Reading books in dreams

Moved from the Quest for Lucidity forum since it’s related with general dreaming. And I prefered to change the title because it wasn’t very explicit. Previous title was: Does this ever happen with anyone?

I, priam18, am an avid reader. I used to read a lot when I was in high school, but now that I’m in college I dont get much of a chance to. Still, I love reading. I also love writing, and have tried my hand several times. However, what I usually find is that I’m not as good in writing as I want to be (though this may be because I haven’t taken many writing classes, etc…)

What does this have to do with dreaming, you may ask?

Well, it’s just that (and I dont know if this is a common experience or not) sometimes when I dream, I see myself reading books and poetry…books that I’ve never read before in waking life. The even more shocking thing is…this stuff is really good! I’m talking bestseller, strong imagery and characters, etc… Now, obviously I’m being very subjective here, but…the books I see in my dream…just amazing stuff. The thing is, in the dream itself I either see the text (the actual words) or hear myself reading…it’s never a case of actually ‘dreaming’ the story, but dreaming the book itself (if that makes sense.)

Anyway, it’s just annoying since whenever I wake up I either remember just a fragment of what I dreamt or a gist of the story. Like, just this morning, I was entering a dream and vividly saw/heard myself read 4 lines of a poem that filled me with such perfect and strong clarity that I woke up instantly…sadly, all I could remember to jot down in my dream journal was the following:

The stage is set, and I’d still be a flower if not for you

So does something similar happen to anyone else?

Yes, I get that occasionally. Unfortunately I always forget it when I wake up, though. By the way, that one line is really good! You should use it in your own poem! :smile:

I believe that happens to a lot of people, if not with books and poems then with music, paintings or other creative material. It happens to me with songs all the time, I hear the most beautiful, heavenly music in my dreams, but I can’t remember it when I wake up… I guess the only thing you can do is try to improve your dream recall even further, or maybe use some kind of autosuggestion to remember your dream books and poems…

I have had a couple dreams where I’m reading a book and dreaming the imagry at the same time. Its hard to explain I can see the words and in my mind I can see the imagry from the words.

I cant really explain it. I’ve also had dreams of just plain old reading (stories that dont exist) and reading my own dream versions of stories that do exist.

I read for about 2 hours before I go to sleep, or at least 2hours + a day.

Sometimes I’ve heard or read something in a dream that I thought was great, and what I have been able to remember after waking up hasn’t been special at all, so one possibility is also that you just read something and in the dream think that it’s wonderful even though you wouldn’t normally think so. :tongue:

it happened to me once or twice, I remember at least dreaming of a new song coming out …
but I question myself whether what I dreamed of was legit or just hullucinations that my mind remembers as a dream, because I didn’t remember one dam word of the song! I just remember listening to a new cool song, that’s it!!

reading a book is what you could amagine i na dream but what i saw on this forum wos someone saying he read and saw in his mind what he wos reading well i think its the same thing just thinking of things isent it?
oly the diff is that when you reead you read when you think before you say it you thought aobut it so if i watct mydream jumping towards the sea and freezing myself aobut a meter from the sea i could think aobut ,sweimming shoots swimming glasses and i get an extra awareness like even more in the back of my head and i see the images i think of isent that the same as you are saying

I sometimes dream of beautiful and complex stories, which are said to be stories or tales in the dream, but it’s always under the form of motion pictures.

Yet you have the example of Coleridge, who dreamt the 73 verses of Kublai Kahn. He had rather good dream recall. :smile:

I dreamt (is this how it is written?) that a guy handed me a book asking me to read it, but i was very upset with him for some reason and didn’t want to…

some time later i dreamt that i was in a friend’s house and she had lots of books and suddenly i remembered the previous dream and asked her if she had any particular book for me to read, she said yes and handed me a book, i started to read it was a history from a girl, which had the same experiences in life as i did :bored: , when i realized that another person took over my body :eek: and read it, then laughed :bored: , after that my friend started fighting with this person…

there were also another dream which i visited a guy who had a lot of books and asked him if he could lend me some psychology books (I’m nuts about psychology) and he said: “no, but here’s some about history”. :bored:

MY DC’s really want me to read a history book!! :bored:
that gets me a little aphreensive 'cause i had an wierd experience when i was young, with a meditation, which we were supposed to just let the images come… then came a door in my vision i said it to my friends and one of them told me to go inside, so i did, then it came a book, wich i’ve tried to read (no luck, it was in very small letters and had several blank pages) then a box, like a gift, when a friend of mine who was there heard i was opening the gift she yealled NO!!! and when i opened my eyes i was acting as if i were really opening a door (although i already had opened that door at that time)

She never told me what it meant

I haven’t had this happen much with normal books. I’ve read comic books in multiple dreams, which is odd because I never read comic books in real life.

This happens to me with other creative areas. Some dreams are a lot like movies or TV shows. For instance, my current favorite show is “24.” Over the last month or two, I’ve had a number of “24” dreams in which I watch part or all of an imaginary episode. This happened just last night, as a matter of fact. The plot had to do with a man stealing LCD monitors. Another man kidnapped Jack Bauer’s daughter, and Jack responded by running the man over with a car.

I also hear music, especially while falling asleep. I’m very careful to write it down as soon as I hear it because I know that I’ll forget it by morning. Sure enough, when morning comes, I can’t remember the music, but my handwritten notes remind me. Strangely, a lot of the music I hear is rock or even heavy metal, although I never listen to either genre in real life. (I’m mostly a film soundtrack guy.) Sometimes, I can cause my brain to start generating dream-like scenes while I fall asleep and it spontaneously composes music to accompany them. Go figure.

I once “dreamt” a book :happy: Check my DJ for the killer granny dream

Robert Louis Stevenson used to dream the stories he then wrote as books, for example “Doctor Jeckle & Mr. Hyde”.

I’ve dreamed ideas for movies and books that I thought were great. The few that I could remember when I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down, the next morning they were not so good :sad:

Twice I have dreamed poems. In one I could only remember 2 lines, in another there was both an idea and about 8 rhyming lines. I liked the poems okay. :smile: