Maybe It's A Sign of A Bibliophile?

Can you read in your dreams?

When I was a kid, I watched an episode of Batman: The Animated Series called Perchance to Dream. In it, Bruce wakes up and his world is perfect. He's married to Selina Kyle, he's not Batman, and his parents are alive! Naturally, there are some things that don't seem quite right, and the one that keeps bugging him is he can't read anything. Road signs, books, sky-writing, everything is gibberish, and this eventually leads him to the conclusion that he's in a dream. As opposed to him just being crazy. Turns out the Mad Hatter hooked him up to the technological equivalent of the Black Mercy plant. Poor Jervis, he couldn't understand why Bats wouldn't stick with his happiest fantasy. Maybe Hatter should have just hooked himself up to it. Or would it not have worked because he'll know he did that?

I think for a long time I took it as fact you can't read in dreams. Batman said so, and animated series Bats was a smart guy (It's so weird to realize I do like Batman at times other than when he's having a bad day. Or when he's Jean Paul-Valley). He was always using some obscure bit of geologic or botany knowledge or theater lore that he'd gone to the trouble to learn*. Somewhere along the line I actually had some dreams that involved reading that I remembered (I had one last night, not that there was a lot, but it was there and it was legible), so that confused me. Was Batman wrong? Or were those not actually dreams? I wonder about that sometimes. I know lucid dreams are dreams, but it seems strange that I'm aware enough to interact with the dream, but I'm still asleep.

I thought I'd ask my audience. A little informal poll.

* Or he'd hooked up his computer to relevant databases. Unless he compiled all the information in those databases, which would be pretty impressive.