(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 can play mario on here!!

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

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.

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 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.

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)

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.