Funny

Phones have become a transparent technology

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

Oh great, now I might dream about them.

Edit too many nows.

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

(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'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.

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.

When I was a ~10 year old kid, I dreamed about having an iPod touch. It was so cool to take pictures, play games, and look up information. I would wake up and be disappointed for half a day that the iPod was no longer in my hand.

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.

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