I was wondering if anyone occasionaly (or has ever) dreamed in a foreign language, i.e. not their native language. What are your thoughts on the subject? For example, I’m fluent and dream regularly in Spanish, sometimes just in small pieces and sometimes the whole dream, even though my native language is English…
Also, if anyone could offer any linguistic insight to the topic… like why one would dream in one language or another.
I have told this elsewhere, but once I had a ND where my mom asked me what “I want to buy some gas” is in Swahili when we were at a gas station. I study Swahili and I promptly answered but what came out was gibberish, except that the words (I remembered them clearly in the morning, wrote them down in my DJ and checked the translations) were really Swahili words and one of them was even correct (“I want”), which surprised me.
I guess dreams where you speak or think in a foreign language are a way for your subconscious to adapt to the possibility that you might someday need that language. But that is just my own reasoning, I like the theory that one of the purposes of dreams is to let our cognitive system prepare for many different situations that we wouldn’t have a chance to practice (or to safely practice) in the waking life.
I could say something more theoretical to this as I study linguistics, but a) I don’t know that much about psycholinguistics and b) that wouldn’t interest many. 
I think so too.
A lot of my dreams are in japanese, and it feels like a chance to practice having conversations in the language, since I have no-one to do that with IRL.
my mother tongue is dutch but i regularily have DC’s speaking english to me or giving me english names for things. English is like a second language for me anyhow.
I also have sometimes dreams where my mother in law or my sister in law speaks moroccan to me but i don’t understand that IRL as well 
(a few words and phrases).
Funny, i’m in france right now, but no french dreams yet. I had some when i had to study hard to keep up with what everybody was saying. Now it is just my husband and I in here so i don’t hear french all the time.
do any of you also have subtitled dreams sometimes? I have had a few
hallstrom, i like how you get to practise japanese in your dreams 
Subtitled dreams! I’ve gotta try that! 
How about dubbed dreams, that would be pretty silly 
English is like a second language for me too, I didn’t think of that when I posted here.
I don’t even distinguish between english and swedish dreams since it comes so naturally. I even think in english IRL most of the time althoug I almost never speak it.
Yes. While I was living in Japan, I often dreamed in Japanese. Even after I left, I still occasionally dream in Japanese. I think the reason for this is very simple: your dreams are based on what goes on around you during the day. Living in Japan, the language is everywhere. It’d be only natural to have it come into your dreams. Likewise, I still dream in Japanese sometimes because I’m constantly studying it at university. If I stopped this, I suspect I would completely stop dreaming in Japanese after a while.
Yes! I had one earlier this year. Chinese this time, and I didn’t know what they were saying from their words, so I read the subtitles!
Edit: Typos.
The other night I had a ND where I was talking to a guy from Brazil. It was odd in that I was trying to speak in Portuguese (of which I know very little), so I was speaking what I could and filling in the rest with Spanish… I guess my subconscious thought, “hey, they are sort of similar, just mix them up.” 
But in the dream we understood each other perfectly, though, needless to say, it was an odd-sounding mix…
(By the way, I was trying to convince him that I was from Lisbon… 
Don’t ask. I have no Idea why.)
I have never had a dream with subtitles, but it sounds cool!
Welcome hotchy!
My mother tongue is Spanish although English took over during 1st grade. I’m fluent in both languages but always dream in English.
I once had a dream where DC’s spoke Japanese or Chinese. Not that I would know the difference but it seemed to have mimicked movies.
Subtitles?! That would be a riot.
tonight i had a dream where everybody spoke french (i’m in france right now) and when I spoke to one of the DC’s he answered in Dutch. It didn’t appear to me to do a RC 
I just thought:“He is probaby from Belgium (they speak dutch/french there) - how convenient that somebody can speak Dutch here”
anyhow i blame this topic for that dream!
i dont know if this is related, but due to the fact that all my LD souces in my life were written in english, and I have used english mantras for MILD (even though my mother language is greek, and I live in Greece), since 2004 that I started, all my normal dreams are in english!
Dark Alex C 
all your ND’s in english? that’s quite amazing 
My mother tongue is English. I speak fairly good French, Swiss German and high German. (Swiss German is a dialect form of German that the German’s cannot understand, but the Swiss can understand high German).
A number of times I’ve been speaking Swiss German in my dreams far better (so it appears!!!) than I really can. On waking I wonder whether the fluency is buried deep within me or whether I just perceived it to be so fluent. Very unusual feeling.
With regard to sub-titles, knowing my luck, I wouldn’t have my glasses with me!!!
In all my ND and LD everyone is speaking Swedish. Thou on one account I met a person in my LD where he spoke swedish but couldnt understand it and was frustrated. Unfortenaly I coudlnt figure out which language he understood so we couldnt exchange any information.
You know, the more I think about it. I don’t ever recall a dream in Spanish. I speak enough of it every day but it’s never there. Even when my mom’s in my dreams and that’s all she speaks IRL.
I had a dream recently when one character started speaking spanish. I have also had dreams in Welsh, Danish and Japanese, I don’t actually know any of the languages but my unconscious obvious either picks them up or the dream-wilder gets her dreams mixed up a bit sometimes.
You know darakat what’s funny about what you just posted? It’s that neither of us have heard the languages we “know” we dreampt in but yet we’re so sure that’s what they were speaking in the dreams.
I’ve maybe heard someone speak Japanese a couple of times but not even enough for me to recognize it.
Just last night I had some spanish in my dream. (spanish being a second language to me!) Although I understood it, later when I think about what was said, I am not to sure if it was grammatically correct?!
In my house we speak mostly a mixture of spanish/english - generally there are alot of adjectives, expletives and nouns that are spanish, and a few of the major verbs.
The funniest one I remember was dreaming about my wifes grandmother… she doesn’t know any english, but she was speaking with no worries at all!
When I dream of longer conversations they’re alway german (my native language) and single words sentences or songs are sometimes english. Sometimes IRL I think english too.
I once had a dream in which some guy was constantly talking Italian (sounded very fluidly) to me. Didn’t understand a thing of course
Yesterday I encountered the Japanese word “shihatzu” in a dream. I looked it up and it seems to be some kind of Japanese massage (shiatsu). Never heard of it before, so God knows how it entered my subconsciousness…
I can only imagine what’s said then 
my household is spanglish too.