How is it indeed

Oh great, now I might dream about them.

Edit too many nows.

i often have a dream of an android virus on my phone stealing all my money and data

Speak for yourself, my phone is constantly in my dreams, and for some reason my alarm isn’t stopping no matter how much I try!

I'm a xennial so very much grew up without cellphones at all, let alone smartphones. They occasionally pop up in my dreams.

I have cell phones in my dreams all the time. One of my most common stress dreams is that I can't enter a fucking address into the navigation app

I was trying to buy a buss ticket while running thru a city and my password was 20 characters long and trying to enter anything is useless.

Typically I can't read letters or numbers in my dreams.

it's often how I realise I'm dreaming. looking as moving shapes but still somehow being able to read it. something clicks and I know I'm in a dream. can't hold it for long though.

I want to know why I continually dream about taking a piss but never actually wet the bed. I mean, thank you bladder but jeez.

Actually, I'm a school bus driver and most of my dreams involve me fucking up badly somehow in my bus and waking up bummed that I'm going to have to find another job. I wonder if other drivers have this going on.

I want to know why I continually dream about taking a piss but never actually wet the bed.
Sorry about that. Bug fixed. You will now piss the bed.
When I bought my first new car, I had horrible nightmares about wrecking it for a solid 6 months. Not quite the same, but I sympathize.
Edit: Upon rereading this, it makes me sound like ms money bags with my "first" new car. Felt I should clarify, it's also my only new car and I finally pay it off next year and I'm so excited!!! Anyway...
I dream about messing up at work pretty frequently as well.
Ooh do you ever have dreams where you either can't quite reach the brake pedal, or you can but the vehicle barely slows down?
Also the pissing... I pretty regularly have dreams where I'm taking a piss and usually don't pee IRL... But every once in an unfortunate while... But in those few times, luckily the sensation of warm piss on my skin quickly awakens me and my bladder sphincter slams shut before I've soaked the sheets.
- My bus dreams are usually about getting into some tight spot where I have to back up and then smashing shit up when I do. We're told quite emphatically to never back up and our enormous repair bills justify that. I've taken out a few fences myself in the real world.

I regularly have dreams where I'm trying to use a smartphone but can't do anything because I can't read the screen and Pacific because it feels like I've been hacked.

My vape also regularly falls apart in dreams, and back when I smoked lighters never worked.

I think that the part of our brain that processes these mechanics are shut down when we sleep, so when our dream self tries to use them they just don't function.

Could come into play where punching in a dream is impossible and running is difficult.

I ain't no brain doctor, or nothin'.

My dreams are usually pretty communicative and applicable to things going on in my life. Glasses breaking when I was starting to have a drinking problem, bombing theatrical performances when I wasn’t acting authentically in my relationships, etc.
Not saying it’s applicable for every dream, but I think our unconscious mind is pretty communicative with us when it has something to say.
- Was that meaning there or did you apply it post facto?
  With confirmation bias it is easy to apply meanings to things that aren’t necessarily there.
- Glad someone's dreams actually have meaning. Mine make no sense and I forget most of them by the time I wake up. The best I can hope for is getting a few seconds of lucid dreaming where I can can fly around for a bit until the dream ends (whenever the lucid thing happens, the dream seems to fall apart and I have trouble keeping myself from waking up).

People can dream of phones but the ability to read language while dreaming depends on where that language processing routes through the brain as it is different for different people. Most commonly people cannot read in dreams. Being able to write in dreams is even more rare.

This is why reading and writing is one of my lucid dreaming triggers. Don't need tops or other tokens like in Inception. Just try to read the same thing multiple times and it's different everytime in a dream, because you aren't actually reading, just hallucinating that you are.
thank you Batman for teaching me this

I very rarely remember my dreams but I definitely do remember that once a long time ago I did dream of making a forum post from my smartphone. So the premise is not correct for all people.

I don't personally spend much of my day thinking at all about my phone. It's an extension to get to what matters, like my family, or completing a task. I don't ever think "I'm looking at my smartphone" as much as "I'm talking to my sister" and "I'm using the Bank's app."

Sometimes I dream that I have to call 112 but can't. I type 111... clear... 122... clear... 111... clear... 1112... clear... Brain definitely has issue with maintaining a consistent state of UI in dreams. Even watches don't work. Every time you check the time it will be different.

Same fucking thing, a couple of times i did manage to call and they answered the call, only for them to be incredibly incompetent and super annoying, they wouldn't take me seriously at all.🥲
I have had that one often even with landlines.
Last night I dreamt the icons on my home screen were scrambled. To make matters worse, there was a transparent vertical Windows style taskbar overlaid with its own icons and I could not find the icon/app I wanted.
Yes Windows and phone in the one nightmare! Could have been worse: a clippy AI 🤓

I get phones in my dreams all the time. Usually checking the time and being late to get up. Sometimes the horror of receiving an unexpected call

receiving an unexpected call
They asked about dreams, not nightmares....
- Well that my secret all my dreams are nightmares, do people have pleasant dreams? My are either straight up unnerving nightmares or a weird crazy mess that makes no sense. Also they jump from one scene to other. Sometimes they are hard to keep together. What I don't understand is for most people dreams are supposed to fade away after waking. But for me a lot of them I can hold onto for fucking years in vivid detail. And if I concentrate hard enough when I go to bed can revist some. But that part is rare.
  Dreams fascinate me and I will ponder over mine for days or weeks. The only dreams that make sense are the smoking dreams. I am ex smoker and I will have the occasional dream of picking up a pack of cigarettes and smoking. They say that is just par for the course for addicts. Sad thing I hear that one doesn't ever go away.
  But the rest of my dreams cant gst handle on them. But none of them are good or pleasant.

I saw this when it was originally posted in 2023 and it stuck with me like yeah, why don't I dream about using my phone. Maybe it's because they are an extension of something else I'm doing or maybe I just don't remember.

And then one day did dream of struggling to use my phone and then in the dream itself I realized this was a dream and I was using a damn phone so the original assumption was wrong. I do dream about it, I just never think about it enough to remember. But when I started to think about it now I remembered.

They literally do....

I have a recurring stress dream about needing to type a message urgently on my phone and the touch screen keyboard not registering any of the right letters.
I miss physical keyboards.
- It's similar for me too, but a bit broader. My brain apparently can't convincingly simulate any digital user interfaces. No PC, phone or anything else like that works correctly in my dreams.
  It's actually one of the most consistent ways I have to figure out that I am currently dreaming.
- A few days ago, there was a post about a BlackBerry with an Android OS coming to market.
In my dreams, I very frequently use my phone to book tickets, check train schedules or itineraries. Usually, though, time is ridiculously tight and/ or the connection keeps breaking down etc.

Read this yesterday, went to bed, dreamt about phones.

Genuinely, i was just dreaming about a new phone i was looking to buy.

Because dreams don't exist anymore. I haven't had a dream in years, and since anything I experience is universal that means everyone else is just lying about having dreams, and that's why there aren't phones aren't in dreams.

i think that's because of all the weed, but i could be wrong
- That's absolutely it. I was a chronic waker-and-baker for almost thirty years and never had dreams. I quit four years ago and now I have multiple intense dreams every night. I genuinely don't like it at this point - I spend too much of my first few minutes awake each morning worrying about shit that never actually happened.

My cell phone is in my dreams all the time. Usually I'm trying but failing to make or send text messages or phone calls.

It's when I succeed in my dream that I wake up in a panic and check my phone to make sure that I didn't actually carry it out in real life. So far so good.

The panicked "did I really send that text". Can't say I haven't been there.
- As teenager I've once been in the "I received a weird text from you last night" situation. Never happened again in the 20 years since then, it still gives me a weird feeling when I'm at a hotel without a proper nightstand and I have to keep the phone in my bed for the night.

I don't remember many dreams, but I also don't recall dreaming about computers or TV much.

Maybe brains just have a hard time hallucinating user interfaces.

this is true. i remember been able to dream with my nokia 3320 back in the 00’s
Back in the day, I would have AOL Instant Messenger windows pop up in my dreams.
That just got me thinking - you know how you can't read in dreams? You might be able to glance at something and go "yeah that's Exit sign". But if you really try to concentrate on reading something it's just a bunch of jibberish.
We've always written this off as different parts of your brain being responsible for dreaming and reading. But now that we've advanced our technology enough, it seems like maybe our dreams are just being created by some shitty AI.
/s
No I dreamed at least twice in last month of being at the movies, and one of those wss last night. Also I can remember details of my dteams. Some of them a vivid months hell years later. Also I still remember in detail a recurring dream I had as a 5 year old. But for the first time last night I questioned weather I was dreaming or not. That what scares me most about my dreams, they feel fucking real when I am having them. I always wake up relieved when I wake up knowing it wasn't real. But never noticed about not having a cellphone. But now that on my mind wouldn't put it past my mind to conjure one up.

I don't need a phone in my dreams. What I need is a god damn clean toilet so I can finally sit down and poop and pee!

That's your brain trying to stop you from pissing/shitting the bed.
Iirc it means that you feel vulnerable irl
I kinda like the ridiculously nasty bathrooms in Morphée's kingdom.

Have them pop up, but they work extremely erratically. Mostly pop up in the context of reading a single text, which changes if I think to look at it again (rare).

Buttons do whatever they feel like (mostly nothing or stuck keys producing garbage text), and I don't think I've made or received a phone call (can't say this for landlines when they show up).

Idk man, dreams are weird.

Funny thing is that despite being on my PC all the time (literally, if I don’t eat, sleep or shit I am in front of my PC) I very rarely dream of computers.

Last dream I rember was me standing somewhere I don’t recognize and watching a bridge collapse lmao.

There was a bridge I used to drive over on my way to and from work every day. It was a very tall bridge and I've always been terrified of heights. Every day when I drove over it, especially when traffic was bad enough that I'd be stuck in the middle of it and could feel it swaying, I'd just stick to the lane farthest from the sides and maintain a mantra of it's safe, it's huge, it's going to be here forever, don't be afraid. (Also there was a cool abandoned military base that was visible from it and I'd look at that to distract myself when my mantra wasn't enough.)
Anyway, I still have the same job but have moved hundreds of miles away from there. After I did so, a ship hit one of the supports for that bridge and caused several people to live through exactly the unlikely event I dreaded happening every day during my daily commute. Now I don't ever drive on a bridge over anything bigger than a small river or even creek and, though it's unrealistic to expect this to be fulfilled, hope never to again.
- Ah, the Key Bridge going to/from Dundalk, MD?
  Man, I used to use that bridge all the fucking time. Got my first speeding ticket on that bridge.
  Even though I don't live in MD anymore, it's still trippy to think about that just not existing anymore. Super tragic situation all around.
I think it's because a PC is simply an interface, the stuff on screen is the bit that gets remembered. That and maybe the stuff shown is much more engaging for most brains.
I almost never dreamnof the computer but game dreams are common. Its like fully immersed with what's would be on screen without the computer being in the situation.
Watching infrastructure fail is a daydream, not a real dream.
- Daynightmare.
I have dreamt a few times about having majorly messed up something while putting my computer back together (it was implicitly dismantled before the dream started). Then I wake up in the night to realise that it was a dream and the PC is still in working condition.

They feature in my dreams on an infrequent basis. They never work, though. I've never made a successful call on a cell phone in my dreams, ever. I suspect that means something, but I don't know what.

While we're sleeping different parts of our brain is essentially idle and unresponsive. During the dream phase (REM sleep) there's still multiple parts that are unresponsive even as the dreaming part is active. And everything we do that's almost fully handled by a certain part of our brain won't work in dreams when that part is idling.
The things that works but acts weird in our dreams is partially controlled by an idling part of our brain, but our dreaming part of the brain has a separate redundant model of that thing, but it isn't complete (see: complex movement, etc)
Fat fingers

Heard somewhere once that dreams have a hard time with details. It's all loose impressions that your brain rapidly confabulates into experiences. It's why (supposedly) light switches don't work in dreams. If any of this is true, the same probably applies to other devices.

People say that dream states don't do well with text or numbers in particular.
I've read in lucid dreaming communities that trying to read the time on a clock, or small text (and failing to do so), is how some people manage to realize they're in a dream as a first step to taking control.
- What’s pretty interesting to me is, when I was tripping on mushrooms hard many years ago, the Mac OSX Aqua interface was beautiful but unusable (likely any user interface would have been), felt like interacting with a squishy wet portal to another dimension, and reading interface items and digesting what something like “close” meant was nigh impossible, like “is this element close to me?” “Should I close this element like a door?”
  But years later, in dreams I’ve noticed it’s similar to how my brain was interacting with an interface while tripping, which definitely has similarities, it’s no wonder Aldous Huxley wrote
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception
- I've read text in a dream. Short words and sentences. For instance "love you" in a fogged mirror. What gave It away to me was that there wasn't a shower in the bathroom. I lucid dream, but I don't have the best control over it.

I literally dreamt about using a phone tonight

This has nothing to do with the post, but I have had multiple unconnected people tell me I was in their dream and every single time I was eating fried chicken. So either I give off the vibe I love fried chicken, which is true, or I'm off wandering though my friends dreams watching their weird shit while eating some tasty fried chicken.

No reason more than one thing can't be true, dreamwalker
Great, now I'm going to dream and some dumbass is going to be eating fried chicken in it.
- I only stick around for the weird shit tho, so it better be a weird fucking dream.

Anything that involves dexterity or hand movements generally don't show up in dreams. Thats why fighting in your dreams feels like a numb slap fight.

I experience that when i have generally high anxiety
Fighting in my dreams is usually more like Mortal Kombat with an endlessly refilling health meter. Brutal attacks that do nothing.
I haven't tried to fight any of my dreams yet. So this is an interesting revelation.

not on a phone but i've had discord conversations in my dreams before

I’ve had at least a dozen dreams of trying to text someone during an emergency and I’m unable to do so. I keep fat fingering the buttons and it won’t send.

Ah, I’m sorry. That sounds anxiety-inducing.
- Dreams are usually pure anxiety for me. Do people actually have enjoyable ones?
I've had that dream many times! I cant recall it super specifically right now but funny enough, I think it's typically a landline keypad I'm screwing it up on for some reason.
That's about where I am. I commonly have a phone in my dream, but I can never type words properly.
i have the same thing, it always scares me. i feel like it will happen in real life one day

Hmm, yea I'm on a computer the majority of most days probably but I can't remember ever really dreaming about that

Phones aren't real.

I'm guessing it happens most among millennials and gen z. Seems like dream norms are based on your youth.

Remember (gen x folks) when they used to say that everyone dreamed in black and white, but you're like, nuh uh? It's because boomers dreamed in black and white because they grew up on black and white TV.

Idk about the TV part. Because what did they dream in before that? Radio? Silent films?
Dreaming in color or black and white is more of a personal aspect unrelated to TV and probably something that can change even for one person over time. And dreams are not only based on your youth, they are based on your life and your experiences and can include just about whatever. You can dream in different languages depending on what you are using most (many dreams I have are in English and I'm not a native speaker).

A void cannot pierce the immaterium.

People seriously don't see phones in their dreams? Unbelievable.

Do you?
- Yes

All advanced tech is forbidden in that realm.

And yet I can play a full match of Overwatch in my dream and still lose because my DPS is running in the open and getting shot in the head /s

My spouse has a recurring nightmare including a Nokia 3310

Vaguely related, considerably off topic:
... As a child I had a recurring nightmare about being chased by essentially demon possesed pants.
Because of this goddamned book:
https://www.rhcbooks.com/books/43177/what-was-i-scared-of-by-dr-seuss
I was deep within the woods
When, suddenly, I spied them.
I saw a pair of pale green pants
With nobody inside them!
Thank you Dr. Seuss, for literally authoring (and illustrating!) my nightmares.
My nightmare version was basically me trying to put my pants on for school, except oh no! a fucking poltergeist has possesed them, they are alive, they are bad, and they are chasing me.
Literally started having the nightmares the same night after reading this.
- As a child I kept having a nightmare of a sentient kite chasing me through a hotel. I don't think any media exists I picked this up from so maybe kid brains just love producing nightmares of getting chased by random objects.
- This is so bad and hilarious at the same time. I feel for you, even if my laughing makes me look like a liar (艸≧▽⁠≦⁠)｡
3310 is so strong it can distort the fabric of reality and enter dreams

(computer but still relevant ig) I had a dream the other day that 4get.ca added an ai chatbot and a games tab. I was like holy fuck

I had a flip phone in a dream once but all the text on the screen was Cyrillic gibberish.

I definitely have had doom scrolling dreams as I fall asleep. Similar to Tetris effect.

I have them constantly make an appearance and it’s always a situation where I desperately need to contact someone and I can’t hit the right button. It’s so frustrating.

Dumb. Mine was in my dream last night. I remember teaching my son to set a PIN instead of using Apple Face. If I remember, in the dream, he spent a lot of time making funny faces at me.

My guess would be that, beyond basically a thin plastic brick that makes noises and you make noises into them, to talk to another person...

Most of the functions of a modern smartphone rely on a high degree of lingusitic symbolic abstraction that only makes sense if it is stable and consistent.

Dream logic and dream perception is notably... basically the exact opposite of that.

You'll get very visceral feelings and sensations and visuals that... while yes, are abstractly tied to other things... my guess is that basically the part(s) of your brain that actually does interpretation of a complex system of symbols (writing)... basically, it isn't functioning coherently, the parts that all align to make that make sense when you are waking conscious, they're all being rerouted in a bunch of other ways while you're dreaming, to help produce other parts of the dream... or just... maybe defrag your memories and trauma?

I think a dumbphone, an old thing plugged into a wall... that is 'simple' enough to remain a somewhat coherent 'dream concept'... but a smartphone, an entire computer and all the things it can possibly do....just too complex.

My guess would be if people are dreaming of smartphones, the dream concieved smart phone is likely to be ... one or two uses cases, apps.

Somewhat interestingly... you can kind of see this in how earlier AI still motion and video generators... have that wierd dream like ... morphing, flowing aspect to them, the details are never right if you look closely, they really struggle with generating like, coherent billboards or signage or the text on posters or in a book.

It gets lost in the noise, ... and these models are basically oversimplified, rough models of neural networks... with way, way more amounts of processing power and a vastly more expansive data set thrown at them, to compensate for them being a crude approximation of the human brain, which is basically the most complex thing that is known to exist.

Maybe you could say that a dream is roughly a low fidelity hallucination, compared to the high fidelity hallucination that our waking consciouness is.

I wonder how synesthetics dream, how the deaf and the blind dream...

I still remember one powerful, psychadlelic trip I once had ... I was aware of the difference between the 2D image projection component of my vision, and the 3D spatial approximation component... because they were now massively out of sync... either the 2D image was basically delayed, or the 3d spatial component was just basically broken, getting sizes of and distances to objects and their edges massively wrong, sort of warbling, frothing, kind of like in a video game where LODs are flickering between high and low detail models erroneously.

... But, anyway, this is all my barely informed spitball speculation, I could be completely wrong, my non expert, layman brain is just trying to do abstract pattern recognition.

Totally!
I’m using my phone as an extension for hobbies, mostly as a map and fining things, and I’ve had it multiple times appear in my dreams.
Then again, as a Kid the N64 often appeared in dreams. I was playing some dream-Diddy Kong Racing even.
No, I am not schizophrenic. I do have hallucinations in the corner of my eye when tired, but they disappear once I look at them.
- Its actually entirely normal for people to 'see things that aren't there' in the corners of your vision, especially in poor lighting conditions.
  Your eyes and brain are best at resolving detail of things you're looking directly at, and basically the brain does a best guess pattern match for things on the periphery... because sometimes, its just a bug or a leaf or just a weird trick of the light... but other times, its a fucking stealthy predator animal.
  As to video game ... entities appearing in dreams, or just... dreaming you are in a video game... yeah I've had that happen too.
  It seems to be easier for a dreaming brain to just either mix the virtual world and real world together, I guess like AR... or just throw you totally in to a simulated world... than it would be to dream of yourself as still being you, sitting in a chair, in front of a screen, and keep the clear distinction between the real world and the digital.
  Again I think the commonity here is that when a system of abstractions and symbols only makes any sense when it is stable and coherent... a dreaming brain does not really handle well a highly specific and complex rule set: it either blurs them together, simplifies them massively, or just doesn't include them.
  EDIT:
  But yeah, if you use a phone as mostly a map and compass... thats not too conceptually complicated, if you limit it to just that. Of course I'd be surprised if the... fidelity, the detail of the map and compass were high, but they probably don't need to be if most of the dream if like, you hiking around looking for geocaches or w/e.
  Theres a whole lot more visceral, more real elements to that experience that are probably gonna get more ... dream fidelity focus? on? The environment, the difficulty of moving through terrain, the beauty or terror, maybe the elation of finding the thing, the determination that keeps you going, the fear of running out of food or maybe having to shelter in place from a sudden onset storm...

had a dream recently where i was trying to take someones details in my phone but it wouldnt load the app and the keyboard kept fucking up as they were getting impatient with me. thanks brain, you son of a bitch.

My phone went dead, then i looked around the room and the lightz go out, I look out the window and there's a huge mushroom cloud in the distance (apparantly my dream brain remembered that emp kills electronics), then I wake up, but I can't fucking move my body (or at least that's how I remembered it, perhaps I'm mixing it up with a different memory of the time when I got sleep paralysis)

Man, FUCK nuclear apocalypse dreams. Always get me waking up in a cold sweat, all confused and panicked. Why can our own minds be so awful to themselves?

Phones have become a transparent technology

I was a little kid when I dreamt of a translucent phone with buttons that could reposition (that was before I saw touchscreens) all over the front surface.

I have dreams with phones all the time. I dream that I type something, I look at the keyboard for a second, and when I look back at the text box I realize I made a mistake and have to rewrite most of the text.

It helped me realize I already experienced a quirk of the brain while dreaming, that I found about some time after I started having this recurring dream: if you look at a text while dreaming, then you look away and then back at it, the text will change.

It's the same with watches. If you look at your watch twice the time will change.
- A glitch in the matrix...

It's because it's something constantly in flux. You don't have an unconscious model of "a phone", because you've changed out your handset so many times that you're not inherently comfortable with the sensation. And because they're information displays, they don't form an unconscious impression.

I'm usually dreaming about something more interesting than a phone. I don't think I've ever had a phone in my dreams

Linklater's Waking Life touches on this, describing digital clocks and such not working in dreams, iirc.

Dreams are the brain trying to solve problems it couldn't solve during the day. Phones are nightmares we're forced to entertain during the day. Does the heroin addict dream of hot spoons and needles or the way they feel when high?

I have had phones show up in my dreams but they don't work properly they usually show up when there is some kind of emergency and I need to call someone but nothing works the way it usually does and I am not able to call anyone or look up the thing I need to.

Someone swapped your phone with an Android.
- My phone already is an android

The screen is a mirror. But physics don't work in a dream other than what you observed and can replicate manually. Every experience of physics within the dream are generated manually, piece by piece.
Some might say you don't walk or run, you float or float faster. Others would say you don't even do that, but rather the dream world moves around you.

So when you look at the screen of a phone, it's like a dream within a dream. It has to be crafted and you get sent within the screen, turning that into the actual dream.

If you've ever fired a gun in a dream, you'll note that it usually doesn't work. Or if it does, the targets drop without you "feeling" the entire process start to finish. And if you focus on the strangeness of this, then next time you fire a bullet, the knowledge you have of how that works gets added. So you see the bullet coming out of the gun, you follow along as it travels and you see it hit the target as you've seen it before in real life, whether it's actual practice, a game or a movie.
However, everything else comes to a standstill. The you that shot the bullet is left behind or no longer there, the target being shot waits there quietly to receive the bullet or even actively cooperates and the background world no longer matters.

The dream world isn't fixed, tightly bound by the rules of the real world. The dream world is what you focus on at that moment and everything else changes to fit. So if you don't see a cellphone in your dreams, it's because they're not relevant to you persistently as a cellphone and they instead become (the gateway of) what they show you as soon as you focus on that.

I have tech of all kinds in my dreams, including smartphones, and that's clearly not rare since there are always many comments saying so every time this gets posted.