I don’t know if I’m posting this in the right forum, but it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else, so I put it here.
Anyway, I’m currently staying in Japan as an exchange student, and I’m studying the language pretty much. I got an idea, when I read in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming about some guy solving extremely complex mathematical problems in his dreams, some ice skater improving her skating skills quite a lot by means of “surrendering to the lucid dream” or something, the inventor of the sewing machine (or whatever it was) getting the idea to it from a dream. And so on.
I was, thinking, that maybe you could activate the parts of the brain working with language in the same way, and improve things like your pronounciation, listening skills, vocabulary and so on by practising in dreams. When it comes to Japanese, we have all these characters you know, so I was thinking that maybe you somehow can make remembering them easier by studying in dreams. The same goes for vocabulary. I mean, as soon as you study a new character or word, it is bound to get stuck somewhere back there in the brain, even if it appears like it doesn’t at first.
In dreams, it seems we can activate different parts of the subconsious mind. I don’t see why it would be different when it comes to language. The dream would be to be able to just read heaps of words in the day before going to sleep, or before going back to sleep in the middle of the night, and then remember them in the dream.
I have a theory when it comes to learning new words. At first, when you encounter a new word, it is registered somewhere in the brain, but since you’ve only heard it once, mr Subconsious thinks “well, it can’t be that important, let’s leave it back here for a while”. The more you hear it and use it, the closer to the surface it will get, so to speak.
I was thinking, maybe you could make a shortcut here in some way, by activating this subconsious register of words (or characters, in the case of Japanese) and while being in the dream telling the subconsious mind “I wanna remember these”.
What do you think? And does anyone have an experience of something like this? It doesn’t need to be about language.