[2003.10.04 2154h]

yesterday, i had a bout of philosophical thought, and wrote a lot about
ideas i had on areas such as postmodernism, death, time, religion, and
politics, thinking that i might write an entry on some of these ideas at
some point.  unfortunately, none of the material i wrote is very polished
right now, so instead, today, i will be writing an entry about reading in
dreams, and perhaps save the pretentiousness for another day.

some people seem to believe that it is impossible to read in a dream.  
the reasoning behind this belief is that reading and dreaming are
supposedly activities that happen on different sides of the brain.
although i have not significantly researched the ideas behind this theory,
i believe that simply because activities happen on different sides of the
brain does not mean that these activities cannot interact with each other,
since the corpus callosum, which unites the two sides of the brain
together, allows the sides of the brain to communicate with each other.

regardless of whether or not the argument behind the theory is valid, i do
not believe its conclusion, as since i have had dreams in which i have
been able to read since at least high school.  i may have had such dreams
before high school, but i may not have remembered them as dreams in which
i have been able to read, since, at the time, i may not have known about
the belief that it is impossible to read in a dream, and therefore would
not have noted the dream as being unusual in any way.  in addition, i know
of other people who are also able to read in dreams, so there is strong
evidence against the belief that it is impossible to read in dreams.

i can't say that being able to read in a dream is a very useful trait,
since, once, i fell asleep while reading some shakespearean play that i
found particularly boring, and unfortunately, in my dream, i continued to
read the shakespearean play.  i was rather disappointed when i woke up and
found myself significantly earlier in my reading assignment than i had
thought otherwise.

however, i don't recall ever trying to read in a dream and finding myself
illiterate, so i don't know if it is better to be literate or illiterate
in dreams.  on the other hand, i have never heard of anyone finding
themselves illiterate in a dream even though they were literate in real
life, or vice versa.  come to think of it, it is quite possible that the
people who posit the theory that it is impossible to read in dreams have
simply not tried reading in dreams.

at first, reading in dreams back in high school was actually rather
strange, since, in the dream, the material on the page that i was trying
to read usually looked like some kind of swirling matter that seemed to
form into letters and words as my eyes focused on the page and i tried to
make sense of the text.  however, i don't think this has happened to me
recently, and nowadays, reading in a dream seems to be second nature.

i have read that a way to determine whether or not one is dreaming while
one is reading is to read something twice, and if the text was different
the second time around, then one is reading in a dream.  however, in a
dream i had today, i believe i read something twice, and the text was
similar both times.  i'm not sure what this means.

it should be noted that in addition to being able to read, i believe it is
also possible to be able to write in a dream.  in a couple of e-mails
dated 2003.05.17, i mentioned to a couple of friends that i had just had a
dream in which i was writing something in a messy version of my
handwriting.  i'm pretty sure that the writing wasn't just a collection of
unintelligible scribbles, since i was also reading my writing as well.

offhand, i know of no one else personally who has also written in their
dreams.  however, after a few cursory searchs on google, i was able to
find documentation on two such instances.

in the first instance, the dreamer was writing a note to a cute teller boy
at a grocery store, and in the second, the dreamer was writing something
on the window shade, apparently for a man she was engaged to in the dream.

i don't recall if, the time i was writing in a dream, i was writing
anything to a significant other in the dream or a prospective significant
other in the dream.  however, i doubt it, since i was writing with a messy
version of my handwriting, something i usually do only if i'm either
writing notes to myself or working out a difficult math related problem.

however, it may be worth mentioning that the writing that i read twice in
my dream today was written in the dream by someone i know who i think is
cute, even though i'm not sure if i wrote anything myself in that dream.

from what i can gather, the first writer was a 19 year old female student
at the time of the dream, and the second writer an 18 year old female
student.  although i am also a student and roughly of the same age, i
don't think this necessarily shows that the ability to write in dreams
usually occurs amongst college aged students, since a large number of
people who use the internet are students anyway.

however, the first writer does mention that she slept around 0900h and
woke up around 1900h when she had the dream in which she was able to
write, which may be of significance since i have very unusual sleeping
habits myself.  on the night i had the dream in which i was able to write,
i slept from around 0200h to around 0700h, which is perhaps not as unusual
as the sleep the first writer had.  however, today, i slept from around
0730h until around 1630h, which is roughly comparable.