Henry Muhumuza

Some months ago I was minding my business, and really just going about the mundane, boring tasks of the day. Then I stumbled across something that deeply intrigued me and has since stuck in my mind. An anonymous user on X had made a humorous post about dreams. I can't remember the exact wording, but it said something like: "Isn't it interesting that your phone never appears in your dreams?"

It was an unremarkable weekday. An afternoon, I think. I was in a casual, low-attention, maybe sleepy state, just trying to pass time. But this sharp, witty observation jolted me into a state of attentive curiosity. My wikipedia-browsing-at-3-am side was tickled. I live for this kind of stuff, man.

I don’t know about you, but that observation was strikingly accurate in my case. I'd just never noticed. In that moment I realized that I had never had a single dream where my phone showed up. Considering my average screen time of no less than 7 hours a day—and that's just the phone, not counting the 4 to 6 hours on my laptop—how could I have never dreamed about either of these permanent fixtures of my life?

For full transparency, I should disclose that since reading that post, possibly because I was thinking about it so much, I have had one dream with a phone in it. It looked like a phone, I could tell it was a phone, but in the dream it didn’t feel like a phone, not least because I felt I could not use that ‘dream phone’ the way I use mine in real life. It felt like a toy phone. There was no discernible text on the screen. Just a vague white light.

Let me narrate the dream so you can judge for yourself. I was doing an early morning run around a soccer pitch I could recognize from my childhood (it’s where my former school held physical education lessons). I knew it was morning because I could feel the cold morning air rushing into my nostrils and lungs, and there was that faint light of dawn with the sun still on the horizon. I was holding a ‘phone’ in my left hand, using its light to illuminate the track so I wouldn't trip—or at least, that's the impression I got.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I wasn’t really using it in a way I typically use a phone. So essentially, I've never had a dream where I'm using my phone or laptop the way I normally do: directly looking at the screen, navigating and clicking icons, opening apps, reading and actually making sense of the content.

That got me thinking. Could this be a window into understanding how our hunter-gatherer brains (yes, they haven't changed much since those days) interact with modern technology? Maybe this weird omission of screen-based visual stimuli from our dreams means something about cognition, perception, and how memory works.

So I did what I normally do, I went on a chaotic, though diligent internet search.

My hunch was right.

Turns out phones and laptops rarely appear vividly in dreams because our brains encode them not as objects with meaningful presence, but as interfaces—transparent tools, like the glass of a window, for accessing content on the other side: information, emotion, social connection. In cognitive terms, they function as extensions of self, not as entities with their own sensory or emotional weight. It's as if the phone has become so integrated into your cognition that your brain no longer logs it as an external object. It has become an appendage.

Dreams, on the other hand, are built from emotionally charged, sensorimotor-rich memories—things we interact with physically or emotionally. So while we spend hours with our devices, the brain doesn't store "phone" as a discrete object of perception. It stores "the warm rush of connection," "the electric thrill of learning something new," "the sudden spark of amusement from something funny you saw." In dreams, the underlying emotions or narratives surface, but the medium drops out because it's conceptually transparent, like dreaming of talking to someone without imagining the air that carries the sound. The content gets dreamt about, not the conduit itself.

Interesting stuff!