucid dream. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2020, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335/49 "2020-02-16T07:31:40Z")
I had a dream recently of that sort. I held a newspaper and realized I could read it and (this is very rare for me) knew that I was dreaming. The way it worked was this: I could read one word in the middle of the page at a time; the rest were blurred and moving. One at a time would form and become legible, and they kept changing as I read. It was pretty amazing. It happened shortly before I was going to wake up. I was sleeping lighter then and my mind felt more active than usual in dreams… because in reality it was. The trick was keeping the dream going while raising my mind’s windowshades. It must have helped that I had a specific focus of attention within the dream. A rapidly shifting series of them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-in-your-sleep/144335.md?page=2)