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 definitely do. I had a problem for a few years where I would wake up in the middle of the night, see a notification on my phone for a text or email, read it, and then take whatever action needed in the morning. This would be fine if I was actually waking up or the texts/emails actually existed. I was not and they did not, but I took MANY actions in the morning.
I heard that you can tell if you’re in a dream if you try to read something twice to see if it says the same thing both times. Probably true for some people. As it turns out, not a reliable method for me. I once dreamed up a whole damn cast list for a ballet I was working on which I could repeat verbatim the next morning. I proceeded to email my friend involved in casting with my hot takes on the choices and got a very confused reply about how they hadn’t even had the meeting yet.
The only solution I have found is to have a 100% no-exception ban on actually interacting with my phone at night so I am sure that whatever boring ass email I’m reading at 3am isn’t real.
I’d never heard of anyone else this happed to before! Less consequences for me but there was a ~4 year period of my life where at least once a week I’d have a dream wherei just got up and went through a normal day from 8:00 to like 11:00 or as late as like 16:00 sometimes. For example in the dream I would wake up, go to the gym, hang out with my friends as normal and then I would wake up and have to do the whole day again, but sometimes I thought the dream had been real and would brace myself to deal with leftover arguments or jobs from the dream
The only tell I ever noticed was that people were way meaner in the dream