Thread: Dreaming in a foreign language

This is something I've been wondering about for some time...
Do any of you regularly dream in a foreign language?

All lucid dreams I've had since I joined DV were entirely in English, which is a foreign language for me.
I'm fluent in English (though I do make some mistakes), and I kinda like dreaming in English. It makes it feel more "foreign", if that makes any sense.

I currently live in Germany, so I speak German pretty much all day long, which is a foreign language for me as well.
I enjoy speaking English much more though. I like skyping with some of my English speaking friends when I get home from school for example, it's very refreshing not having to speak German.

Maybe that's the reason why?
I think when I have a lucid dream, I somehow conclude that because I'm in a foreign place (the dream world) I need to speak a more universal foreign language (English).

Does this make any sense or am I just weird?

Cheers,
Hyu

omg worst lucid i had (you just reminded me) . I was on a plane talking to people liek I was wide awake. Then suddenl;y i heard a loud noise so real that it wasnt at all like sleep like it was so real it;s hard to explain but.. these people appeared of foriegn decent and started speaking arabic, and praying and not long after that 9'11 happened. And another one I had a dream where i was in new york in a plane crash and i was sat talking to people by a river that was incredibly real i seen faces of people i never met, and the day after a plane went down in the hudson. Thats the god honest truth and people wonder why i am scared of flying lol.

I've had a few dreams in which japanese was included. I've been trying to learn japanese for quite a while, with little success thanks to college, homework and such. I'm not fluent by any means but i know enough that i may use a little japanese in a dream or a dc uses it. It is usually very brief because my knowledge of japanese is fairly limited. I've never had an entire dream in japanese before, but i definitely would like to. The interesting thing is that i know more japanese subconsciously than i realize. I may use a word or phrase that i didn't "know", then when i wake up and recall the dream i'll think, "Oh, that's what that word meant" or "That's what that word was." It's almost like my subconscious is teaching or helping my conscious review parts of the language.

lol not weird, just an awesome way to make most DCs speak same language as you. I used a spell to make my DCs understand me, and another one for me to understand them.

I've only had few dreams in English, but all of them were epic ones. Don't know if it is coincidence or not :/ I've also had one dream in Japanese, but I only understood few words and couldn't speak it myself.
Never had lucid in English though.

I've had some dreams in english too, though most of my dreams are in my mother language.

I'm multilingual (1st=English, 2nd=Spanish, 3rd=Japanese), but I've only had one dream that I can remember that involved different languages:

I'm talking to my friend, Sally L. [a real-life friend who is a fellow native English-speaker/Japanese learner], in person. I ask her, “You've lived here [meaning, in Japan] pretty much continuously since we got here in 2007, right?” She says yes. [What? That's not true in reality; we even lived in Florida at the same time for a while.] We continue to talk, and she keeps answering me in English but randomly throwing in one Japanese word per sentence, each of which takes me several seconds to recall what it means. Jigetsu is “next month.” [I completely accepted this as true in the dream, but in reality, I know it's raigetsu.]

They say that dreaming in the language you're trying to learn is a huge step to becoming fluent in that language.

And I've had several dreams in French.

This is quite interesting.

I had a few more dreams over the past few days and I noticed that any DC I don't know in real life speaks English.
The only exception are people I know in real life, where I know which language they speak exactly.

I also automatically initiate any conversation in English, I just "know" that's the way I will be understood.
It's like I don't even realize it is not my first language.

Originally Posted by Hyu

This is something I've been wondering about for some time...
Do any of you regularly dream in a foreign language?

All lucid dreams I've had since I joined DV were entirely in English, which is a foreign language for me.
I'm fluent in English (though I do make some mistakes), and I kinda like dreaming in English. It makes it feel more "foreign", if that makes any sense.

I currently live in Germany, so I speak German pretty much all day long, which is a foreign language for me as well.
I enjoy speaking English much more though. I like skyping with some of my English speaking friends when I get home from school for example, it's very refreshing not having to speak German.

Maybe that's the reason why?
I think when I have a lucid dream, I somehow conclude that because I'm in a foreign place (the dream world) I need to speak a more universal foreign language (English).

Does this make any sense or am I just weird?

Cheers,
Hyu

There was a time when I dreamed regularly in a language I understood while asleep. When I woke up, I would still be speaking in this language for several sentences. While I understood the intent of my words, I did not understand the words themselves.

I usually never dream in other languages but once I had this ridicuolus dream in which I was talking in a non existing language with dream characters using random words like: Bididabo luan ifruni polase and they all made sense to me, like my brain was instantaniously translating what I wanted to say in another extemporary language.

Originally Posted by Mirror

I usually never dream in other languages but once I had this ridicuolus dream in which I was talking in a non existing language with dream characters using random words like: Bididabo luan ifruni polase and they all made sense to me, like my brain was instantaniously translating what I wanted to say in another extemporary language.

I'm not sure I know how to use this form for a reply. If I have it wrong, somebody please correct me.

This long-ago sequence of my dreams was not being translated. My sense was, the language was native to my spirit. There have been several vignettes. In some of them, I was among a group of perhaps 10 "other" scientists (I'm not a scientist this lifetime), standing before a blackboard, working on a formula. This dream went on night after night. Then one night we had a breakthrough and all of us began jumping up and down, laughing and rejoicing together.

Once, in my waking life, I went into a produce stand in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There stood a white-haired young (perhaps forty-ish) woman -- absolutely beautiful. I knew her name, though we'd never met to my knowledge. "Ruth?" I asked her. She smiled broadly and clearly laughing at me with intimacy and friendship, "Of course I'm Ruth." My face showed my puzzlement. "I know that we know one another, but where do I know you FROM?" She laughed out loud. "I'm one of your students. I attend your class. You are my teacher." Instantly I understood that she was talking about a class on another plane. I would never have used the word "astral" back then, as it carried some anti-Christ connotations for me back then, so I probed, "You're talking about night classes, aren't you? I mean, while we are asleep...?"
"Yes," she replied. Not much else was said. I bought some fruit, she took my money (she worked there), and I left. I came back a couple of days later and asked for her, but no one seemed to know there had ever been a 'Ruth' working there.

The language issue should be simple to be explained. Since the people we are talking to are just projections of yourself, or in other words they are you, it's easy to create new languages and being understood because who is creating and recieving these information is always you wether you are talking to dream characters or they are talking to you. You are always ultimately talking to yourself. Languages are just tools to coomunicate with others in the waking world but in dreamland there is really no need for it. You don't need to speak out what you think to communicate with yourself hence dream characters, same thing when we are awake. You could create words out from nowhere even while awake understanding them, the only difference would be of course that no one would understand a damn of what you're saying and would probably think you are crazy
About the other experience you reported I don't know what to say, it's so beyond ordinary events that only you I think can find an answer to it, always that such answer exists.

Yeah, the "crazy" issue has crossed my mind, but there have been too many unbelievable yet certifiable (lol) events in my life for my to have personal doubts. I have always till now been reticent to share some of my stories. Only a few involve dreams. Now that I am investigating the nature of reality, and having found this website and group of (possibly) like-minded people, I'm ready to ask for help if someone presents as being knowledgeable. I'm hardly gullible, but have found that some herbs, for example, have actually WORKED for us even though the vast majority of claims by herbalists have turned out to be (in my humble opinion) just so much hot air. And so it may be within the world of those who believe in sub-space (Astral Projection, Remote Viewing, different dimensions of existence, or what-have-you.) In the words of my father, I'll eat the meat and leave the bones. I'm ravenous. I have never been out of body by my own efforts to do so. Both my long-ago events were verified by outside sources, which is something I need. (At the wreck site, where I nearly died, I heard things that I reported to my doctor later, and one of his friends who was there verified what I reported. The friend I visited in her home while I was OOB experienced my visit the same way I experienced it.) Anyway, at the risk of sounding loony, I'm hungry to practice AP and learning to do it at will. At present, all my family are having major allergies from the surge of Spring pollen, so it's nearly impossible to go to bed and get comfortable without coughing. Oh, well, all things at the appointed time, eh?

I have taken a 3 year study of Spanish before, but I can't recall one time that it was really incorporated into any of my dreams. Interesting... I imagine the more you study a language and the more proficient you are at it the more likely it is to be incorporated into your dreams. I think since my Spanish is so limited as it is and I don't keep up with it, it's not spoken in my dreams.

It's certainly possible to have a discussion with DC's in a language that you do not know (or does not exist).
Whether or not the conversation is anything like the 'real' language (in case of an existing language) is a different story.