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.

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

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

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.

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.

I literally dreamt about using a phone tonight

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

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.

(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.

A void cannot pierce the immaterium.

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.

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

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 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.

Phones have become a transparent technology

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

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.

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?

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