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?
I was handed a note in a dream once.
I handed it back, saying “sorry, I can’t read in dreams”, and confused myself so hard it woke me up.
Lol that’s so cool
it’s considered common knowledge that you can’t
I’ve never heard that before. What I have heard several times is that text is not static, so if you read something, look away, and then read it again, it’ll say something different. That I can corroborate, along with the idea that this is how you realize you’re in a dream and induce lucid dreaming.
Yep that’s it for me
It’s also hard to tell if I can “read” something, or if I look at an object and just know what it says. Same with mirrors, supposedly you can’t see your reflection in a dream but I might look at one and ‘know’ that I see myself
It’s commonly used as a plot device in stories, and in my experience people will tell you about it as a way to “wake up” in the dream if you complain about nightmares and people I’ve spoken to IRL about it take it as accepted truth
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That makes a lot of sense to me given my personal experiences. Reading this thread is interesting. I’ve never heard the idea that you can’t read in dreams. The last couple of months I’ve been having dreams where I’m doomscrolling headlines on an app, and I’m actively reading the headlines to myself. But since I’m doomscrolling , I notice them and move on. I’m aware of when I’m dreaming, so sometimes I’ll laugh to myself and my partner about the stuff my sleep- psyche comes up with. I don’t know if this is a recent development, but I can’t remember ever trying to read something in a dream and being frustrated that I can’t.
I have a number of problems that result in unusual and unhealthy sleep patterns, so that probably contributes to odd dream experiences.
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
I’ll have to try that next time I’m lucid, never noticed(as far as I remember anyway)
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I remember, watching an episode of Batman, the cartoon. In that episode, Batman was trying to figure out if he was in the dream or not, and he open books to see if he could read and realize that there were no letters in any of them. And that’s how he could tell he was dreaming because you can’t read in a dream.  from that day, I’ve always tried to read in my dreams, and so far, as far as I remember, I never succeeded. 
If you want to try to learn how to know you’re dreaming while in a dream, you can check out !luciddreaming@lemmy.world. I’d mainly suggest you check out r/luciddreaming for learning to lucid dream (has loads of info for learning + has been around for over a decade and has a bigger userbase). Beware of YouTube videos though, as they spread misinformation. I’ve lucid dreamt a handful of times and it’s pretty fun!
This is exactly my experience as well. Same inciting incident.
Oh geez, I can’t remember ever seeing a single letter in a dream.
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’ve debugged code in my dreams before, so I think dream reading is something that varies from person to person. Also I only have minor issues using computers and phones in dreams, like my typing sucks but it’s not too difficult, keyboard shortcuts don’t always do what I expect, etc; but I’ve heard of plenty of people who can’t use tech at all or don’t even dream of their phones.
This reminds me… I used to play a lot of video games. (I still play, just not as much.) Sometimes I’d have dreams where I was wearing the power armor from Metroid, or had the guns and powers from Destiny, but I couldn’t use them without imagining the controller or keyboard.
Guns are the same way. It’s a pisser, because I want my bananas dream action sequence, but nooooooo…
I can’t. Sometimes I have dreams where it’s terribly important that I read something but even then, no. The words make no sense.
No. Everything just looks like complete nonsense.
A good way to tell if you are in a dream is to look at your hands. For some reason, your brain while dreaming is a lot like a diffusion model in that it’s hard for it to comprehend what a hand looks like.
Barely. I typically can’t remember more than a few words and the text is different once I go back. Dreams where I need to read something are among my most frustrating.
Yes, I can. The prose is pretty bad though, it has that markov-chain feel where it only flows logically relative to the surrounding few words.
Yes. I have had many dreams where I’m actively reading something, I’m texting somebody, there’s a weird newspaper headline, the sign was wrong and gave me bad directions, etc.and I very clearly remember reading literal text and writing too.
I don’t know where that “you can’t read in dreams” thing came from (The Simpsons?) but it’s bullshit.
I was reading in my last dream. I remember it well because the content was a language mess full of puns that my dream made up.
(Something about “el ga coguLLMeli bianchi e priti de tante grosserìe”; roughly “there are black and white mushrooLLMs of many sizes/incivilities”. The book in the dream was mixing Portuguese and Talian this way. If anyone wants I can narrate the dream here, but be warned that there isn’t anything too interesting in it.)
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 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
