Quote Originally Posted by LXNDR View Post
to be honest if i ever heard such a phrase i certainly considered it odd like "я читать"

there's a phrase "мне пора" - it's time for me to go, short for "мне пора идти", which IS another example of the dative case

There are tons of examples of sentences with just a verb and the dative. It's extremely common, for example
что нам делать? - what should we do?