The problem is that you watched Friends

Fake: you can’t actually read in your dreams

I remember this one, it's "The one with the C̶̫̪͇̳̀͝o̴̧͎̰͎͆̄͗͒͘f̷̢̖̮̆̐̽͝f̷̢̪̗͉͓͒̍̇͘e̶͖͔̒̉ḛ̷̛̹͎͐̕̕ ̴̗͈̝̽s̷̛̥͈̉̇͊͜͝h̸͓͕̲͇̪̉̀̓̀͝o̴̰̰̝̳͌̍͛ͅp̵̛̝͓̯̄͊͜ͅ ψ"

You can't read coherently, but its sort of a visual association where you look at something that should have words and read those words simply by thinking. If you were lucid and do this, then you would be able to tell the words can't be read, but when you are just on auto-pilot like most dreams then your dream tends to fill in the blanks that maintain the illusion. They became lucid around the time the words became indecipherable, which could be at the same time or just anxiety making the words lose meaning, but either way the pacing checks out.

Matches my experiences with lucid dreaming and the reading I've done on lucid dreaming at least.

sounds like a Datura trip

Forgot to pivot, noob

Sleep paralysis

Fake: you can't read in dreams

Gay: anon tried to read, like some kind of nerd homo

But also, I have absolutely read in dreams. Most of the time it's frustrating or terrifying nonsense (like, an imperative to read or something bad will happen, and suddenly I can't, or dial a phone number or something bad will happen, but the numbers won't display correctly, or whatever), but on more than one occasion dreaming normally and lucidly, I have successfully read text in a dream.

I tried to read, fail and thus realize I'm dreaming in an attempt to lucid dream. But my mind fucked me over and had made the text appear in Asian instead of Latin symbols so I went "ah ok, technically I could read but not that. So I'm not dreaming, carry on then."

Once you've experienced sleep paralysis, nightmares are comforting.

I can definitely read text in some dreams. Not even lucid ones. Not like reading a novel, but signs or things I, "need to read" have words, and often legible, at least shorter words.

Anon forgot they were watching cable TV not streaming. Reruns at 2 am? They just slept through a long commercial break. You may have had a nightmare but you avoided Yahel with the sad old jews, Sarah McLoughlan with the abused animals, 16 pharmaceuticals, 5 kind of insurance, and a financial advisor.

I'm inclined to think that when 'reading' in a dream, you're actually just dreaming the concept as if having read it.

It's your dream, you already 'know' what a sign says.

If that makes any sense at all...

The come shop

Oh that totally sounds like some of the shit my brain would do to me when I was into lucid dreaming haha

How sweet, they are just a learner and almoust bot Anon for real.
Next time you'll trap Anon for eternity, Buddy!

Comé shopë. It's French oui oui

Did nobody tell him that life was going to be that way?

Anon knows their job's a joke, they're broke, their love life's DOA.

it's like they're unable to drive due to a broken gearbox

Yeah this is what I mean with my comment. Your brain knows there should be something there and thus it fills in the blanks, maintaining the illusion of it being readable without it needing to be.

Sort of like when you wear glasses with a huge smudge on the edge of them for long enough. You don't notice the smudge because your brain fills in the gap that it takes up in your peripheral.

Don't forget about reverse mortgage era Tom Selleck

Dreams are fun eh? Also your concept of time gets wonky when you're dreaming.

It's the "time has no meaning" aspect of it that's terrifying.

Definitely happens both ways for me depending on the occurence.

Your brain is doing the whole thing.

It can imagine you have already read something it never actually "simulated". It can imagine you going through the steps of reading without any written words in the dream being involved at all. It can imagine illegible text that you are conscious of being unable to read. It can imagine legible text that you can read. It can invent information, recall it, or fail to recall it for the contents of the text. The contents could stay consistent if you return to them later in the dream, they could change, or at that "later" point, your brain can invent the "memory" of having previously read that text.

And it isn't really a simulator, which is why lucid dreaming might only experience a subset of these, possibly leaning more towards illegible text, because a lucid dreamer is probably either trying to read to find information (that the brain might not have and might not bother trying to make up because it knows what the conscious mind is up to) or testing what is possible in dreams (which I'd imagine the unconscious mind might think something like "dude, I'm just making this up as I go in the first place, and while it's cool that this whole thing entertains and/or perplexes you, it's just a hallucination that happens during routine housekeeping that you're not even supposed to remember because it's all meaningless. Don't try to do science in it, just enjoy the show, laugh when you think about it when I'm fully online, and move on").

I once got locked in a state of sleep paralysis and managed to call out for help. I said "please wake me up I'm having a nightmarrrre" but in a really scared voice and no air in my lungs, just forcing the sounds out with my diaphragm. It freaked my roommate THE FUCK out. Honestly it was a little embarrassing but they just think it's a cool story now. It's kinda funny how our emotional states flipped because they went from "hehe is he sleep talking?" to "WHAT THE FUCK HE NEEDS MY HELP!" and I went from "I'm trapped in an inescapable torment of my own unconscious mind!" to "ok I'm awake now. That's better." My eyes were already open but I couldn't wake up. The instant I saw them open the door I was immediately awake and calm. Meanwhile they were dealing with a major adrenaline surge and took a long time to calm back down.

And GGW.

I would have said sleep apnea, but similar I guess?

Mine was an abandoned mall with half the lights dead and people shambling around aimlessly. There was a guy sitting by a door with a curtain on it and he asked if I would go in and help him with some math problems. Seemed sus as hell but I was kinda curious so I peeked behind the curtain and it was just a black void no floor or anything. Wished him luck and went back towards the lobby. There was a giant upside down cross on the wall and I was like oh hey it's the cross of St Peter and everybody turned to me suddenly looking really pissed off and then I woke up.

The sleep paralysis moment was just a shadow man standing at the foot of the bed until I managed to yell for my husband and it disappeared when he ran in.

More recently I ran out of clonidine and had a dream I was being stalked by a weird blurry outline of a human. When it finally caught me I felt this vibrating stiffness go through me like being lowkey electrocuted so like not as painful but rather alarming at which point I woke up. Bizarrely, my immediate thought was to force myself back to sleep and go fight the asshole and I did exactly that and kept chasing it down and grabbing it and holding on as long and as hard as I could and getting shocked awake repeatedly. I must have done that 3-5 times before I stopped being able to find it. I remember my jaw being a little sore from grinding my teeth.

I'm also pretty sure I saw my actual death at some point. I got stopped at a traffic checkpoint during some kind of mass exodus by highway from somewhere. We were told we tested positive for some kind of infectious disease and I remember knowing that was a ruse but they were armed. They took us all to a sports stadium and once everybody was there (100 people or so?) they told us we needed to get in line to get on some trucks that were gonna take us to a more long-term housing situation. Once they had us in line on the field they started shooting and that's when I woke up. At least part of the reason I haven't tried to kill myself again is the distinct impression that if I try to evade that fate something way worse will happen.

For me, sleep apnea's can't breathe usually immediately jolts me awake, brought on by something in the dreamstate, the first time it was driving into a lake and drowning, then sitting up hyperventilating. Sleep paralysis is a lot scarier, I tend to be, or at least perceive to be, awake and in my bed, but there's something else there, and for one reason or another, that thing keeps me from breathing, maybe it's to not make a sound, maybe it's stealing my breath, I dunno, but it keeps me from hitting that jolt awake moment with the hyperventilating. The post felt more like the second one.

Please open a blog and share more

Very neat short stories hahaha

I've got a pretty long post history here if you're that interested and I'm on masto but I do periodically delete everything but the last six months or so for privacy reasons.

While I agree with most of your statement, I don't believe that all dreams are meaningless hallucinations. Onierology is the study of dreams and does have moments of consistent results, such as the experiments showing the ability to communicate with the waking world from within dreams and vice versa, and the potential for therapeutic interactions within the dreams as they act as sort of vague subconscious messaging of psychological distress. I've actually overcame a lot of mental issues by actively trying to become lucid in dreams to consult dream entities who seem to have knowledge and understanding of things that I either don't have or have been avoiding without thinking about it.

Its definitely all conjured by the brain, but it isn't always meaningless and the meaning behind it does vary from person to person. Some people have no dreams at all, some have the same dream over and over and over again (which often is the brain trying to tell them something), and some people have abstract dreams with no real meaning but can sometimes inspire them into artistry where they try to understand the dreams regardless of if they have meaning or not. Its a very curious thing to learn more about because it has such a wide net that blurs subjectivity and objectivity of any kind.