I can read while I dream.
Tim posted an interesting idea about dreams being some kind of connection to other universes, or dimensions, or whatever. Anyhow, he noted the reading thing, and I thought about all the times I had heard as a child that we can’t read in our dreams because we read with the other side of our brain, opposed to the one in which we dream. Damn noun/verb words.
Just last night I recall reading a lot of text, and I retained when I woke up. I have done homework for design classes, political science, and Japanese in my dreams (and I was exhausted when I woke up).
I have never looked it up, not even before writing this post, so I am not sure what researchers who study sleep, brain activity, and dreams theorize about reading in dreams, but I know from my own experience that I can do it.
As for lucid dreaming, I habitually do that as well, maybe once every few months. However, unlike when I was a small child, they no longer persist. The realization is jarring, and I wake up.
Besides reading and lucidity, I also have one other feature about my dreams that I don’t hear from others very often: realism. My dreams are very realistic for the most part. Even when I dream of animated characters as “real” people it all makes a lot of sense, and I am able to recall the details in my dreams minus the emotional soup that comes with a lot of ethereal thought processes. That isn’t to say that I don’t have dreams where Robin Williams comes to let me use his spatula. Rather, most of my dreams are low budget video collages. 