reading_in_your_dreams oldephebe has anyone experienced this supposedly impossible phenomenon? you know because of the whole hemisphere thing right? no left side of the brain to process language or syntax (written while we sleep right?) - what?! well I gotta say maybe it's because I'm left handed or used to using both hemisphere's, thinking in weird ways I guess despite my banker's gray blather style - umm I've had a few dreams where I could actually read (I'm pretty sure of it! what was written, on the page, and in some of those dreams I'm not in the dream (yes of course there's an instantiation of "me" or idealized representation of me or whatever) in other dreams I try to read it and it's just gobbeldygook - sometimes lucid dreams can be really disconcerting (need more adjectives)is there some psychic dispacement going on here? Or astral projection? What could account for this? Or am I just deluding myself? This only started recently, say within the past three or four months or so. Has this ever happened to anyone out there? 030816 ... delial I've dreamt of reading before, yeah. chatting with people on AIM reading messages left while I was away etc etc I was shocked the first time I heard about it being "impossible" coulda_fooled_me! 030816 ... neesh yeah i've read in dreams too, been on msn messenger, in fact i set up my contacts list grouping all my friends elementally after that happened in one of my dreams. didn't know it was impossible though :-/ 030816 ... ferret i've read in dreams, i dont' think what i read made any sense though :) if i were to go back and read it while awake, i would probably bust up laughing thinking that i understood it. as far as lucid dreams go, i've heard that it is possible to read in lucid dreams, although the words do like to rescramble themselves, whenever i try to have a lucid dream, i always end up getting too conscious so i guess i'll just have to work on that. has anybody ever been lucid WHILE FALLING ASLEEP? strangest thing 030816 ... screwing for virginity no, but i am lucid while waking up relitivly often 030816 ... x i can't read in dreams, but i usually decide that i know what the thing that i'm reading says regardless 030816 ... nomme when i am looking for an answer to something when i am thinking of someone wondering how they are sometimes out of the blue it will be a book or a letter and i always struggle so to remember the words i am reading but they fade as i read them become blank pages dust to the waking memory only snippets of recollection and languages i do not know 030816 ... shoccolo i can't read in dreams. for some reason, i try to understand what is before me, and it's taken away, the scenery changes, or all of a sudden it disappears. my subconscious is witholding valuable information from me, i feel... i wonderwhat it means, that i'm illiterate in my dreams? 030817 ... oldephebe doubt it probably just something your sub-conscious thinks it's protecting you from - of course I'm hardly the person to consult about dream interpretation i only retain the knowledge for a few minutes after I wake up 030817 ... endless desire this is kind of lame but in some dreams i've read the bible and then i wake up and look at the page and it's exactly what i read. i have a pretty good photographic memory so i guess i just kind of remembered it. it really freaked me out at first but then i thought about it and it really wasn't that cool. 030913 ... ferret once i dreamed that it stopped raining outside and when i woke up it stopped raining! 030913 ... Toxic_Kisses If its a book or a magazine most of the time (although not always) I have to concentrate on it for a few seconds before it will materialize into words, sometimes the words make sense, some times they don't. The dreams that freak me out are the ones that come true! Take for instance the two that just came true recently. In one of them I'm @ the eye doctors and for what ever reason wear talking about musical instruments, why on earth are me and an eye doctor talking about musical instruments?? It didn't make sense in the dream so I just disregarded it, and then it actually happened a week ago!! turns out I asked the guy what made him want to be an eye doctor, guess no-one had asked him this b4 so he goes on a simi-long tangent about how he use to want to be a musician but how he chose the safe road bc his dad was an eye doctor and so he grew up around this type of stuff all his life, but that wasn’t the important thing, see the important thing was now I had finely figed out why him and I were discussing musical interments in my dream! the other dream was a scene of a nude woman @ a waterfall, her backed turned to me, nothing happened in this dream I just saw this scene of this nude woman @ a waterfall I woke up and thought that was odd bc usually when I dream something is going on, but in this one nothing was going on, every thing but the water was @ a stand still! THEN I find this postcard http://www.whiterain.com/postcard.asp?page=60 and it was the EDZACT same thing I saw in my dream! Not only that but I had these dreams about 3 months ago!! Those type of dreams are the kind *I* find freaky!! 030913 ... metamantrg thats realy weird because someone speical to me seen me that card last week how incretable is that it was a great insperation to me that a dream like of your would come true what can one say about that 030913 ... metamantrg thats realy weird because someone speical to me seen me that card last week how incretable is that it was a great insperation to me that a dream like of your would come true what can one say about that 030913 ... Death of a Rose lucid feelings while falling asleep. i've had one that recurs about every six months. I know I'm falling asleep, i know my eyes are closed, breathing shallow. I can hear the curtains shifting from the wind through the window, i can feel the pillow under my head, where the creases in the pillowcase are, and the pillow bunched up against my chest. all these things i know, but when i tried to open my eyes, move my hands, even take a deep breath, i've failed. 031015 ... ms sing I have read in my dreams before. I too was unaware that it was "impossible". Guess that just shows what you can accomplish if you don't know you're not supposed to.... hee hee but the best dream I had about reading... I read jelly belly jelly beans. Pages of books contained pictures of jelly bellies and each belly represented a word or combination of words. It was weird. I was teaching a child to read with jelly bellies (which by the way are awesome...buttered popcorn being the best) and when he read it coreectly...he could eat the jelly beans. Weird huh? 031204 ... anomalous i often read in my dreams 050513 ... pSyche hmm. I've read in my dream I think.. but now that I think about it, whenever I remember reading something in my dreams, it seems to be more of a knowing what it said than actually having read. 050513 ... Lila Pause Is it sad that we dream about being on MSN? 050514 ... . slough in your nightmares 050514 ... ? often when i fall asleep while reading, i begin dreaming as if i was still reading. This becomes a probelm because i continue reading, although i make up the story from where i had stopped reading and fallen asleep. So when i wake up i get confused with what i had read and what i had made up, and the story becomes very confusing. I don't read before bed anymore. 050514 ... ? and to lila.. whats sadder.. dreaming of being on msn when you are asleep, or willfully being on msn when you are awake 050514 ... anomalous this morning i was reading streetsigns the names were all funny 050515 ... andru235 science alleges dream-reading is impossible? hah! another one! this is [another one] of those things where i am nearly to the point where i could not care less about science and/or psychology and its absurd allegations: i have dreams where i read, quite often. in fact i have had more dreams where i engage in reading than i can count (and sometimes even find myself reading the same sentence twice because i wasn't paying attention, etc). i have dreams where i read music quite often also. i've never heard this alleged, but i have heard other "facts" stated about how we dream that i solipsistically know to be false (see appendices below) now i will bore everyone with a recollection of some of these dreams. ]]]]]]] I [[[[[[[ i have a recurring dream that i am listening to Bruckner's 14th Symphony (he only wrote 11, including one unnumbered and a Symphony #0), and nearly every time i turn over the CD case to see the tempo markings and durations, which are present, but the key signature is not listed, and so i open the liner notes and am dismayed to find there is merely a longwinded negative criticism of the work, with nothing eloquent stated. i have journaled about this dream four times after having it over the past ten years. when i examine the tempo indication for the first movement, it says, presto con brio, and lasts only 4 minutes or so. bruckner wasn't a 'presto' kind of guy; i'm only aware of his using it once for a string quartet fragment. and no bruckner opening symphonic movement is under ten minutes! ]]]]]]] II [[[[[[[ while learning spanish in central america, i had a dream one night that my boyfriend... (tangent: if i can call him that? because i will always remember him fondly but i was a total asshole tourist and after three months of a relationship left without even saying goodbye) ...handed me a book of poems in spanish and they were about us, in spanish, and there was a specific reference in the book to my being a very, very clumsy lover. and i awoke feeling embarrassed and insecure about it. but after that my fluency in reading (while awake) was vastly improved. i still have occasional spanish speaking dreams but since i so rarely speak/read spanish these days, this is very rare !pero recuerdo leiendo(?) en mis seunos pasados! ]]]]]]] III [[[[[[[ when i was a boy my neighbor and i collected "garbage pail kids" cards. dorky, i know. he always was lucky and got the rare cards in new series, whereas i would end up with twenty copies of 'oliver twisted' or whatever. one night i dreamt that i acquired the entire (x+5)th series, and i looked and looked at these cards, fascinated. when i awoke i was disappointed that i didn't have the cards anymore. i told the neighbor boy about one of the cards i had dreamt of and he said that it was "a stupid idea for a garbage pail kid, they would never make a garbage pail kid that stupid" ]]]]]]] IV [[[[[[[ i was an avowed nihilist from about 10, when i learned that was the word that applied to my aleatory sense of creation, until about 20. one night in high school i took a nap after school. if i sleep between 5pm and 9pm, i will usually have nightmares whereas i otherwise almost never do. i dreamt that i was walking around st. paul and someone sold me a "vacuous grimoire" book (i was playing a lot of RPGs at that juncture). i...DM though i was at the time...read the book. in the book, i learned de facto proof that there is no meaning to anything, that everything is a fluke, and in fact, nothing exists whatsoever including the present moment. in this book it was absolutely proven (i must have been in geometry that year or something) and i read the proof with a sort of disappointed "well andru235, i told you so!". i awoke and was depressed for days, unable to think of anything else but this dream. but then: ]]]]]]] V [[[[[[[ weeks later i had a dream that my 'soul tribe' (i.e. plural soul mates) sent me a letter that i had been tricked by an evil lich who cared only about factual knowledge. in the letter was a de facto proof that everything is infused with meaning, there are reasons for everything including (it's a paradox, i know) chaos, and that i would eventually reunite with my people. i dismissed this dream as a defense mechanism against the previous dream. (the high school only permitted seniors to take psychology, but i was able to take it as a sophomore because i was one of those irritating 'students rights' activists who was in the principals office every week citing human rights violations at the suburban school. incidentally i received a B+ my first trimester, a D- my second trimester, and an A my third trimester. so when it comes to psychology i may be an idiot but i'm no fool.) at any rate, i remained a nihilist for about four more years, until the phenomena started pouring in. ]]]]]]] Appendix A [[[[[[[ a psychology student friend of mine state, matter of factly, that no one remembered more than one dream from the previous night, and even then only remembered if awoken unnaturally. i was like, "next time you see a window, give your textbook a toss". i remember multiple dreams almost every night. how do i know they are multiple? i can usually recall the continuum of events, strange and surreal though they are. i suppose it could be argued that the night's entire dream is singular; else, most nights i awake with various levels of memory about my dreams, which are usually too varied and shifting to be lumped into singularity. semantics, i suppose. but does this mean i almost never awake naturally? i rarely use an alarm clock, and waking is usually a gradual, groggy process. my psychology friend, upon my waging a similar argument, said no, i was wrong. he preferred the theoretical opinion of an expert over the recurrent experience of a friend. how typical. ]]]]]]] Appendix B [[[[[[[ not so frequent are the music reading dreams, but i've had them. usually i am trying to read a piece of music that is way too advanced for my performing skills, or, the score is handwritten and i'm only able to distinguish the bass line, or whatever. on a few occasions, similar to dream#1, i've found myself with access to music that wasn't written but i had longed to hear, like Beethoven Piano Sonata #571 or something. ]]]]]]] Appendix C [[[[[[[ like five people i have known have one day claimed they never remember dreaming, then a year later they start telling me about these 'wierd' dreams they've been having. one suspects there is more sentient activity whilst sleeping than we are aware of upon waking. " *gasp* no! how could that be?" how often are you aware of your waking sentience upon sleeping aside from dreams? this isn't always a matter of memory recall!!! ]]]]]]] Appendix D [[[[[[[ dreams within dreams: had 'em. allegations that dreams within dreams are an impossibility: heard 'em. conclusion: had 'em. ]]]]]]] Appendix E [[[[[[[ people who have experienced trauma sometimes have recurrent nightmares about it. many have sought therapy through hypnosis, and the dreams have gone away. the point is PEOPLE ARE SUGGESTIBLE AND IF YOU TELL THEM HOW THEIR BRAIN WORKS, SOME WILL ADAPT TO THIS! this can be 'good' or 'bad', of course (externally-imposed self-fulfilling prophecy) 050515 ... Tocsin God. That was just brutal. 050718 ... Tocsin God. That was just brutal. 050718 ... no reason i read in a dream but i'm not sure if it was actual reading so much as just seeing the words and "knowing" what they said. 050718 ... z i once dreamed whole functions that did not exist on an imaging platform that i used to work on. i used the menus and referenced the numeric displays. 050718 ... sab the_mirror_of_my_dreams 050718 ... hsg ive done it. been lucid_dreaming for about ten years now. practice everynight. appreciate whats around you. pay attention all day and all night. at night set an alarm clock to wake you up every 45 mins. always keep you dream journal and 2 pens within reach so that you move as little as possible between awaking and writing. this movement thing is very important. practice not analyzing things when u awake. remain calm and collected. 050718 ... nom the poem i wrote and read i haven't seen a copy yet, had a dream i was reading it, the words were messed up as i worried 051126 ... Twitch I once had a dream where saw myself digging a hole in third person, and then credits just rolled by... I don't think I actually read them though (I was like five...I don't think I could read that well in the first place.) 051126 what's it to you? who go blather from