I actually thought I'd posted the following story on a thread specifically about reading in dreams, but it's actually on the
Adventures In Sleep Paralysis, thread (#85):
...I’ve never really taken a whole lot of interest in dreams, maybe as mine generally seem to be - with some exceptions - rather uninteresting/unedifying.
Not so long back though, I had a couple of experiences that gave me pause for thought.
Last November, during a break at work, I was chatting to a colleague who mentioned that she was attempting to train herself to dream lucidly, and further into the chat also told me that she had been led to believe that it is not possible to read in dreams.
I didn’t think much about it at the time, and wasn’t aware of that I’d paid much attention. However, that night I had a vivid dream in which I was visiting my mum after a trip away. When I asked what she’d been up to, she replied that not much had happened, apart from the fact that she had single-handedly thwarted a terrorist attack (yes, I know – but it was a dream…and you haven’t met my mother) and if I didn’t believe her then I could read all about it in the paper.
Ah, okay, I know what this is about – said lucid-dreamer-me, in a kind of mental voiceover to the action involving the me in the dream - This bit’s important – concentrate! So, as she slides the paper across the table and points to the story, lucid-dreamer-me makes a concerted effort to see if I can actually read her name in the print. And I can – albeit in a slightly jumbled form...
Anyway, the reason I was hunting around for this subject this morning was that I had another reading session last night.
I was looking at a small poster sized image of a baby lying on a blanket on a table top, with a Mediterranean like vista in the background - complete with blue sea, blue sky and a couple of white gulls. I'd say the baby in the image was not box-fresh - maybe a few months old - but the poster was obviously something I'd received from an ex announcing the birth to her friends. (The only real dream-odd thing about the image was the fact that said baby was wearing bluetooth ear buds.)
Although I can no longer recall the actual sequence of words written on the bottom of the image, I can still actually see the child's name as written in that message - 'Febers'. Even within the dream, I thought this was a really strange name for a baby (it's clearly implied in the message that this is a Christian name).
Oddly, I had another name and reading related dream last week. This time I was looking for a book titled
Locran. I had the word written down on a crumpled piece of white paper - someone who was helping me looked at it and suggested that the writer might have actually meant
Lochran. In the dream, I had no concept of this word as a surname - that realisation only came on waking up and thinking about it.
Why two fairly uncommon surnames have lodged inside my imagination - to the extent of actually being written down in my dreams - I have no idea. I don't know anyone so called, and have no memory of reading anything containing those names - certainly not any time recently, at least.
As I've said before, my dreams tend to be a bit of a jumble - apparently meaningless, and soon forgotten - but occasionally words and phrases contained within those dreams will stick with me long after the surrounding context of the dream has dissolved into nothingness. ('Spanish Pass' would be a good example: I have absolutely no memory of the dream that contained those words any more, but the phrase 'Spanish Pass' - which I assume to be geographical in nature - has stuck with long since the dream it appeared in has faded away.)
I found it quite disturbing to read.
