This sheds at least some light on the puzzle of multilingual dreaming. What is much better understood, however, is how and why our brains process languages and even learn new words in our sleep. Sleep researchers say that the exact mechanics and function of such dreams are quite hard to establish, partly because dreams are generally still quite a mysterious phenomenon. A Croatian participant dreamed of trying and failing to communicate with a stranger in Italian, German and English before realising they both spoke Polish, and laughing with relief. A Polish study participant reported dreaming of an English word she couldn't figure out – "haphazard" – then looking it up when awake. There are also linguistic anxiety dreams, in which the speaker struggles to make themselves understood in a foreign language, has to catch a train or plane from one linguistic setting to another, or looks for words in a dream dictionary. In addition, the dream languages may be layered with questions of culture and identity, as in the case of a Thai-American woman who dreamed about shopping for a dress for her late sister, and debating the choice with her nieces in Thai and English. For example, the people in the dream may speak the languages they would speak in real life, while dreams about one's childhood home tend to be in one's childhood language – though the idea of common patterns has to be approached cautiously since there have been only a few, small studies of multilingual dreams. Many of us seem to categorise our dream languages in certain ways, by person, location or life stage. It may even create entire dialogues in an unknown, fantasy language, or in one the dreamers have come across in waking life, but don't speak (in my dreams, I sometimes have lively conversations in Japanese, a language I've studied but failed to master in real life).
For a start, instead of randomly replaying linguistic snippets from our day, our brain appears to mash them up with all sorts of daytime worries, memories and problems. A study of deaf people and people with hearing loss found, for example, that they communicated in dreams as they did when awake, through sign language.Ī closer look at multilingual dreams reveals a more complex picture, however. After all, the language we speak during the day generally carries over into our nights. But how and why do our brains come up with these multilingual dreams – and could they have an impact on our real-life language skills?Īt first glance, it may not seem surprising that many multilinguals who juggle different languages during the day, and even people who are only beginning to learn a foreign language, also use those languages in their dreams. My own dreams often feature English, which I speak in daily life here in London, as well as German, my childhood language.
If you speak more than one language, you may have had similar experiences of them mingling in your sleep. When I spotted him, I sighed a relieved "Ach, da bist du ja!" – "There you are!", in German – and gave him a hug. At one point I couldn't find my son, and panicked. Most of the guests were chatting away in English one or two spoke German, my mother tongue.
I was hosting a party in a hotel suite, with guests from the US, Pakistan, and other countries. Just after I began work on this article, I had a very fitting dream.
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