As I’m sick, I sleep all the time. And for some reason, in my dreams I’m reading newspaper headlines in Polish. Many words are just like in Ukrainian but some are completely unidentifiable. For example, why is “kobieta” a woman? In my dream, I only figured out what it means from the context.
4 responses to “Polish Dreams”
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It did sound vaguely insulting to me but I couldn’t say why. It’s a linguistic mystery.
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Coincidentally, I had one of those awesome dreams this week, too– I was chattering away in Viet, and it wasn’t even perfect in my dream, but in the dream, I can easily find work-arounds for words I don’t know (unlike IRL). I love those dreams.
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The weird part is, when asleep I can remember key phrases that completely stump me in real life, when I’m keyed up and can’t bring it to mind for anything, like “Tôi không biết cách ăn nó”(I don’t know how to eat it) or “Cái này là gì?” (what is this?). That first one is a polite way to decline terrifying foodstuffs. The result of never remembering it is that I’ve now consumed frog legs, mysterious internal organs, tripe, stewed dog, nearly-raw eggs, chicken feet, and far, far more bitter melon than I ever wanted to eat, just to avoid being rude. But in dreams I can remember it!
I’ve never worked at learning Greek, but sometimes I have dreams where I can speak it, and I can remember a little bit of it when I wake up– I’ve tried looking up those words, and really, my brain just uses the handful of words I do know, and fills in the rest with plausible sounding fake Greek. κακός is real. βοίσκεσ is real. But all the filler words that dreamscape pads them out with… those are totally made up. And nobody (except maybe my subconscious) was saying “you are bad”.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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