A correspondent writes to tell me of a linguistic dream he just had. As follows:
'I had a dream the other night with Significant Linguistic Content. It started out as the standard nightmare (mercifully infrequent these days) that I was teaching in a secondary school, as was the case long ago. But things improved and softened: the kiddies (11-year-olds, I’d say) were nice, and their music teacher, a fiftysomething German lady, came in and asked me would I mind if they practised the song that they were working on. I assented readily, and they sang a couple of verses of a song in German, about which I can remember nothing save that it was very sweetly done. I thought they deserved complimenting and encouraging, so I said to them “Ihr singet sehr gut auf Deutsch”.
I should explain that my German is far from good (I came to it very late), but they seemed to understand, and smiled and giggled pleasedly. I followed that up with “Wie heißt das Gesang?”.
Quick as a flash, the music teacher corrected me. “Der Gesang”, she said, entirely amicably; and I remember nothing after that.
Now, I was under the impression that German nouns that start with Ge- were uniformly neuter, so when I woke up I thought I’d better check it out in a dictionary; and, blow me, it is der Gesang. Now, what I can’t understand is how it’s possible to dream a person who knows the rules of a language better than one does oneself! Any thoughts?'
Not really - which is why a blog post might help. The only thing I can think of is that my correspondent must have encountered this correction before, and it impressed him at the time (as it did in his dream), and he's now forgotten all about it.
It's certainly possible to forget whole chunks of one's earlier linguistic life. I remember meeting an aphasic patient in his 70s who had lost his English very largely but who was able to produce some words in a foreign language. He himself denied he knew any of this language, and his wife had never heard him speak it, nor had they ever been to a country where it was spoken. But it eventually transpired he had lived in such a country for a while as a young child. And there was an interesting paper in the Journal of Child Language last year suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse.
Sad to say, I don't recall ever having had a linguistically interesting dream. I can't be trying. But I'd like to hear of any others. I can't think of anything in the literature on this topic. Do phoneticians dream in accents? Do grammarians dream grammatically? Do lexicographers dream alphabetically? It's a whole new research domain: dreamlinguistics.
There's a thought. All those students who fell asleep in my lectures, over the years. Maybe they were doing research all the time.
And maybe that's what Chomsky's 'sleeping furiously' really meant.