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?
Sometimes I see signs I can read but that’s about it.
A while back I had an incredibly vivid dream about getting to and on the tube at King Herod station. That tube logo roundel with the name in the strike through was so, so clear and in several places in the station, along with a map of the line I could read. Upon waking I spent a good ten minutes googling it as I was so convinced it had to be a memory and was a real place.
Books and the internet have never worked for me in dreams though and I’ve had plenty of dreams where I’ve been trying to text someone and couldn’t as the keyboard was gibberish and words didn’t work.
And kinda related I suppose- I had a dream I was trying desperately to unlock my phone throughout this long adventure, and when I woke up my memory of my phone unlock glyph was fried as I’d basically overwritten it by doing it wrong so many times in the dream.
The whole following day had me freaking out trying to unlock my phone, to the point of drawing the nine dots out in my notebook over and over and over again, trying to link them up in the way I knew had to be right but wasn’t working.
When it finally came back I realised that I’d been drawing it out mirror flipped all day. It’s made me slightly uneasy ever since for some reason. It hasn’t helped that I’ve started to notice other mirror flipped things in dreams after that too.