Acadia - sorry i didn't see that as a joke.  and interestingly, nope, i don't see each word make a story.  when i read it's like watching a movie.  i remember certain lines, but overall, i swallow it whole.  i read, and the words matter, but i see the whole story, not each word.  for me, reading is like looking at a picture: each brush stroke matters but what i get is an impression of the whole.

but how you talk about reading images reminds me of my friend who's a pretty successful artist / illustrator / designer.  once, in college, a mutual friend of ours spent some time interpretting the lyrics to songs on the album ten.  he was a total physics guy, got horrible grades in everything not scientific.  and so he's interpretting this stuff, but he's also deciding to read sentences like equations- putting one word together with another in linear fashion.  i go along with him  on this, and immediately find popular rock lyrics unintelligible.  

so i relate this to my friend, who's already taking a killer design course and  was an accomplished artist.  i say, no wonder he hates writing and reading (to the extent of finding writing lab reports difficult).   and she says, "how else would you read?" i was literally shocked, because she always wrote well, loved language, and read frequently.  but then, she always had as unique a way with words, and the interpretation of others' words, as she did with every other medium.  also, she had come to think she might have been mildly dyslexic, having struggled with reading and writing as a kid, especially learning to write her name forwards instead of backwards (which she could still do without thinking about it). 

today, her artwork combines illustrations, words, and photographs.  and i think some of that is because she never saw any of them as separate.  and she loves to read the dictionary.