Sorry, GameHat, I Was going off an article I read many years ago. I could have some of the details wrong.
That said, I’m still gonna throw my armchair theory out there:
I think it all boils down to memory retention. Even though, in your dream, you’re reading something in text; your brain still has to remember that text exactly how it was written the first time.
So, a dial pad? I’m sure MOL knows what a dial pad looks like; like the back of her hand.
A simple five word phrase? Sure, that would be easy enough to remember as well. But what happens when you get into a 20 or 30 word phrase? A phrase that your mind just randomly came up with at that time?
Unless you have an eidetic memory, I think it would be damn near impossible to read the same thing twice.
In my dreams last night I had written words & I was able to sorta stand to the side and check the re-reading thing without coming out of the main dream. I am such a dreamer… Anywho, it was as usual, & even trying to hold the word or where the word was written, I was not able to do or to get the word to hold with just staring at it or going back quickly.
That is just the way I dream… Bawahahaha … Works for me.
Oh, yes, words they know, that it. (That’s why reading scores went to hell several decades ago. Because adept readers read the whole word, educational theory decided to teach kids to read like that, instead of teaching phonetics. Didn’t work out very well.)
Interestingly, the reader does not have to ever hear the word - if s/he sees it often enough, and understands the meaning from context, s/he can read it without ever knowing how to pronounce it correctly.
So, a person who reads Cantonese, in ideographs (which apparently is the right term), can read a word without having ANY idea how it is pronounced.
I just found this page that has several articles on the topic.
I have no trouble with numbers or with letters used in equations in my dreams. That - and other posters reports - indicates they are processes differently …
I can’t read in dreams, either. There are words, but nothing stays stable nor really makes any sense. At best, I can figure out a very short sentence, but it requires a lot of concentration. Very frustrating every time, since I think it’s my fault, I wasn’t paying attention while reading and try again. Fortunately it never lasts too long, my dream moving onto something else.
For me, words are as stable as anything else in my dreams. And then I get the weird dreams that are entirely in text. That was disorienting when I woke up!
For the record, the twist in the Batman episode was that he himself was dreaming (having been put in a lotus-eater machine by the Mad Hatter) and realized it because all the newspapers and books he read were a bunvh ov gobbledygook. So it’s a little more excuseable, especially if Bruce Wayne is a person who can’t normally read in a dream.
I, myself, can understand the meaning of words I read in a dream, but i’m aware on some level that the meaning i’m reading doesn’t match the words i’m seeing.
Is this why I made it all the way to my freshman year of college without connecting the written word “segue” and the spoken “seg-way” while understanding both? That was an embarrassing conversation
I am one of those speed readers. Never took a course or anything, I just picked up reading early, really early. I was always picking out the fifth-grade books from the school library when I was in kindergarten. Nothing my parents did, other than provide me with lots of reading material. I loved to read, they loved to give me books. So over the years my reading speed has been accelerating steadily.
And yeah, I do see words as symbols, rather than going letter by letter. I probably had unconsciously gotten this down by age 14. These days, I’ll even find myself (without meaning to) skimming a paragraph without properly reading it - spottiing key words, noting the structure, and figuring out the meaning without fully reading the whole thing. This part is still a bit buggy - I’ll be zipping through a novel, then realize: “Wait. That last sentence (or paragraph) didn’t make sense…” (based on how I quick-parsed it) and have to go back and force myself to read it word by word.
Oh, yes. I was a voracious (you might say compulsive) reader as a child (and still am). It was a not infrequent occurrence for me to use a word in conversation that I’d never heard spoken, but that I correctly understood, because I’d read it so many times.
I have this dream all the time. Not the one where I forget the number, but the one where I have to call someone for some incredibly important reason, and I have to call right now, but I keep pressing the wrong buttons.
I read in dreams all the time. Last night I dreamed that I was reading the New York Times, and I must have read three or four pages. But I’ve never gone back to re-read something in a dream. Interesting – I’d be curious to see if the words stayed the same.
Of course, even if they did, it would be possible that I’m only dreaming that they’re the same.
I have to wonder about the people who can read in dreams, if they are actually seeing all the words, or just intuiting them. For example, oft times I will encounter someone I know in dreams but I just “know” it’s them - I don’t always actually imagine their detailed real life appearance.
