Pascal wrote to me:
Here's a little topic which I feel your blog would be ideal for promoting and asking around. (Mine doesn't quite have as wide a readership to gather testimonies.)
Once, in an episode of Batman: the animated series, Batsy figures out he's in a false reality thanks to the clue of all inscriptions being complete gibberish. Turns out he was mind-controlled, and imprisoned in a dream. I mean, he was REALLY sleeping and dreaming, and the foe was controlling it. Batman explained how he found out and escaped that trap : "One can't read in dreams."
I thought about it, medically, and it seemed to make a lot of sense, even though I never heard about that in my Neurology classes. We read with the language area, in our left hemisphere, which interprets the visual symbolism of letters, and we dream with our right brain hemisphere. The reason/emotions dichotomy. We analyze on the left, we dream on the right, literally. But I don't have many chances of meeting my Neurology professor to discuss the issue of reading in dreams.
The thing is, I myself often read in my dreams. And write, too. The letters are very clear. So, it seems a very likely theory, but it doesn't apply to me. I wonder if this is a rarity.
Therefore I'm asking around: do you people ever recall reading in a dream? I mean remembering the letters and all? For we can often "dream that we HAVE read", but the content will be expressed VERBALLY, as it a town sign sort of spoke it out to our dreaming mind, and we'll have the memory of spoken words. Does anybody specifically remember dreaming intelligible, readable letters, words and phrases?
Also, please do mention whether you're right-handed or left-handed. Lefties may have a different repartition of brain tasks. But myself, I'm an ordinary right-handed bloke. In theory.
- Pascal
I can't offhand remember instances of reading in a dream.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fascinating topic.
ReplyDeleteI dream, vividly, and regularly, & I faithfully record them - and I have just been through the past 3 years worth of dreams and there is not one recollection of reading....even though I am an avid reader. Not EVEN reading, never mind specific word / character recognition. Fascinating...why have I never dreamt reading, something important to my conscious state...
FTR i'm left handed TaT.
"TaT"?
ReplyDeleteI'm right handed. I can recall reading in a few dreams I've had but almost without exception I wake up shortly after. Funny enough it's because I'm suddenly aware that I'm dreaming.
ReplyDeleteTo be specific, I can see clear, legible text on my computer screen but that alone doesn't do it. I only wake up if I try to read it. If I'm observing myself from a third person perspective then I'll watch myself read something and get information from it but if I read and process information from a first person perspective it wakes me up.
I think the problem is that you are dreaming the writing and then, or at the same time, you are dreaming reading it, I have read in dreams but it always goes astray, the words start changing etc, maybe with dreams, as soon as you concentrate on something you take yourself out of the dream state
ReplyDeleteAh, I'm very glad you posted this! I've heard people mention this before as well, and I was certain I had had dreams in which I read something. In fact, in quite a few dreams I find myself reading street name signs or other small details. Now, I'm a lucid dreamer (whenever I find myself walking on all fours in my dreams, I know I'm dreaming) and I've given this a closer look, and indeed, upon closer investigation, the signs ARE gibberish. Even the ones I wrote myself.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that while you may *think* you're reading, you're not, your mind just makes you believe that you are. In dreams everything seems quite real, even when we know that it's a pile of horse shit. I think it's no different when it comes to reading.
If any other lucid dreamers are reading this, please give this a shot if you can.
Addendum: I'm right handed, although when I was around age 10 I was forced to left-handed for about a year when my right hand was injured.
ReplyDeleteThe topic discussed here touches the interesting phenomenon, called "lucid dreaming". That is the type of dreaming where a given individual is AWARE they are dreaming. From that state they can controll the content of their dream, they can change deliberately the plot, the story of their dream. Lucid dreaming has been researched widely by Stephen LaBerge.
ReplyDeleteSo, I think IT IS possible to read in a dream. It is possible to write in a dream, and in both cases the content of that which is being written and/or read can be legible...
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ReplyDeleteHello Pascal !
ReplyDeleteHere is a fresh example, just for you ! :-)
When reading the question yesterday, I couldn't recall any example. So when going to sleep, I told myself to recall if there was any writing. Woke up twice, and here is a nice example for the second time.
In the dream, I was talking to a person, who then scotch-taped a piece of paper on a door for me, to give me some information that a third person (her boyfriend?) standing further should not know. Then I looked at that third person, and woke up.
The piece of paper, it is funny, it was my own handwriting, but from some ten or more years ago, with a green ballpen. In the dream it just looked so familiar, didn't notice it is my writing, but as I still had the image in my eyes when I woke up, I realised it is my writing. It took me a few minutes.
There was very clearly written 203b. I started was wondering about it when I woke up, then recalled it was the name of the classroom where I used to have my classes from 14 to 19. Was fun to recall it. Actually, if there wasn't Pascal's question, I don't think I would have stopped to wonder about it.
So there was 203b, and a few other words, scattered, not in a line. Something like a note with the different things one should do that one wrote not to forget them. I just read the 203b in my dream, then turned my head to look at the other person. Then woke up.
Actually, when I woke up, I thought: well, there was no writing. Then I recalled the piece of paper. It was so natural and casual that... well, for me, I think I can read in dreams...
I am not an awake dreamer, at all, and I am right-handed.
Since we are already onto lucid dreaming, I made a couple of posts about very interesting experiences on my spiritual blog, here, and here, and here.
ReplyDelete(It should be noted that I am of the persuation common in some beliefs that life itself is a dream.)
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ReplyDeleteBy the way, Pascal, neurologically it sounds weird, that we dream with only one hemisphere... For Batman it's ok, but otherwise... Are you sure?
ReplyDeleteand if language is on the other side, we should also not be able to hear speech, should we.
Could you be more precise? :-)
And, well, you certainly know that the brain functions have first been defined on male homo sapiens being shoot on their heads during the last wars, and losing different kinds of cognitive abilities. It was assumed that for female the regions are the same. Though roughly similar, the female brain is indeed different. One point is that we woman have language in both hemispheres...
Haha !
That would be why you talk twice as much.
ReplyDelete(Sorry, you can see how I couldn't let that one lie.)
Of course!
ReplyDeleteActually I wanted to write it myself ! :-)
But then I realised that on your blog, Eolake, men talk so much more than women... So it would have been slightly false, and as it was late, I didn't find a nice way to put it, so I just left it.
So you just picked it up. Fair enough ! :-)
Pascal alone talks more than all the women combined around here. :-)
ReplyDeleteYeah.
ReplyDeleteHe was the one I was thinking of too.
Pascal, I am sure you have more than one language-related region in your brain! :-)
*
That might be a reason why you can read in your dreams.
How interesting! I remember that episode from years ago and I've always wondered if that was true. Ever since, I would try to make myself aware of the task during my sleep. I think there was a time or two that I woke up and blurted out "I can read," and then fell back asleep. I can't say that I've written or read books in my dreams, but I was able to read words on posters & signs. I assume because the typesetting and symbols are extremely larger than book or newspaper print?
ReplyDeleteBTW, I'm right-handed.
Captain's blog, start date 7.6.2009:
ReplyDeleteThere's now evidence that if I try to read in dream, the text blurs out.
I saw it now on an odd phenom I've had recently: just after wakening or when half-asleep, lucid "dreams", silent pictures running in a little area of my field of vision. Like MTV videos on crack. Very strange.
I had a dream last night and i read an email in my dream and i remember seeing the words, he wrote about a japanese restaurant he wanted me to go to and i remember actually seeing the words 'japanese restaurant' and the name of it was in caps but i don't remember the name. i told my friend about it and he's like you can read in ur dreams its a scientific fact, but i don't care, i know what i saw lol.
ReplyDeleteim a righty.
I'm a lucid dreamer and have often noticed strange discrepancies surrounding writing and reading in dreams. Touch-typing in a dream appears to be impossible - even though the lucid mind can spell the word you want to type, the characters displayed are random, as though the fingers keep hitting the wrong keys. To a lucid dreamer this is immensely frustrating, but I suspect in a non-lucid state one would assume the correct spelling.
ReplyDeleteShort phrases and signs are sometimes displayed correctly for me, but larger bodies of text are, on closer inspection, 'greeked' - which is to say, they appear to be normal sentences, and even make sense grammatically, but are nonsensical. For example:
"The toasted bat forgot his cheese on the bed when he couldn't find his mother in a tower block falling over on top of a pig. The catastrophe made itself quite scarce when the tax man blew chocolate sauce on top of an elephant for lunch."
However, if one allows oneself to relax and not examine the dream too lucidly, the text will present itself with a 'sense' that does not correspond to actually reading the characters. One dreams 'reading' a text, and the mind is supplied with meaning (which can even make sense after waking), but the usual processes of interpreting writing do not appear to take place.
A strange example of language in a dream would be when I was urged by a dream-character to look up the word 'aphasia' in a dictionary. The entry read, in clear English - 'Aphasia is a foot disease'. I resolved to double-check it against a real dictionary when I woke up. 'Aphasia', of course, is a difficulty producing or comprehending spoken or written language!
Haha, that's great.
ReplyDeleteFunny, I actually surfed the web to get the same answer after remember the Batman episode from my childhood. I remember doing some research on it a few years back (aka googling) and the best answer I liked was that its very hard to read in your dream unless you are focusing on it. After the Batman episode, I have tried to read in dreams, and I remember a few instances where I was able to after concentrating on it in the dream.
ReplyDeleteI realize this is a old post, but wondering if there are new insights? I have actively been keeping track whether I see actual words or not and last week I had actual words - Rhino and patience being two of them. I was aware that I was dreaming and that I was actually reading words - clearly being told to be patient - glad to see my subconscious has a sense of humour.
ReplyDelete(Who are you?)
ReplyDeleteThank you.
Personally I have not gotten new data about this one way or the other, although I think it was after this post that I had a couple of fascinating episodes of lucid dreaming, where I was aware of dreaming and saw everything in stunning detail, it was so kewl.