this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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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.
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").
While I agree with most of your statement, I don't believe that all dreams are meaningless hallucinations. Onierology is the study of dreams and does have moments of consistent results, such as the experiments showing the ability to communicate with the waking world from within dreams and vice versa, and the potential for therapeutic interactions within the dreams as they act as sort of vague subconscious messaging of psychological distress. I've actually overcame a lot of mental issues by actively trying to become lucid in dreams to consult dream entities who seem to have knowledge and understanding of things that I either don't have or have been avoiding without thinking about it.
Its definitely all conjured by the brain, but it isn't always meaningless and the meaning behind it does vary from person to person. Some people have no dreams at all, some have the same dream over and over and over again (which often is the brain trying to tell them something), and some people have abstract dreams with no real meaning but can sometimes inspire them into artistry where they try to understand the dreams regardless of if they have meaning or not. Its a very curious thing to learn more about because it has such a wide net that blurs subjectivity and objectivity of any kind.