Dreamstate

In a dream I had last night, I talked to somebody about lucid dreaming, and they said: "Oh, like xxx!" (I've forgotten what xxx actually was.) I asked: "Who is xxx?" He: "You know, the sesame street character?" I didn't know xxx and I don't think the character actually exists. But in my dream, I googled it and found out that xxx had a different name in every country sesame street is shown in. I remember reading the names, one of them was "Phlox", like the Star Trek character. But can we actually read in our dreams? As far as I know, the language areas of the brain are less active in sleep than in waking life. Like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area – the first is what connects meaning to words, and the second is what allows us to put the words together in meaningful ways. Which is why in dreams, we supposedly make less sense when we talk, and most dreamers cannot read or write in their dreams. But I've also read that there are people who can read and write in their dreams, and a lot of them are writers and generally people who think a lot about language. I have a book blog and spend a lot of time writing book reviews, which involves thinking and writing about how language is used by the author. Maybe that's why I can read sometimes in my dreams – but only sometimes. Reading in dreams falls into these categories for me: I cannot read and the dream explains it away. The print I'm trying to read is too small or smugded, the paper it's printed on is torn or somebody has spilled ink on it, the form is not actually filled out, the sender's address is missing etc. In a recent dream, I walked past a bookstore and all the books on display in the window were upside down. (In real life, you would still be able to read the titles, but in my dream, it made sense to me that I was not able to read them.) The dreams skips over the part where I actually read. I decide to read something and suddendly just know what I've read, so I assume I must have read it. I read, but my gaze and focus are erratic. I read a sentence but not as you would from the first word to the last. Instead, certain words and phrases jump out at me. Like in the sesame street dream – I found the character on a wiki page, and I know that I wanted to read its profile, but I could only clearly see the names of the character in different countries. I actually read, I can see the letters and words in my mind, but the meaning of the sentences seems weird in some way, and sometimes they change while I'm still reading. How about you – CAN YOU READ IN YOUR DREAMS?

When I woke up from a vivid dream last night, I wondered: what now? Anchor? MILD? Meditation? Thinking about @The Lucid Guide s latest video ("ILD technique") I didn't want to focus too much on a technique, but rather on the right mindset. BUT. While thinking about it, a memory suddenly popped into my head: in 2005, I was in medical rehab for a few months, and additional to physiotherapy, they offered classes like yoga, qigong and meditation, even self-hypnosis. I remembered that one of those classes taught us a meditation technique that worked so well for me that it felt like I lost touch with the waking world a few times. EDIT: As Marcelo Braga rightfully pointed out further below, losing touch with the waking world is usually NOT the point of meditation, quite the opposite. When I said this medition "worked so well for me", I meant to say that I had a very strong reaction to it. It did feel a couple of times as if I was entering a dream. Wait a minute... Thinking back to it, I realized that this meditation was actually very, very close to the SSILD technique! I suspect this memory popped up because I read @Marcelo Braga s post yesterday where he mentioned that the SSILD technique had worked for him, and I re-read the description of SSILD afterwards. So I tried the meditation last night as I remembered it from rehab, but couldn't get it to work as well as it did for me back then. I lost focus pretty quickly, and then just fell asleep without experiencing hypnagogia (which I experience rather often) or entering the dream world. I did have a very clear, vivid dream later in the night, though! How can I keep the focus on a sense without getting too aware or falling asleep too soon? I feel like I want to play around with this more. One problem I have is that when I try to focus on a sense, I can't stop myself from counting in my head, which is counter-productive! I think I'm counting because I remember that I was supposed to do a few quicky cycles, then a few slow cycles, just like in SSILD...

Hello, In my dreams I often have false memories, and I am doing certain things in certain places based on these memories. For example, in one of my dreams I believed that I was still a student at school and was therefore catching a bus with my friends, who I believed were students at that school too. I have been treating these memories as impossible or unlikely event dream signs as they are of situations that would not occur in my real life, and reality checking whenever something remotely unusual happens in waking life. Am I on the right track here,?