😴 Dreaming in Another Language
What does it mean to dream in a target language? Fluency? Progress?
😴 What Does it Mean to Dream in a Target Language?
A Rosetta Stone article states that dreaming in a TL may mean that you are internalizing the vocabulary and grammar of that language. In a Tandem blog post, they listed dreaming in your target language as a sign you speak a foreign language fluently. Other blog posts seem to agree that dreaming in a TL is a sign of fluency, or at least, progress.
What do you think it means to dream in a target language?
⏰ What Causes a Target Language Dream?
When considering language choice in dreams for Multilingual, Šarčanin (2018)1 categorized the dream experiences of the multilinguals in her study into 3 theories: accommodation theory, waking appropriateness and language mode. The accommodation theory states that speakers adapt their language use to the person they are speaking to due to social acceptance. Waking appropriateness (Foulkes et al., 1993, as cited in Šarčanin, 2018) explains that a specific language is used when the dream context matches what we are exposed to in our waking life. Finally, language mode (Grosjean, 2010, as cited in Šarčanin, 2018) presents the influence activating a language before sleeping can have when entering a dream state.
In summary, the social context of your dream (meeting people speaking your TL in a dream), the real context of your life (living in the country of your TL or overhearing speakers of your TL) and being exposed to your TL before sleeping are potential causes and reasons for dreaming in another language.
💤 My Experience Dreaming in My Target Languages
I’m not one to be a fantastical dreamer. By that, I mean that my dreams are for the most part rooted in reality. I’ve never flown in a dream or done anything that I wouldn’t be able to do in real life. As such, the dreams in my TL usually reflect my real abilities to a degree. For example, if I can’t speak a language yet, I usually won’t have dreams where I am speaking unless I’m only saying the few words I do know. A specific dream that illustrates this is my first dream in Japanese. In this dream, I overheard people speaking Japanese and became frustrated because I couldn’t speak. I remember thinking that if they were speaking Mandarin I would’ve been able to communicate with them.
I have found that most of the “triggers” for my TL dreams fit into the second and third theories, waking appropriateness and language mode. Most of the dreams I had, especially in Mandarin when it was my only focus language, occurred after I had heard someone speaking the language in my real life.
Since I have had dreams in all my TLs, I don’t particularly believe that dreaming in a TL means that you are fluent. I had my first Icelandic dream 1 month into learning it consistently and I was definitely not fluent at all. Based on the notes I have on my past dreams, I started having dreams in the first few months of learning Mandarin. I was also nowhere near fluent then.
📝 How I Document Dreams in My Target Languages
In the past, I wrote out what I could remember from my dream on Google Keep. Below are a few of the notes I wrote about the dreams I had. Since I was only learning Mandarin, my TL language dreams were mostly all Mandarin. You can see in my note on August 23, 2020, I was already categorizing my dream into the waking appropriateness theory.
Since learning more languages, I have had dreams in those languages as well. I now type those dreams into my digital language journal for the corresponding language if I want to save them. Below is an example of my journal entry about my first Icelandic dream.
It had been about a month of learning Icelandic at that point. I attributed the dream to starting to speak Cantonese in the month of February. Even though Cantonese is a different language, I think the act of making passive vocab active by speaking caused me to dream in Icelandic. Another reason may have been that the language I spent most of my time with that day was Icelandic.
If you have dreamt in a target language, I’d like to hear what that dream was like. Do you know what prompted your dream? Which theory would you attribute to the cause of that dream?
Thanks for reading!
Šarčanin, M. (2018). Multilinguals and language choice in dreams.
That's fascinating! I always heard that dreaming in a different language meant you are fluent in it, but you're so right about exposure to a language, the context etc. I mostly dream in English but sometimes in Italian (my mother tongue).
Interesting read! Dreams in foreign languages fascinate me.
I've had quite a few but I always forget the details (i really should start jotting them down). The only detail I know is that my dreams in foreign languages always include me talking to (at least) one native person I know.