They say you can’t read in a dream, because it requires executive functions of your brain that are switched off during sleep. You can, however, think you’re reading in a dream.
I’ve actually experimented with this claim during a couple of lucid dreams.
In the first one I realized I was dreaming, ran to find a book, and started reading from it. Seemed like I could read it perfectly, but when I woke up a few seconds later I couldn’t remember anything at all about what I’d read.
The second time I actually made an effort to study the words and see if they made sense individually. They didn’t. The letters were regular letters, but the words didn’t make sense.
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That is wild. Now that you mention it, I think I heard that long ago about reading in dreams. How could anyone ever prove it conclusively, though? Our brains are unreliable narrators as it is, much less in dreams. Wouldn’t it be possible that because we’ve heard that, we incorporate that knowledge into the dreams and they manifest accordingly?
If it really is true, it’s pretty mind-bending. “I can’t do this thing, but I can make you think I can so convincingly that you can’t tell the difference.”
I have been able to read very short pieces of text, like individual words. I remember seeing a very thick book with the word TENNIS written on the front. (It was a set of rules for simulating the game of tennis as a tabletop game with dice, apparently.)
Yes, that is a symptom of Narcolepsy, pretty much the #1 indicator doctors look for.