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've seen billboards, street signs, addresses written on curbs, numbers on apartment doors. Once was in a city reading a chalkboard menu for Mexican food, amazed at prices, wondering if I could speak Spanish well enough to ask questions.
Reading is never main focus though. More vaguely in background.
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
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.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.
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.
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
