The languages of our dreams

This is our main forum. Here, anything related to languages and linguistics can be discussed.

Moderator:Forum Administrators

Karavinka
Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Karavinka » 2017-10-15, 5:45

I had a strange dream a couple of days ago. I don't remember the contexts, as my dreams are very fragmented and I don't really remember much. It rarely has any sound, let alone language. So when I do hear language in dreams, it's rare enough that I remember.

I assume I was sitting somewhere, and was listening to something, and I heard maybe a dozen words spoken in a language that my dream self somehow recognized as "Danish", but I'm sure it wasn't because I don't know any Danish (and I doubt I ever listened to it) and thus can't possibly produce it in my dream. What I heard was a series of mono-to bisyllabic words, heavy on uvular and glottal sounds. As I woke up, I felt like if the language was a mesh-up of French and Arabic.

I'm sure it was the last piece of dream I had that night, as I woke up as the words stopped. I remember it was played against my will, as my dream self tried to find ways to stop it.

Ciarán12

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Ciarán12 » 2017-10-27, 11:48

I rarely remember my dreams, and they mostly don't feature language when I do, but I had a dream last night where I spoke Portuguese (unsurprisingly).

In the dream, I was speaking with my father, he was sitting to my left and speaking to me in English. I had to interpret what he said into Portuguese for some unseen audience to my right. I don't remember what he said in English, but I remember my translations; there were three sentences which I translated, each after it was said (consecutive interpretation for those who studied translation studies in college :) ). The first came out as "Estamos vivendo as vidas das pessoas de ontem" ("We're living the lives of the people of yesterday"). The second was "Estamos fornecendo as nossas vidas com as ideias de ontem" ( "We're furnishing our lives with the ideas of yesterday"). I wasn't able to translate the third sentence, I remember that the word "yesterday" was replaced with "yesteryear" and I laughed and said "Fuck off! I don't know the Portuguese for 'yesteryear'!". Then I woke up.

Naturally, I looked up "yesteryear" in Portuguese once I'd woken up, it seems that "de ontem" would have been an acceptable rendition, though for the sake of learning a new term I picked out "de outora" as an alternative form I didn't know before. I'll just go tell my dad now that I can translate his third piece of wisdom for the Portuguese-speaking audience now, if he still needs me to... :P

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2017-10-27, 12:25

I can't remember the details, but I was speaking Catalan in my dream last night, or at least trying to. I remember struggling with the gender of clau (which is feminine when it means "key" and masculine when it means "nail") and using the word germà several times. If more comes to me (which sometimes happens as real-life events cause me to flash back to scenes in my dream), I'll update this.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-26, 20:15

This morning, I woke up from a dream set in some Arabic-speaking country, possibly Saudi Arabia (or else one of the Gulf countries). All I remember is that whatever country it was, the government was obviously trying to require immigrants to achieve fluency in Arabic before they could earn certain jobs or stay for a certain period of time or something like that. At some point, I was in a building that included a desk with a woman (in hijab IIRC) helping foreigners practice speaking Arabic. I was talking in English with some female government official(?) who IIRC looked Chinese or Korean or something, but she told me that I needed to be fluent in Arabic in order to resolve the issue I was dealing with. She suggested that I could talk to the woman at the desk to get help with my Arabic because "it's safe to speak Arabic there," and I was thinking where is it not safe to speak Arabic in this country? :? So I talked to the woman at the desk. I don't know what variety she was speaking, but I guess it sounded relatively close to MSA; meanwhile, I was talking to her in Syrian (Damascene) Arabic. I don't remember what we said in the conversation now.

הענט

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby הענט » 2017-11-30, 15:59

I had a weird dream last night. At first I was in Nitra, Slovakia but it looked almost like a fairytale. Anyway there was this couple and an extra woman who had gone missing and we were trying to find her.it was some love triangle stuff and I went to Lithuania to look for her. It was weird, everybody spoke Lithuanian (I guess) and the only word I remember is nori or nuori (want?)

Anyway it was something like a cross of a mall (shopping center) with shops and movie screens and a strip club/police station. I remember seeing one half naked woman with a black bra and other prostitutes as the ones you see in American movies.

After that I escaped some idiots and went into some time portal to preserve some animal species by going to stone age. Shit hit the fan and upon our return some colorful paint started to drip from out of nowhere and it would erase any matter if it came to contact with it, leaving one woman who was climbing down a ladder with a giant hole in her head. The best part was I was recounting the dream to a friend but it turned out to be another dream. Crazy. But why Lithuanian? :)

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2018-03-22, 15:39

I seemed to be someplace in Southern Europe. There was a dilapidated facade for a "Ministero de Turismo Italiano" and Italian seemed to be the dominant language in the little commercial street where I found myself, though the food choices were surprisingly limited and unappetising. There was a niche or a storefront where books were being displayed and a song was playing over the speakers. After listening for a moment, I identified a scrap of Catalan which said something to the effect of "don't stop speaking them" and realised it was part of an EU initiative to promote the use of minority languages.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-03-22, 23:45

Alghero? :P

Linguaphile
Posts:5355
Joined:2016-09-17, 5:06

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Linguaphile » 2018-05-06, 21:13

If I read in a language I'm studying, or study from a language text, right before I go to sleep, often I'll dream that I'm speaking that language. Usually I'm either translating for someone, or if it's a language I don't know well then I'm struggling with trying to be understood in some situation (shopping, or asking for something, etc). Almost always if I wake up enough to remember the words I was using, they're correct, but often part of the dream involves me being frustrated by not knowing a word or phrase that I want to use and trying to figure out a way to communicate it, usually in some totally ineffective (i.e. dream-like, surreal) way, as if repeating the wrong word over and over when I know it's the wrong word will somehow make it the right one, etc. And usually I'm the only one speaking - I'm talking to someone but the other person's words either aren't part of the dream, or I maybe I just don't remember them when I wake up. I have done this off and on for years and always assumed it's my brain's way of trying to organize what I've read or studied earlier in the day. When I remember enough of the dream to remember what it was that I didn't know how to say, then I look it up the next morning.
Last edited by Linguaphile on 2018-07-08, 17:41, edited 1 time in total.
Sono di continuo a caccia di parole. Descriverei il processo così: Ogni giorno entro in un bosco con un cestino in mano. Trovo le parole tutt'attorno: sugli alberi, nei cespugli, per terra (in realtà: per la strada, durante la conversazioni, mentre leggo). Ne raccolgo quante più possibile. -Jhumpa Lahiri

User avatar
Vlürch
Posts:943
Joined:2014-05-06, 8:42
Gender:male
Location:Roihuvuori, Helsinki
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Vlürch » 2018-06-29, 13:57

On Tuesday, when I was sick and could only barely sleep, I had a dream where I was the Pope trying to give a speech to some priests about how Communism is the greatest thing ever but couldn't get a word out of my mouth for the longest time because I'd lost all knowledge of Latin and it would've been important to give the speech in Latin. Eventually, I had to resort to English and said propagandy/buzzwordy stuff like "proletariat of the world unite", "redistribution of wealth", etc. over and over again... :lol:

Then, I went outside and was in some coastal city with lots of huge ships at the docks; I think it was Copenhagen or Stockholm but I only remember that the people made totally unintelligible sounds, which I somehow knew to be a Germanic language (pointing to Danish), but somehow the place itself struck me more as Stockholm; I've never been to either city, so whatever it was supposed to be, it was probably nothing like the real deal. I wandered around trying to get the world to stop spinning with my hands by taking breaks from wobbling on my shaky feet to push on the ground and walls (not sure if I was literally trying to stop the Earth's rotation or not, but I think so?) and yelling some more about Communism.

Obviously, the Communism part came from watching a documentary on Marx earlier that evening, which left me with really mixed feelings since apparently even the dude himself conceded near the end of his life that capitalism works and that communism might never work. I've never been a communist, let alone with a capital C, and could never really be one since I'm officially unable to work due to my social anxiety and whatnot and as such would probably be killed if I lived in a Communist state, but in the dream I wasn't really myself so I guess it makes sense.

The Pope thing most likely came from watching an episode of a documentary series earlier that day on Renaissance art that dealt with Catholicism as well (the second episode of the Renaissance Unchained), but I'm sure watching the Young Pope a few weeks ago when the entire series came on TV on two nights also had something to do with it.

I had some other short bits of dreams, many of which were really weird, but I don't remember basically anything about them. A lot of them definitely had some kind of religious themes, though, and in one I was trying to squeeze through a huge meat grinder so that I could be reborn.

User avatar
Vlürch
Posts:943
Joined:2014-05-06, 8:42
Gender:male
Location:Roihuvuori, Helsinki
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Vlürch » 2018-07-08, 17:31

Sorry for the double post, but I had a dream that involved some language stuff last night.

The first thing I remember from the dream was that I was going to the local pizzeria (which is owned and staffed by Turks) only for it to be closed. I stayed outside for a moment because I overheard someone yelling in Italian inside, of which I only understood that there were some mafia guys trying to buy it. I then ate at a barbeque with some random redhead dude and code-switched between Finnish and English with him, and also tried to use some Slavic words but failed miserably.

After that, I went home and there was an old man dressed in a long black leather jacket with large tubes going from somewhere under it into his throat and mouth, called Gsbo Tigo (pronounced [d͡ʒɪ̆sbo tɪɢo] or something), who spoke a language with lots of affricates and uvular(ised) sounds, and then English with an accent where /r/ was [ʀ] in onsent, [ɽʶ] intervocalically and [ɻʶ] in coda, /s/ was [ʃ] at least word-finally and every "A-sound" was [ɑ]. He was telling me something really important, but I don't remember what.

When I woke up, I looked up if his name meant anything in any language, but apparently it doesn't; tigo turns out to be the Esperanto word for the stalk of a plant, but although *gsbo looks vaguely kinda like it could be Tibetan, Old Chinese or Proto-Sino-Tibetan or something, it doesn't mean anything AFAICT. Well, ĝis bo in Esperanto would apparently mean "until B", but that doesn't really mean anything...

ceid donn
Posts:2256
Joined:2008-02-15, 0:58
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby ceid donn » 2018-07-08, 17:48

I forgot about this thread.

I meant to mention this in my SAC update but I had a dream mostly n French this past week, which is extremely rare. I also had a couple with some Gaelic, and that's actually more common for me. It was the dream with the French that surprised me.

In that dream I was in Halifax and I was walking around asking random people if there was any new places that had good croissants and pain du chocolat, and I would ask them in French first and some of the people replied to me in French while others said they couldn't speak French, so I had to switch back to English. One person said he was from France and asked me where I learned to speak French.

There's some background to this dream--when I visited Cape Breton (now many years ago) to do some summer Gaelic courses at the Gaelic College, I spend about 36 hours in Halifax and found it surprisingly hard on both mornings I was there to find good croissants. I was quite disappointed by that. I may not have been raised with much French culture but I am French enough to think a croissant, some fruit and an espresso is le petit déjeuner idéal. :lol:

User avatar
Antea
Posts:3954
Joined:2015-08-23, 10:53
Real Name:c
Gender:female

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Antea » 2018-09-24, 6:35

This night I had a dream completely in German, because in my dream I was German and also my family, and my colleagues at work. And at some point, I had to give an address and I wanted to say that it was not very far from there. At my surprise, I couldn’t remember the word “far” in German, so I was translating it in English. But the person I was trying to explain to in my dream, couldn’t understand English, because she was Russian :roll: . So I was looking for the word “far” in Russian, which, surprisingly, I could neither find it in Russian. And the only other language I could translate this word in, was in Arabic بعيدا

Of course the first thing I did when I wake up was to look up these two words translations , which by the way are

- Fern/ entfern / breit (this one I found it in my dream, but I discarded it because I thought it meant only “wide”).

- Далеко

I think this dream is my subconscious calling for reviewing German and Russian, and not lingering so much with Arabic :hmm:

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-09-24, 13:13

'Far' in German is usually weit.

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2018-09-24, 14:53

I dreamt I was in a Nazi prison camp. One of my friends had managed to recover some documents related to my ancestry by having sex with one of the guards. One relating to the birth of one of my German ancestors was written in Lithuanian, which I knew I was supposed to understand. [IRL, AFAIK none of my ancestors are Baltic Germans.] Another contained the cúpla focal but was mostly written in English and pertained to my Irish ancestors. The dream ended with us scrambling to find a hiding place for the documents in our prison barracks.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
Antea
Posts:3954
Joined:2015-08-23, 10:53
Real Name:c
Gender:female

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Antea » 2018-09-24, 15:11

vijayjohn wrote:'Far' in German is usually weit.


It’s clear I continue mixing “breit” with “weit”, maybe also with “weg” :hmm:

I see that everybody is dreaming with German lately :whistle:

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2018-09-25, 15:07

Last night I even dreamt that my mom was speaking German, and she's never spoken a word of it in her life.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby linguoboy » 2018-11-01, 14:43

Swedish and German. There was a Swedish guy I knew from online and we met in person for the first time. I tried speaking a little Swedish with him but we almost immediately switched to English.

Later I learned at the last minute that I was helping out with a German class and the in-class exercise, which was supposed to a collaboration between different instructors, was only half written. So I grabbed a piece of paper and began madly writing out example sentences for the class to translate. It felt less anxiety-producing and more exhilarating.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

ceid donn
Posts:2256
Joined:2008-02-15, 0:58
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby ceid donn » 2018-11-04, 16:35

So, thanks to being able to sleep in an extra hour due to daylight saving, I had a bizarre dream this morning that I was going to a Star Trek convention--OK, I do like ST but I would never go to a convention for several reasons, so that part was weird.

It started with me in one of my old apartments in Houston, and while I was getting ready to leave, I was watching a cartoon on TV about a fox and a flying fox that was in Navajo.

Then the dream jumps to me being in an elevator with Chris Pine and some random young woman, who's apparently a fan of Pine's. Pine is wearing an old TOS-style Captain Kirk uniform and he says he can't get the com badge on right, so the female fan reaches over and helps him with it. I hate touching strangers, even in my dreams apparently :lol: , so this irks me and I say sarcastically, "Captain Kirk does love the attention, doesn't he?" The fan gives me dagger eyes, so Pine just laughs at me and says to the fan, "Herzlichen Dank für Ihre Unterstützung, Fräulein." I respond with, "Ich wusste nicht, dass du Deutsch sprichst, Chris." He smiles this huge Kirk smile and grabs me with both arms--I don't like being touched by strangers either so I'm rather irked by this too--and says in his Kirk voice, "Well, now you know!"

(I actually have no idea if Pine speaks anything besides English.)

The dream then jumps to me entering this high auditorium where the convention was being held. For some reason, while everyone is waiting for the convention to begin, they are playing an old documentary in French about Chairman Mao on the main screen onstage. Everyone there seems to be speaking either English or French. I find an empty seat, sit down and then decide it's too far from the stage, so I start making my way across the auditorium, excusing myself in French to the seated people I have to brush pass as I go. I find a free seat on the other side and just as I sit down I realize I must have left my Kindle at my first seat. But before I can get up and go fetch it, a different woman sits down next to me and starts asking me about Minecraft in French.

And that's when my cat, who apparently had gotten tried of waiting for me to wake up and feed him, woke me up by knocking my tea mug off my night stand. :P

User avatar
Widukind
Posts:53
Joined:2018-09-02, 21:04
Country:CACanada (Canada)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby Widukind » 2018-11-20, 20:40

I get the odd dream in Low German or Latin (I used to study it). It's English or no speech at all, otherwise. They are usually intensly vivid, no matter the language.

User avatar
france-eesti
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:4236
Joined:2016-01-02, 19:41
Gender:female
Location:France
Country:FRFrance (France)

Re: The languages of our dreams

Postby france-eesti » 2018-11-22, 19:57

Tere! :D Kuidas suul laeb?
I had a dream in Estonian! :mrgreen:
Yes, I know 3-4 sentences in Estonian, maybe 20-30 words... And still I had a dream in Estonian!
So you see it doesn't need to be fluent in a language to speak it in a dream! :partyhat:
(fr) Native - (en) Fluentish - (pt) Fluentish when I was younger - (hu) Can sustain a conversation with a patient and kind magyar or order some beer and lecsó in Budapest - (it) On Duolingo ma posso ordinare uno Spritz ed antipasti in un ristorante :blush:


Return to “General Language Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 18 guests