Can you generate text in your dreams?

Question

I occasionally have lucid dreams or can remember dreams quite vividly. Something that I&rsquo;ve noticed is that in my dreams I can&rsquo;t generate text. It&rsquo;s very reminiscent of the kind of text you see generated by AI.Was just wondering if this is just me and everyone else is having great fun reading newspapers in their dreams&hellip;

anigbrowl · Accepted Answer

I can, but it's a lot of work; I will sometimes wake myself up by struggling to make sense of the text I'm 'reading'. Usually the text involved will be a middle-length paragraph of a few sentences, not unlike this one. I'm more likely to do if I have spent too long using social media the previous day. I don't dream of sitting in an armchair reading the text off a screen; I'm in the DOM somehow.In contrast, I don't dream about text in books or newspapers very often, perhaps only 2 or 3 times in my life. I think it's the act of composition that is then half-remembered during dreaming. I don't dream about handwriting at all, even though I do it often. There's a Jaynesian disconnect between reading/constructing the text in the dream and trying to make meaning out of it, which feel like two very separate and incompatible tasks. I suspect this is not that far away from the sort of gradient descent vertigo my LLM friends describe.

breckenedge · Answer

You mean you cannot read in dreams? See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchance_to_Dream_(Batman:_...

themodelplumber · Answer

I find that I can do that while Frontdooring, which is a meditation-style technique that's in my profile. Sometimes I'll read or surf the web in a browser on a device that doesn't exist in real life, etc. This often sets me up for a nice nap but it's calming for normal relaxation too.The text itself is probably similar to what you call AI text. But I treat it as if it's ready for symbolic interpretation, i.e. there's usually some layer of metaphorical rationality hidden in there similar to what people may find with dream interpretation. For this reason among others I prefer to let the stories or texts generate themselves.

khedoros1 · Answer

I've had the impression of seeing text in my dreams, but it's typically something that my eyes pass over without trying to resolve into words. More rarely, I see text and know what it says, but I don't recall actually reading it.Then again, I've also dreamed that I understood various languages that I don't while conscious.

jollyllama · Answer

Yes, this has happened to me a few times. I agree.