Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

H.S. Teoh wrote:
"Heh. I remember this one dream where I was descending into this scary
stair well in the basement, leading deep into the earth, and there must've
been something like 100 floors or more. Perhaps 200 or something like that.
(BTW, I have this uncanny ability to fast-forward repetitive events in my
sleep, that's how I know there are 200 floors :-P) I was just leaping down
it, for some reason, and it just kept going and going and going, and then,
suddenly, I start reaching the bottom of it, and found myself to be reaching
the ground floor of an implausibly high building."

    I am reminded of one of H.P. Lovecraft's lesser-known stories, "The
Outsider," which is similar to your nightmare.

Padraic Brown wrote:
"A dream early this morning concerned trying to buy something somewhere in
Mexico (in Spainish as well as in colour). Whatever the thing was, the lady
kept saying "cincuenta centavos"; and the 50c notes I had weren't government
issued."
    This is amazingly similar to Robert Heinlein's "Job: A Comedy of
Errors."

    Because I learn languages professionally (sometimes 4-5 a semester), and
rarely reach anything approaching fluency (mainly because I learn 4-5 a
semester) frustration with languages is a fairly common motif in my dream
life.  Two years ago, I was subjected to dreams in Akkadian (what a
nightmare!).  Because we attempt to vocalize all of these dead languages at
my school, and we're required to cough up sentences in (for the sake of
example) flawless Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian, or Ugaritic, all of us tend to
internalize the language to some degree.
    If you want to have dreams in a language, the best way to prepare for it
is by reading a text, out loud, three times immediately before going to
sleep.  This is a standard assignment here at the Department of Near Eastern
Languages, and, in my experience, it often has the effect of setting the
tone for your dreams that night.  I'm quite sure that this will work well
for conlangs as well as dead Near Eastern languages.  FYI, I'm not
recommending that you do this; it can be intensely frustrating, especially
if you don't know the language all that well.

-Chollie
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