Reading Dreams: Dream or Reality?

[Alphaba]

It is a remark made by Bruno Putzeys in another thread (Philosophy & Religion subforum) that prompted me to start this thread and poll about dreaming that one is reading:

You can't read in a dream, because the letters weren't there until you tried to look (so they change all the time).

Notwithstanding the oddity of your explanation (quite a lot of characters, objects, and environments vividly 'seen' in dreams "weren't there until you tried to look"), you are in good company as to the claim that it is impossible to 'read' while dreaming: I read it first - while fully awake - in a book, published in 1992, written by the noted sleep researcher Michel Jouvet. Problem is, that was some months after I had 'read' an entire paragraph on a CRT monitor during a dream. I thus never bought this claim, which I considered at the time as just one more thing Jouvet unduly rejected (during decades Jouvet denied the reality of lucid dreams, until... he had one himself). Yet it is manifestly a widely held belief today, but one singularly lacking empirical support. Indeed, I have been unable to locate a published research specifically or principally addressing this issue. It seems then to remain an open, unsettled scientific question, worth devoting a Ph.D. research and dissertation to it.

There is of couse nothing paranormal or parapsychological as to its a priori bases: Reading is a common, ordinary perceptual-cognitive task routinely performed by hundreds of millions of humans, and all but a few humans do dream during their sleep time. And even if daily routine tasks aren't frequently present in subsequent dreams, as indicated by the results of a recent study on the continuity between waking activities and dream activities [pdf], infrequent doesn't equate absent. In fact 'reading' represented 7.3% of dream activities taken into account in this research (but what 'reading' meant wasn't investigated in detail).

Moreover, speculating about the possibility or impossibility of dreaming that one is reading is somehow putting the cart before the horse: It obviously is before all an empirical question. Do people actually 'read' or not while dreaming? Without any other ambition than to bring together anecdotal evidence, this thread/poll may be an indicative answer to this question.

In my own recollection of dreams, of about 7-8 occasions where a dream included something like 'reading', only two were episodes of 'reading' words with perfectly stable and distinct letters: A paragraph, as already mentionned, and a title on the cover of a book. In all the other occasions, although I had the strong feeling of understanding the meaning of the text, the letters were either too blurred, too scrambled, or too unstable for 'reading' to aptly describe this oneiric performance. Similar experiences and reports can be find in "Reading in dreams", a thread dedicated to this question on another discussion forum.

Your votes, reports, and comments are welcome.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

I have read in dreams occasionally, though I find that the words don't stay. If I read back over what I've read, it's not the same. While I understand what the words mean, they don't quite look like what they're supposed to.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'm dyslexic in dreams. I can see characters on pages, but they make no sense.

 

[Piscivore]

What Monkey said.

 

[Dragonrock]

Every time I remember "reading" in dreams I wasn't actually reading, I was making up what I thought it said. In most cases whatever I was reading was really blank.

ETA: Except street signs, I remember seeing street signs with words on them.

 

[Kaarjuus]

Sometimes I doze off while reading a book. Sometimes in the dream I continue to be awake and to read on. If I wake up after a few minutes, I find that what I'd been reading in the dream, while being highly entertaining, was not what the pages contained.

 

[Dragonrock]

I would also like to point out that your planet X option is rather weak. Something like "The only thing to read on planet X is Penthouse Forums" or perhaps expanding yours to "No one reads on Planet X as there is only one letter."

 

[Almo]

I had a bad dream about my programming, so I was reading that... I think. Can't quite remember.

 

[Piscivore]

I've dreamed I was reading the forums before. Especially when I was talking to lifegazer.

 

[AMembrane]

I had always heard that you can't read in dreams, and that most people dream in black and white, but I've always dreamed in color.

I've read books in my dreams. Usually for me the page will be static as long as the book is open to it, but if I flip back, it will be a page from another book. Unlike Monkey, they look like words and make sense, but they are not what I've already read.

On mornings when I'm sleeping later than my body needs to, I've been able to have one dream while on my left side, another on the right, and switch between them by rolling over. The dream I'm not dreaming doesn't progress while I'm dreaming the other one.

 

[Wowbagger]

I've read lots of Top Secret government documents in my dreams. Too bad I don't remember what they said, anymore.

 

[Avita]

I put "yes," but with the caveat that the kind of thing I've read in dreams are signs, book spines, page headings, and other items of that nature. When I try to "read" a connected series of sentences in my dreams, I vaguely see the page, and sometimes I imagine that I know what it says (other times, I have no idea). Signage, on the other hand, I have the distinct sensation of actually reading, and IIRC, what it says doesn't change.

A bit OT, but I think that I "read" in dreams in the same way that I "see color." It's not that my dreams are black and white, it's that I have no idea what colors things are in my dreams. Except for the occasional dream in which I see an element or two in color, and then I notice the contrast between the brightly colored object (e.g., a red monkey), and the rest of the objects, which still have undefined color. Similarly, I may be able to read a few words here and there if my mind expends enough effort on generating the image. When I don't need to really know the details of some dream image, but just know that it's "present," then all I get is the sensation that it's there and that it looks normal enough.

 

[fribble]

I honestly can never remember what happens in my dreams, with one exception. (And that was when I was about 3, I dreamt that Bluto from Popeye was in a space station with a machine that turned everybody into lions. I laugh about it now, but it was darn scary for me back then!)

So I voted for Planet X. Although, no doubt the next time a book appears in a dream of mine, I will remember if I could read it or not...

 

[Molinaro]

I am always aware of my dreams as they hapen. I see they from a 3rd person point of view. I can stop them by waking myself up or by 'rewinding' to an earlier point. I can't change how it goes forward and somtimes I endup replaying the same undesirable events. Othertimes it will play out differently.

I had a dream about a decade ago that's right on this topic. It started with me sitting at an exam in high school. I was at desk in one of many rows setup in the gym. The scene was straight out of my real high school experiences.

The teachers were walking around handing out the exam. I suddenly thought to myself:

"What the heck is a question on an exam in a dream going to look like?"

"If it's a physics or math question, will it work out and make sense?"

"Will I be able to remember it?"

"Will it have spelling errors like nearly everything I write?"


So, I get all anxious in my chair as I wait for the teacher to hand me one. Finaly it gets there and as I look down at the top page, I see that there's three 4-5 line paragraphs on the page with some blank space between each.

Ok, it's plain text, without numbers.

I focus in and start to read the first line.. and .. can't quite focus.

Hmmm.. I look away and everything comes into clear focus. I look back to the page, and try and focus in on the 1st word, then skip to the second, or the middle of the next line.. and NOPE!

It would just get blurry as I tried.

I felt like 'an intelligence' was working against me. Like I caught it with it's pants down and it had to scramble for an out!

It was a very interesting experience.

 

[Cuddles]

You can't read in a dream, because the letters weren't there until you tried to look (so they change all the time).

The conclusion does not follow from the rest of the statement. Whether the letters were there or not before you dreamed them is irrelevant to whether you can read them.

Since you can "see" things in dreams and identify them very clearly I see no reason why letters would magically act differently from everything else.

 

[Meffy]

Not only do I read in dreams, I have written program code that, with just minor adjustments, worked fine and has been incorporated into successful software.

However, getting the text to remain stable required shifting into semi-lucid mode so I had some measure of volition. Didn't want to take over the dream entirely because it was going in the right direction already, helping me to code in a way I'd not have thought of while awake.

 

[gdtbiker]

I've had dreams where I was Tring to read, but was frustrated because I couldn't see the words distinctly But this was during a time when I routinely struggled to get things in general into better focus during sleep. While awake I would practice visualizing things to see how much detail I could discern. Slowly I began to have dreams that were not only in color but included "high def" resolutions comparatively. Finally I reached a point of being able to focus much more detail in my waking visualizations. In the end, at least so far, I've noted visualizations of much greater detail and my sleeping dreams have indeed included reading signs, labels, etc. Though I am at a loss to remember the details upon waking, I am left with the umistakable feeling that the words were clear to me during the dream. Of course I still have to admit the possibilty that my "feeling" is mistaken, but I've had the experience so many times that I'm hard pressed not to conclude that the reading detail was accurate. I do, however, remember some small snippets of what I read during dreams but never the whole thing.

 

[Timble]

I've had dreams where I've read a piece of verse or a few lines of text in a book or playscript. However, I can never find the same piece of text again, either I can't find the page again or the text has apparently changed when I've glanced away.

I've written stuff in dreams too, but again the text changes when I'm not looking.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Well we can recognize thigns we see in dreams, and we can understand speech in dreams. Reading, as far as I've learned, is just a combination of both of those. Some people apparently can't, just like some people say they don't see color in dreams. I can do both, which justifies my existance.

I have a distinct memory of reading a movie theater title for "Titanic 2: The Voyage Home", and I've read a few other things too. My dreams tend to just keep on going. There's random sometimes nonsensical segues into stuff but I seem to recall things that happened earlier in the dream and sometimes that shows up later. Of course, since I don't seem to remember my dreams except on very rare occasions, I can't speak for all of them. I'm just going on fuzzy memory.

However, I can read in dreams as well as I can hold a conversation. Whatever that tells you, so be it. But, if you say I can't read because it only makes sense and looks like words while concentrating on it, well that only speaks to the fact that this dream world is just a creation of my mind and wouldn't you also have to state that you can't listen to people in dreams as well? Same thing there.

 

[Bruno Putzeys]

Good topic... When I read about it I took the claim as true because for me it works like that (which is why I was happy repeating it somewhere). I think the actual wording was "if you want to know if you're dreaming, look at your watch and see if you can tell the time". Well presumably the author meant a digital watch as he went on to explain that you wouldn't see sensible numbers appear.

That's how it goes with me. Even when I'm in a lucid dream state I simply see text that changes all the time and that has little sensible meaning. On the other hand, I can explain a fairly complicate technical concept to "someone" in a dream, so I can perfectly imagine someone cooking up a working software algorithm in a dream.

It's interesting to hear that indeed some people do manage to see a stable text in a dream. I take your word for it (I won't make the same claim again), even though I do still contend (not too unreasonably I hope?) that the content of the text only comes into being only when it was dreamed of being read.

ps: I've also written working code while stone drunk. In fact I'm writing this post in a fairly intoxicated state. I wonder what I'll be thinking when I re-read this tomorrow...