Why Can’t You Read in Your Dreams?

In a dream, you’re capable of almost anything — you might fly over your town, chat with a relative you lost long ago, or travel back in time to high school. Yet something as ordinary as reading a message on your phone can prove surprisingly difficult. The phone screen might scramble or glitch, or you might find yourself staring at marks that only resemble writing.

It’s a curious limitation for a brain that can conjure entire imaginary worlds while you’re asleep. Scientists haven’t established exactly why reading can be difficult in dreams, but one possibility involves how the sleeping brain processes information. And the difficulty isn’t universal: Some people do recall reading in their dreams, especially people in a certain profession.

An Open Book

Just how rare is reading in dreams? One 2000 study by pioneering sleep researcher Ernest Hartmann examined 456 dream reports and found no instances of reading. Hartmann also surveyed 240 frequent dreamers and found that about 84% never or rarely recalled reading in their dreams. That doesn’t mean reading is impossible: Some respondents remembered doing it repeatedly.

Hartmann also described earlier observations by psychologists who closely examined their own dreams. One remembered what felt like reading, only to realize that the page contained no words. Another recalled marks that looked like writing but couldn’t be resolved into actual letters. 

These accounts illustrate a useful distinction: Dreaming that you’re reading isn’t necessarily the same as working through a sentence word by word. You likely also find yourself driving in your dreams occasionally, but when you do, it’s not as if you’re checking your blind spots and shifting gears. Reading in your dream may be a similar type of general role-play. That said, some people who spend large portions of the day thinking about language — say, writers — seem more likely to be able to read in their dreams.

Hartmann proposed that the dreaming mind makes broad, loose associations rather than following the focused sequence of steps involved in reading. When awake, you take in marks on a page, recognize words, and connect their meanings. A dream might supply the idea of a letter and its message without reproducing all those details. His findings were consistent with this explanation, but didn’t exactly prove it — something that’s been difficult to do with any theory in dream science.

You may have heard a simpler explanation: The brain’s language areas shut down while you dream. But while the parts of the brain involved in interpreting language are less active during sleep, they don’t shut off completely. A 2017 study found that dreams containing speech were associated with increased activity in a region involved in language comprehension, meaning the brain was processing the words similarly to how it does when you’re awake.

It’s also not true that reading and dreaming are handled by opposite sides of the brain, as some accounts claim. Dreaming involves both hemispheres, and being unable to read isn’t simply a matter of one side switching off.

The difficulty for dream researchers is that much of this evidence depends on what people actually remember after waking up. And while a dramatic flying dream stays with you, an ordinary moment spent reading is more likely to be forgotten. For now, the research suggests that sustained reading is relatively rare in dreams, but it has yet to identify a definitive cause. 

So if you’re able to read in your dreams, you haven’t broken any rules. Some books you just can’t put down — even when you go to sleep.