I have tried to see the date on a newspaper in my dreams and for some reason I am never allowed to know what date I am seeing.
Recently I dreamt that I was in a coffee shop that was outwardly shut down but inwardly open. They had made it look like all of the stores in this shopping mall were closed because of the pandemic but they were letting people in the back door. I told the people in the shop I was dreaming and they were all a part of my dream. They looked at me like I was crazy and a guy next to me said I was telling the truth that it wasn't reality and they were all a part of my dream. Weird stuff. In this dream I tried very hard to see the date on a newspaper and someone said "they will never let you see the date". I started running with the paper and people that telephoned in to my dream started chasing me and that was when I ended up in the coffee shop. Never did get to see the date.
Quoting: Vivarium Many people cannot read in their dreams, and I view this as linked to their dream development because I can read in my dreams, but that also only came by training myself to do so when I was a teenager and notice I could not read in my dreams. It was the same with not being able to smell and taste as well as other cognitive issues causing deficiencies in my dream, or 'noise' that I didn't like.
I started to correct a lot of those issues because I liked functional stable dreams that had a high-quality of realism so I worked on fixing everything that was deficient in my dreams. I found I could train for dreaming while awake by working with reality as a template for my dreaming standards.
For example, I couldn't taste/smell and that disappointed me as a teenager. Why? At 15 I started to have lucid dreams thanks to an article by Dr. Stephan LaBerge called 'Power Trips: Controlling Your Dreams' where I learned about lucid dreaming. I was successful and loved it, started to do it regularly except I was noticing lots of problems in the dream content. For example, I'd be in a restaurant and there would be food. I knew I was dreaming and was eager to see what the food was like if it could be realistic. I go and grab it, it has no smell and no taste making the experience not as exciting for me.
Well, I reasoned I could have vision/hearing/touch so there must be something wrong that taste/smell was not working and by luck alone, at the age of 16 I was drinking a hot chocolate and was wondering why it could be so sensory-rich while awake but not in my dreams, and I paused smelled the hot chocolate and tasted it telling myself that I want to smell and taste it as good or better than this in my dreams and really paid attention to the sensory experience.
Went to bed started to review the hot-chocolate as a sensory-experience as I fell asleep and sure enough, had a dream where I was suddenly drinking hot chocolate and it smell and taste were vivid and as real as the waking counterpart. Woke up thrilled and realized that all I had to do was work with a sensory experience while awake to improve dream quality during sleep thus started the cognitive mapping phase of my dream training and it also worked for reading because the text was all hallucinatory, shifty, and abstract so I used English class to train my mind to map the text of books so I could have stable reading in my dreams just like the hot-chocolate and that worked too.
So perhaps you can read the dates with a bit of training similar to improve cognitive functional dreaming.
I'm all about improving dream fidelity and quality for optimal dream experiences.
