this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I'm inclined to think that when 'reading' in a dream, you're actually just dreaming the concept as if having read it.

It's your dream, you already 'know' what a sign says.

If that makes any sense at all...

[–] spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app 1 points 5 hours ago

Definitely happens both ways for me depending on the occurence.

[–] ChaosSpectre@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah this is what I mean with my comment. Your brain knows there should be something there and thus it fills in the blanks, maintaining the illusion of it being readable without it needing to be.

Sort of like when you wear glasses with a huge smudge on the edge of them for long enough. You don't notice the smudge because your brain fills in the gap that it takes up in your peripheral.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

Your brain is doing the whole thing.

It can imagine you have already read something it never actually "simulated". It can imagine you going through the steps of reading without any written words in the dream being involved at all. It can imagine illegible text that you are conscious of being unable to read. It can imagine legible text that you can read. It can invent information, recall it, or fail to recall it for the contents of the text. The contents could stay consistent if you return to them later in the dream, they could change, or at that "later" point, your brain can invent the "memory" of having previously read that text.

And it isn't really a simulator, which is why lucid dreaming might only experience a subset of these, possibly leaning more towards illegible text, because a lucid dreamer is probably either trying to read to find information (that the brain might not have and might not bother trying to make up because it knows what the conscious mind is up to) or testing what is possible in dreams (which I'd imagine the unconscious mind might think something like "dude, I'm just making this up as I go in the first place, and while it's cool that this whole thing entertains and/or perplexes you, it's just a hallucination that happens during routine housekeeping that you're not even supposed to remember because it's all meaningless. Don't try to do science in it, just enjoy the show, laugh when you think about it when I'm fully online, and move on").