Question

I have yet to expierence a lucid dream, and I only just started reading about them today. My question is this, is it possible to say pick up a book you have read and then proceed to read it? My hypothesis is this, technically your picking up and storing things in your subconcious that you don't actually remember while concious. Has anybody been able to do this?

Hello Graemes, welcome to the community of Dream Views.

To answer your question, it's possible. When you read a book, it plants seeds in your subconscious (thank you Paul Mkenna). Some things you remember, some things you don't.

Good question. It is said that all DC (= Dream Characters) are people you've seen in your life. I do believe that your brain stores much more information than you'd think, but whether it's possible to extract that in your dreams? I wouldn't know. You should ask a more frequent Lucid Dreamer to do some tests.

Anyone?

Stenny, that's a matter of studying in your dreams, I think. Similar thing anyway. I think it's officially unknown, can't say for sure though.

That sounds like a fun experiment. Reading is especially hard for some people, so it may be better to test with something easier, like an image or a location. I have been amazed (in the dream, realtime) by some of the locations I have visited in my dreams. I've experienced places that I can barely recall an image of with my waking imagination.

Of course, you end up with the problem of remembering the dream. Dreams are harder to remember than reality. You would still have to remember dreaming of remembering something. You end up having to depend on your waking memory no matter what.

Here is what I am thinking, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I am a novice here. The human brain remembers and learns in a number of ways. One of these ways is forming dendrites. I am pretty sure that the dendrites basically work like trails to a hiker, for different things the brain sends synapses and what not along these formed dendrites thereby reacting in a certain way. Its like a hiker on a trail, if the hiker wants to find something on a mountain it takes a certain trail. Now to tie this in with LD. Dendrites are formed in a number of ways but mostly repetition, hence the reason you practice instruments, study for tests. If you could in fact study, practice, or even just read in a LD then technically its reinforcing the dendrites. What this means is that although you may not technically remember say... reading a chapter from a book for a lit class only in your dream, but it might perhaps actually be helpful if you could read the chapter once during the day, once during the LD, and then skim over it the morning the next day. Obviously this has a ton of little problems, like for one, the reliability of having an LD. And also, once you have one who wants to spend it studying?! My thinking behind this is that when your asleep in your REM cycle your brain is going over all the information it learned during the day and making memories or discarding the stuff it doesn't need. Hopefully this could potentially mean that if you were to acquire or reinforce memories while the REM cycle was happening that maybe it would help reinforce the memories. Just some ramblings while I do some homework lol.

Reading is very difficult to do in lucid dreams.

Carrying on from the post above. It's because of the fact that it's literally random. When you read text, it changes a lot.