What language do you dream in?
I asked this question during today's guest lecture on developmental linguistics to little avail. This result should not be surprising to anybody familiar with dream-related research; it is difficult to ascertain information from individuals during dreams, much less to pinpoint precisely the nature in which those individuals experience the content of their dreams. It follows that there exists a dearth of literature on the intersection of linguistics and dreaming, making my question notoriously difficult.
The little reputable research that exists on the subject is nonetheless fascinating but contradictory. A 1993 study by Foulkes et al. analyzed whether the bilingual (English-German) status of a dreamer affected his or her dream language. Awakening participants after individual REM cycles, researchers found that participants self-reported speaking in both languages while dreaming. They also found that the language of pre-sleep questioning correlated with reported instances of language, which corroborates other studies that show links between pre-sleep activity and dream patterns.
However, a study of 24 French participants with severe sleep disorders by Arnulf et al. produced slightly different results. Sleep talkers almost unanimously spoke in their native tongues, indicating no significant differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers' dreaming languages, at least among those with serious sleep disorders. These results seem to suggest that individuals' speech in dreams exists as an extension of their normal speech and thought processes, just manifested in an altered, somnolent reality.
Reconciling these divergent results is no easy task, but does not seem impossible a priori. Consider the first study, in which the results were self-reported. It could very well be that bilingual individuals' perceptions of their speech were divergent from their actual dream speech, i.e. that they were unable to correctly recall their speech from their dreams. This would suggest that the participants were biased by their conceptions of their speech, or possessive of poor recollective abilities from the sleep realm to reality.
Yet, what if the issue was not with the recollection of speech, but with the inability to distinguish between the language of speech during dreams and the language of dream thoughts? Albeit über-meta, this notion might provide an insight into the divergent results. To illustrate this, picture yourself asleep during a REM cycle (when the most vivid dreams occur). Now, your sleeping self has thoughts, but your sleeping self also can speak. In the same sense that a native speaker might think in one language and speak in another, so too might a sleeper sleep-think in one language, and sleep-speak in another.
That our sleeping selves has can differentiate between spoken language and thinking language is an important notion as it begets a debate into the symbolic nature of language. If every aspect of our conscious beings is inundated with the interpretation of language—from our dreaming, thinking selves and dreaming, speaking selves to our awake selves both silent and speaking—then can we really say that language itself is merely a symbol to convey referents? Or can we conclude that language is inseparable from its referents, once acquired, a Chomskyan notion of the special relationship between individuals and languages?
Given the inherent uncertainty of dreams, perhaps it is best to remain satisfied with the banal explanation that sleep and dreams is an important part of language acquisition. But, there is much to be learned in this new domain. Future areas of research might probe lucid dreamers' relationships with language during dreams.
Can you recall the language of your dreams? Is there one? If you are ESL, can you recall if the language of your sleep-thoughts differ from the langue of your sleep-speech? I dare you to remember!
Differing level of proficiency in either languages definitely plays a role in how multilingual people talk and think in dreams. Recency reasonably also influences the way people dream. I think those are the main points you brought up in this blog.
ReplyDeleteIt may be rash to even classify one single language that you speak or think in dreams because as we all know, in real life, people use different languages when talking to different people or in different settings. For example, in my dreams, I speak and think in Chinese when I'm with parents or relatives, but in English when talking with other people.
Dreams are so interesting because they are so starkly similar to reality. So why not apply some assumptions in real life to what happens in the dreamland? If context decides what language we use in real life, it would make a lot of sense for the same to happen in dreams. What one dreams about may dictate which language he chooses to use in his dream. There has been ongoing research to what one experiences in real life and what one tends to dream about. So maybe if the most recent or the most memorable event occurred in an English-speaking setting, then the dreamer is more likely to dream in English.
I think it would also be interesting to look at where the dreamers are physically during sleep. If they are in the US, maybe they dream in English more often. If they also speak Italian, maybe they will dream in Italian more often in Italy. I'm not bilingual to this level, so I'm not sure if this would have any affect. It may not be solely the physical location that influences dreaming in one language over another, but the fact that you will probably use English more in the US and Italian more in Italy. So you are already in that "mode" of speaking while awake which might carry over to dreaming as well.
ReplyDeleteThis post is one of my favorites! I love to sleep (I even took the Sleep & Dreams class last winter quarter), and I enjoy trying to remember my dreams because anything is possible in the dream world!
ReplyDeleteThis might be totally wrong, but I don’t think we necessarily speak in a certain language when we dream. I think we end up processing the information in the language we know, but we might not necessarily speak in a certain language. You might wake up and think you spoke in a certain language because that’s the only language you know. But I think dreaming works a lot like telepathy, where you can communicate using mental images, emotions, feelings, etc. without necessarily speaking in a language.
Nonetheless, when we write in dreams, we probably write in a certain language because there’s no other possibility other than drawing. Also, it’s possible that we naturally process information in our native (or most comfortable) language while dreaming – for example, when my sister was younger, she would always sleeptalk in Korean, telling me to go away or stop bothering her. Haha.
This is an extremely interesting topic, and I would like to study it more!
I think the idea of us thinking or processing thought in a specific language during our sleep is quite interesting. I wonder though if we are really getting at the core of what is happening in our sleep. Based on my understanding of dreaming and the psychology of dreaming, we do not dream in a specific language, we dream without the use of language completely. Then when we attempt to understand what happened or we recall what happened, we need to use language in order to describe what occurred in our dreams. This places the idea of native language in sleeping at a very different level. If we do not in fact dream in a specific language but we dream in images and feelings and other brain signals, and language is merely how we describe those impulses then do we use language subconsciously at all? Its a very intriguing thought that I think is worth exploring from a linguistic angle!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very well written post. I unfortunately am one of those people who know that they do dream but cannot remember what they dream about. From the few dreams that I do remember, one in particular involved my high-school choir director instructing the class how to use power tools. Although this scenario is bizarre in itself, what is more bizarre is that I cannot recall if language was used in my dream. Obviously my director should have been moving his mouth and speaking words, and I should have been hearing his words and processing what he was saying; however, I do not remember him speaking in coherent sentences nor do I remember understanding what he was saying. It was as if language was nonexistent in my dream. Interestingly, although no verbal communication occurred during this dream, I was able to describe the dream to one of my friends, including the setting, situation, and my emotions using language to describe the details of the abstract dream. This sheds light on the fact that the language we are talking about is a human creation used to describe the world around us and within our minds.
ReplyDeleteThough one of the last things I remember from a dream is the language in which I sleep-spoke, I understand what you mean when you mention our sleep-think languages. In particular I remember two instances, one in Peru and one in the United States, when I was aware that I was going through a nightmare, and I urged myself to awake in the language I was using most frequently at the time. Most of the language that happens in my dreams is to myself, so I imagine I would be thinking in the language with which I felt more useful to carry out my thoughts. That said, after I came to the United States and acclimated to the English-speaking setting I stopped sleep-thinking in Spanish, just like I stopped thinking in Spanish in the real world. I wouldn't conclude anything from this correlation, but at least in my case, ever since becoming used to the English language for my everyday use I have not thought or sleep-thought in Spanish, even when I returned to Peru for a brief 3-week time period.
ReplyDeleteExtremely interesting post, Aaron! I have always wondered what language multilingual people think in, but I have never ventured to wonder what language these people dream in! There is no doubt the ephemeral nature of dreams makes pondering this question a truly difficult endeavor -- as you pointed out in your post. However, I would still like to share some intuitions. As a multilingual speaker, I have always believed context is critical to defining my go-to language. I think the same hold for the realm of dreams. If my dream consists of some story related to soccer (a frequent dream of mine), I find that the language of the dream is Spanish -- as it is the language I most frequently use when playing soccer. On the other hand, if the dream is of something academically related I find that the dream is more frequently in English as that is the primary language I have used throughout my studies. An interesting future study would be determining a potential correlation between dream context and language.
ReplyDeleteWow great topic selection. Very original. Personally I dream and think in English despite Tamil (an Indian language) being my mother tongue. This probably because my everyday interactions are primarily, if not all, English and I most frequently use English to converse. I honestly never really thought about this till now. However, I think that in order to get a more definitive answer about this, we need to understand dreams better. Currently, there still has not been enough research done to determine how exactly dreams work. So if researchers are able to ascertain what and how parts of the brain function to simulate dreams, this information can be combined with what researchers know about how the brain-language relationship to determine if there is any overlap of brain parts in action, hence being able to shed insight on this question.
ReplyDeleteVery nice post. For multilingual speakers, I think the language you dream in definitely correlates with the language that is being used most often at that time. I normally dream in English because I obviously use that language all the time at Stanford. This past June, I went to Spain to visit some relatives and I was speaking Spanish the whole time for about five weeks. Toward the end of the trip, I specifically remember having a dream about being back home in Arizona where I was speaking to my friends in Spanish. Even though I never speak Spanish to my friends in the U.S, my dream still happened in Spanish because that was the language I was constantly using at the time. Even though I remember using Spanish in my dream, I can’t recall what language my friends used or if they even spoke in my dream. I find dreams and the subconscious fascinating and I’d be interested to see what some other studies have found about language in dreams.
ReplyDeleteI have always been under the impression that speech is not a part of the dream world in the same way that it is part of the real world. Evidently we do not hear in our dreams (in the sense that there are no externally developed sound waves being interpreted). As a result I always believed that you just infer what people are thinking, saying and feeling without them ever saying anything explicitly. What is the use of spoken language in a dream? Is there any analogy between language in dreaming and language in thought? We can hear ourselves think in a language, and most people are able to give very clear answers to the question of what language they think in.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it would make sense if thought and dreaming had similar relationships to vocalized language, it would not be that shocking to confirm that there was no role for spoken language in dreams.
A related question that occurred to me when reading this post and the discussion in the comments: when a person who was born deaf (i.e. has never heard spoken voice) dreams, does he or she hear people speaking?
ReplyDeleteI think investigation into this question would provide additional insight into some of the questions raised in this blog post. According to several sources I looked at, since dreams generally reflect people’s reality, people who have never heard spoken language would not be expected to hear it in their dreams. Some deaf people report having telepathic communication or communication independent of language in their dreams. Deaf people also tend to report more other senses from their dreams, such as smells or tastes.
While less related to this specific blog post, another related question to the above is whether people who have never heard spoken language think in spoken language .The most common answer to this question that I found was that deaf people think in the same language that they use, i.e. a person who exclusively speaks American Sign Language will think in American Sign Language. In a similar way to how a hearing person will “hear” a voice in the mind when they think, a deaf person will “see” the signs. Another common answer was that deaf people often report thinking in images or concepts independent of language.
@Anne, I think that in theory what you have presented, that we might investigate the language of dreams of born-deaf people, is an interesting idea. If successful, it might allow us to drive to the heart of the issue and probe deeper.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm curious as to how you might suggest that we go about ascertaining whether deaf people hear in a certain language during sleep. Suppose it was true that a deaf individual heard a given spoken language during sleep. Having never heard the spoken language, would the deaf individual be able to differentiate among various spoken languages, much less relay the correct one to the researcher? The prospect seems unlikely.
Nonetheless, I do wonder about the language of thought with respect to deaf people and more broadly. I look forward to learning more about this in the future and believe it will shed light on some of the issues I discussed in my blog post above.