Dreams are imaginary sequences, some of which include clear narrations and stories that we live during sleep, and others are in the form of meaningless fantasies, which occur in people's minds while they sleep.
Most dreams consist of a series of images, sensations, and emotions that range from pleasant and exciting to frightening or even terrifying.
Dreams have always captured the imagination of humans, and early in history they were believed to be messages from the unseen world or a way to predict the future, and in recent decades dreams have captured the attention of psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and biologists who have studied them and tried to interpret them and are preoccupied with answering the question: Why are dreams necessary? For both humans and animals?
Dream in other languages
We usually dream in our mother tongue, but not always. Often we dream in other languages, especially if we master several languages or learn a new language, so if you speak more than one language, you may have had similar experiences in which these languages mixed while you were sleeping.
"My private dreams often include the English language that I speak in daily life here in London, as well as the German language, which is my mother tongue in which I grew up and was brought up," German writer Sophie Hardach says in an article on the "BBC" platform.
And the American doctor, Stephanie Sarkis, says in an article she published on the "Psychology Today" platform, "A while ago, I dreamed of people speaking the Dutch language, knowing that I do not know anything about this language, but how did I know that the language that I dream about and that the people speak in my dream is the language Dutch? Noting that I recently spent a few days in the Netherlands.
And she adds, "Sometimes I dream in French, but I only dream in this language with French people I know and speak with them in this language when we meet, and yet in that dream in Dutch I did not recognize any of the people I dreamed of, but the words were accurate Dutch, no Doubt it."
The language we speak during the day is generally transmitted to our subconscious at night (Getty Images)
Deaf and dumb people dream in sign language
How and why do our brains communicate these multilingual dreams?
And could it have an effect on our language skills in real life?
Does sleep play a stronger role in learning a new language than previously thought?
And what does this reveal about our nocturnal brain?
At first glance, it may not seem surprising that people who speak different languages during their daily activities and even people who have just started learning a foreign language also use these languages in their dreams.
In fact, this may help them learn the new language they are studying, since the language we speak during the day generally passes into the subconscious at night.
A scientific study conducted on deaf and mute people found that they communicate in dreams through sign language, just as they do while awake.
A closer look at the world of dreams
By taking a closer look at multilingual dreams, a more complex picture is revealed to us, as our brain records all the linguistic snippets we hear daily randomly - whether on the street or at work - and mixes them with all kinds of fears, memories and problems that occur during the day.
This may create entire dialogues in an unknown or even imaginary language or in one of the languages the dreamers encountered in waking life even if we don't speak that language.
In her aforementioned BBC article, author Sophie Hardach explains that she sometimes has live conversations in Japanese in her dreams, a language she studied, but failed to master and never used in her working life during the day.
It seems that many of us classify the languages of dreams in certain ways according to the person, location, or stage of life. For example, people may speak in a dream in the languages they speak in real life, while dreams related to parents, parents, and childhood tend to be in the mother tongue.
Dream languages may also be accompanied by questions of culture and identity, as in the case of a Thai-American woman who dreamed of shopping for a dress for her deceased sister, and discussing the choice with her nieces in both Thai and English.
Sleep scientists: The function of dreams is difficult to define because in general it is still a completely mysterious phenomenon (Getty Images)
The effect of the environment on the language of dreams
Scientific studies - despite their fewness - indicate the influence of the environment and the environment in which a person moves on the language of his dreams. If you think about your family in your country of origin, you will dream in your mother tongue, but if you dream of people you knew in another place where you spoke a different language, you will dream in this language, according to what was reported. In the "Harvard. Edu" platform harvard.edu.
"If people dream about important emotional issues, they will dream in their native language, and if they dream about practical, abstract, or work-related things, they will dream in their everyday language that they use during work," says Dr. Deidre Lee Barrett, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.
And she adds, "I heard something strange and different from more than one multilingual person I spoke to. For example, there is a high-level Swedish economist who is fluent in about 15 languages, and he explained that he was dreaming in any language he was speaking that day, even if the dreams were related to his original family in Sweden."
Sleep scientists and researchers say the exact mechanisms and function of dreams are difficult to pin down, in part because it is still quite a mysterious phenomenon.
Here, Dr. Barrett says, "I think that dreams are just a reflection of a different biological and psychological state, as the areas related to perception and emotion are more active than usual intuition, and for this reason we are less logical when we dream."
She adds that there are theories that say that dreams exist to consolidate memory, simulate the threat and danger situations that we may be exposed to, and to fulfill the desires buried in the subconscious, just like our alert thinking and our mind that may think of a million things at the same moment.