I may just be mentally unstable, but on a few occasions now I’ve gone to bed after a long spell of studying Italian (a big time-sink for me right now) and I’ve ended up in a really peculiar state of mind, clearly asleep but feeling like I’m actively participating in my dream.  Almost like a trip… completely lucid.  I keep reflecting back to these experiences because they confuse me, but they’re fascinating.

See, right now I’ll admit I can’t speak a great deal of Italian – I’m only 1 month into my studies – but my dreams find me using it in conversational situations with people I’m not familiar with.  The last couple of times this has happened I have woken up and while I remember the conversation happening, I don’t know whether it made any sense or not.

The first time it happened to me however, I clearly remember talking to two people in a bar.  Two girls opened the conversation in Italian, which I didn’t understand.  So my response was to tell them – in Italian – that I could not understand them but that I had recently started learning.  We then had a short conversation that I don’t really remember the specifics of (and probably made no sense in real life).

Does anybody else have these bizarre experiences?  I’m near enough certain that given I wouldn’t be able to hold a fluent conversation in real life, I must be imagining in my dream that I am speaking fluently, but in actuality I’m merely incoherently throwing together a jumble of Italian vocabulary that I’d been absorbing the day before.  I’d be really interested to know if this is a common occurrence among second-language learners or whether my mind is playing clever tricks on me!

Either way, whether they make any sense or not, I hope I have more of these dreams because they’re great fun and leave me asking questions about the way my mind is absorbing the new language.