Arctangential

People always say that you can’t read in dreams. I forget exactly what the rationalization of this is, usually something about how the left brain isn’t involved in dreaming, and the right brain can only interpret the written language as shape, but not as meaning. Well, for me at least, it’s not the case.

I clearly remember the dream I just had — we were all on a big spaceship, on our way to fight some evil aliens. Someone had discovered that I you got a certain tattoo on your forehead, then the aliens would be fooled into thinking you were one of them. Henry Rollins, who was along with us, I guess, discovered that one could translate this tattoo, which looked kind of like a stylized flower, by treating it as if it were an example of ancient Chinese dot-code: apparently this was a simplistic written language used by farmers in China before the advent of the more complicated written form of their language. When translated, it formed a typically abstruse Chinese poem.

And I read it! I remember very clearly reading this poem, from the piece of paper Mr. Rollins wrote it on. I even remember pointing out to him that there seeed to be an extra “the” at one point in his translation, and his taking it out on my suggestion. So clearly, I can read in my dreams. I’m not sure why some people think that we can’t, or maybe I’m just special (although that seems unlikely).

I’d also like to refute the claim that we dream in black & write — Daffy Duck was a very vivid shade of green in my dream — at least until the aliens turned him back into the cartoon dog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 5th, 2002 at 5:48 am and is filed under Dreams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.