Reading in Dreams

[Mayabird]

I've heard people say that you can't read in dreams, but I do it all the time. Restaurant signs, newspapers, heck, last night I dreamed that I had to register for classes online, and I got on a computer, typed in my info, and got pissed because they'd somehow misspelled my name. I've dreamed that I've received IMs which I read.

So why do people claim that we can't read in dreams? I can't find any trustworthy info on it, so someone please help me. Other people perplex me.

[Batman]

Excuse me? You can't read in dreams? Where does that come from? I most certainly can.
Given that dreamscapes are individual virtually by definition, I would distrust blanket claims like you can/can't do x in dreams without massive evidence to back it up.
There used to be the same claim that you can't feel pain in dreams. Trust me, you can. It's (for me) usually actual physical pain that just makes its way into the dream, but you defintely can.

[Destructionator XV]

I too have heard people say that, and I also know it to be bullshit.. Perhaps their reasoning is that the virtual world in the dream is too low resolution to make out individual words, and I would believe this if I didn't read in my own dreams as often as I do.

Though I must note that I can imagine a great many things, but if I am not in the bizarre quasi-sleep state as I call it, which is right before waking up: I am certainly dreaming, but also concious enough to direct and remember the dream, I can't do it. When I am awake and try to induce reading something not physically there, I can't do it. But when dreaming, yeah, reading is commonplace.

Sometimes it is really bloody weird. Reading books that are sometimes books I have read before but years ago, and sometimes books I don't even recognise; must be me making stuff up as I go. And the IM conversations in dreams are truly bizarre. If not for the fact that my computer logs messages and if they were real, there would be a record of it, or the fact that I wake up still in my bed rather than in my computer chair, I wouldn't even realise those are dreams.

[JEAP]

Left brain right brain thing, I've heard. One handles your ability to read and the other handles dreaming, anything you read in a dream is going to be jumbled up.

I just thought I was weird because I could read stuff in a dream and have it make sense.

[LadyTevar]

Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't.

Sometimes I'll be reading something fine... and then the words start jumbling into gibberish.

[Shark Bait]

Not being able to read in dreams is largely an old wives tale about dreams, a true dream found in REM sleep often stimulates just about every part of your brain so much so that you have to have a back up system paralyzing your motor neurons so you cant get up and act out the dreams. So yes the part of your brain that processes written language can be easily stimulated in a dream and you can read during a dream, though what you read is not allways gauranteed to make sense.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

I can read in dreams, but while the words themselves are perfectly readable, the setentences never make sense. Most of my readings in dreams are newspapers, with nonsensical headlines like "The Goats Are Lefting Archives Forgotten Realms But

Excuse me? You can't read in dreams? Where does that come from? I most certainly can.

No, you couldn't. In one episode of Batman cartoons, you discovered that you were actually in Scarecrow-induced dream by finding out that you couldn't read anything. "I couldn't read, so this must be a dream."

[Batman]

Damn. I need to brush up on my fallacies again.
'I can't read, therefore it has to be a dream' does not equal 'It's a dream, therefore I won't be able to read'

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

Damn. I need to brush up on my fallacies again.
'I can't read, therefore it has to be a dream' does not equal 'It's a dream, therefore I won't be able to read'

Well, it was the fallacy that saved your life and put Scarecrow back in jail