Speaking Different Languages

Have you ever spoken a different language fluently in a lucid dream, or had a foreign language set off a lucid dream?

Te be more specific, have you spoken a foreign language in a dream without being fluent in that language?


I ask this because I remembered a dream I had many years ago where I spoke and wrote Spanish words with correct vocabulary and perfect grammar, something I was not capable of at the time. I took Spanish in 7th grade but even that was long before my dream, and most of my vocabulary and grammar has been forgotten.

At the time, I checked the dream with a friend who spoke fluent Spanish, and they confirmed I had correct language usage in the dream.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Or, has it triggered LD?

So in the dream, you remembered what you said and what you thought it meant, and your friend confirmed that this indeed was the correct thing to say?

Honestly, I didn't know what I said, so I repeated it and wrote it down for my friend, and it turned out to be perfect Spanish.

Wow that's really interesting! I wonder if we listened to a lot of a foreign language we might be able to learn more of the language in a dream. Or practice the language with other DCs! This could be cool!

I think what happened, you still remembered what you had learned, you just didn't consciously recall it in waking life. I think we retain almost everything we learn, we just don't always 'remember' it.

I wonder if the lyrics to songs in different languages that you've heard also are the same when you dream about them, even if you don't know the lyrics. (is that too irrelevant?)

I often speak English easier and more fluently in dreams. Sometimes a DC knows language they shouldn't :).

I think the spanish words and grammar you learned in spanish class were still locked in your subconscious, and your mind recalled them when you were dreaming.

The thing is, I hadn't learned some of those words at all. They simply weren't part of my vocabulary, and neither was the grammar.

It was only 7th grade Spanish. I still know my days of the week, a few simple phrases, I can read it well (without knowing the words), and I can insult your girlfriend, but none of my experiences can account for what actually happened. I simply never got to that level in the one year of language that I took. I switched to Russian in high school and probably should have stuck with Spanish.

I read somewhere that LGing can be used in learning foreign languages, but nothing was mentioned about the exact technique in the article. :roll:
Sometimes I have dreams about speaking and writing in Greek, though I'm not fluent in that language. I know only scraps, in fact. I haven't practised it for some 10 years maybe, and I'm not sure whether I can say a whole sentence in Greek now. My DG speaks in Greek from time to time too. :D Last time he was speaking in Turkish, but my Turkish is fluent, so it doesn't apply to this thread.

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Originally Posted by melanieb

The thing is, I hadn't learned some of those words at all. They simply weren't part of my vocabulary, and neither was the grammar.

It was only 7th grade Spanish. I still know my days of the week, a few simple phrases, I can read it well (without knowing the words), and I can insult your girlfriend, but none of my experiences can account for what actually happened. I simply never got to that level in the one year of language that I took. I switched to Russian in high school and probably should have stuck with Spanish.

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huh...I'm stumped. That is really interesting though.

I never speak in dreams. Only think in my own language. Will try spanish in my next dream, as i have som terrible spanish education.

This has happened to me only once in Mandarin. I am not fluent in Mandarin, but have studied it in the past for school. One day, I had a dream I was having a full blown fluent mandarin conversation with someone. I woke up shocked because I knew what was being said within the dream, but outside of it, I was just confused. Hahaha, this makes me wish I could just be fluent already!

As others have kind of hinted at, it sounds as if your subconscious mind has recorded the phrase somehow and you relived it in your dream. The mind is a fickle thing.

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Originally Posted by melanieb

The thing is, I hadn't learned some of those words at all. They simply weren't part of my vocabulary, and neither was the grammar.

It was only 7th grade Spanish. I still know my days of the week, a few simple phrases, I can read it well (without knowing the words), and I can insult your girlfriend, but none of my experiences can account for what actually happened. I simply never got to that level in the one year of language that I took. I switched to Russian in high school and probably should have stuck with Spanish.

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Do you hear people speak spanish around you? Even if you don't listen to them, do you hear it? And did the phrases you spoke in the dream make sense at all?

Woah, I wonder if I can do this with math!

The phrases I spoke in the dream did make sense.

I consider myself a listener, and I spent my younger years listening more than anything. I was shy but I listened. But no one in my life spoke Spanish.

I have a Spanish last name, but no one has ever spoken Spanish around me. Austin is an oasis in Texas, and I grew up living on the west side of town. No predujices, there just weren't very many Spanish people in my life until I became an adult, and even now it's damn rare.

My dad can read it but doesn't speak it. My mom is from California, English ancestry. I'm never around anyone who speaks Spanish, and by the time I was, excepting my 7th grade Spanish class, I had already had the dream. I never heard the phrase or words from anyone in my daily encounters.

Wish I could do it again. (please don't corrupt this wish) ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by melanieb

The phrases I spoke in the dream did make sense.

I consider myself a listener, and I spent my younger years listening more than anything. I was shy but I listened. But no one in my life spoke Spanish.

I have a Spanish last name, but no one has ever spoken Spanish around me. Austin is an oasis in Texas, and I grew up living on the west side of town. No predujices, there just weren't very many Spanish people in my life until I became an adult, and even now it's damn rare.

My dad can read it but doesn't speak it. My mom is from California, English ancestry. I'm never around anyone who speaks Spanish, and by the time I was, excepting my 7th grade Spanish class, I had already had the dream. I never heard the phrase or words from anyone in my daily encounters.

Wish I could do it again. (please don't corrupt this wish) ;)

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hmm...I'm getting a bit far-fetched with my guesses, but do you have any spanish/mexican heritage?

Your guesses are really reaching. I don't have a good way to explain what happened. Believe me, I tried at the time, and years afterwards.


My heritage is Spanish, on my father's side. My family can be traced back several hundred years, to original settlers of Texas.


My dad moved to Austin to go to U.T. He met my mom here. I was born here. Neither ever spoke Spanish.

My grandfather died when I was young. My grandmother a few years ago. Though she was a Spanish teacher in south Texas, she never spoke Spanish to me, or my parents. My dad never was good at it, and my mom didn't speak it, so there was no need.

I once had a dream that i had a belt that i could shift to any language and was able to speak it perfectly. I tried German, Latin, and french.

Cool experience, remember one time where I was speaking japanese fluently in a dream, but quickly let go of it because it was confusing me and just went back to spanish lol

I haven't had this happen to me, but I want to experiment with it. I took a few Mandarin classes, and I'd really like to have a fluent DC I could practice with.

An acquaintance of mine claimed that while sleep walking/talking, she had a conversation in Italian with her father. The girl didn't know any Italian, but her father was proficient. However, she was not LDing, and she had been to Italy in the prior year. Naturally she heard Italian pretty regularly when she was there. It makes you wonder if she knew what she was saying, or if she just was lucky enough to pick a few phrases that made sense.

It's annoying. I sometimes can't recall if the dream was in English or Estonian. That is probably because I still use English daily and if I dream about the people I speak English with irl then I also do it in my dreams.
Oh, and I have used English, Estonian and Finnish all in one dream :'D

If I speak anything other than English, it is normally nonsense. I have tried checking after waking, and it is normally a mess of jumbled words.

I would love to meet someone in a dream, perhaps from this site, and have a conversation, despite us speaking two different languages. It would make my year.

My theory is since your brain never actually "forgets" anything it actually percieves, it's possible that in your dream your brain gave access to enough foreign language grammar that you've heard over the years combined with the vocab you've heard. And made you a fluent Spanish speaker throughout the dream.

Probably because of this topic I overheard some Spanish in my dreams last night and I don't know any Spanish.

I was exercising German grammar last might.

Did you have any trouble speaking? Were the words clear or did they feel...like you were thinking them more than saying them?


Complicated words and thoughts often feel like I'm thinking them in my dream, rather than speaking them.

Did you have any trouble speaking? Were the words clear or did they feel...like you were thinking them more than saying them?


Complicated words and thoughts often feel like I'm thinking them in my dream, rather than speaking them.

A few days ago I awoke with a phrase which, when I googled it, found it to arabic. I am like most English people - lazy when it comes to speaking foreign languages and, although I know a very small amount of French have no knowledge or experience of Arabic. I have no idea where this came from but I have experienced something even more remarkable. A few years ago I woke early and, although still in a bit of a daze, got up to get a drink. When walking to the kitchen, I started to sing a song in an unknown language and completely in tune! This lasted for about 10-15 seconds and completely baffled me immediately afterwards.

I've had a similar experience before in Japanese. I've been studying Japanese kind of half-heatedly for a while because I am obsessed with Japanese culture. In my dream I was talking to a Japanese woman just at random with a very basic conversation about how she was doing and where she was planning to go etc. I do know quite a bit of Japanese consciously so that made up the base of my speech but some of it I just didn't know how to say yet the words came out anyway and she seemed to understand. When I woke up, I translated some of the unknown words that I could remember (I could only remember about 2-3 but I made a sentence out of words I didn't know) and they seemed to make sense for the conversation we were having. I just put it down to the fact that I watch anime pretty much every day so I am exposed to the language a lot and because I read the subtitles, I subconsciously memorize some of the words.

I have had dreams where I will make incoherent noises that "sound" like a language I don't know and have never studied, and some DC who looks like that ethnic group will look like he's understanding me, even though I have no clue what I'm saying.

I've had dreams where I can understand, but not speak a language that I have never studied. I think there may be access to things that we have never known through dreaming. It may be possible to tap into your ancestral knowledge, or if you believe in reincarnation that is another possibility. There was an Austrian (I think) rally driver badly injured, who conversed with hospital staff in fluent English for several days afterwards, even though he only knew a few words, and he reverted to those few words once he fully regained consciousness. I also remember reading about a guy who had a near death experience and came out of it with all sorts of technical knowledge he didn't possess and continued to have dreams that added to the knowledge. The Universe is a complex place.