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 can’t think of any dream I’ve ever had where there was any text to even try and read. Common knowledge about “how dreams work” doesn’t seem like an exact science - like you said, you can read in dreams.
In the movie Waking Life there is a claim that you can tell if you are dreaming by trying a light switch, and that light switches don’t work in dreams. I had a lucid dream where I tried it and the light switch did work. So I don’t think there are any rules.
The only rule for me is the Doctor Who’s “do you remember how you got here?” as in, a dream is a collection of edited scenes instead of a long one shot. Like, I’m in my house an them I’m in a park with no memory of getting out of the house and traveling there.
At least, that’s the only consistent rule in my dreams
I’ve had both, “now I’m here, now I’m here”, as well as ones with continuity where I went through a forest, down a hill, across a road, through a field to a tennis court, and it was all the “same place” connected like in the real world.
Maybe there are different “dream rules” or trends among individuals.
For me dreams are usually somewhat surreal landscapes with not much happening. If there are man-made structures they are warped like the Dreg Heap area in Dark Souls 3, or the city bending in Inception. Sometimes I’m myself, but other times I’m no one, like a ghost observing and wandering the space. Very rarely are there other people or animals, and when there are it’s usually only one of them.