Un tracteur des herbes
I had a dream last night.
I was in France, in a place with mountains close to the sea.
I walked up to a big Citroën, where two old guys were standing talking to a young one.
The young one asked me in English to wait there while he got a lawn mower that needed to go into the car.
As soon as he had left, the old guys and I got into the car and drove away.
I then had to persuade the old guys – who only spoke French – that we needed to return.
However, I didn’t know what a lawn mower was called in French, so I tried to call it un tracteur des herbes, which they didn’t fully understand, so we went into a supermarket so that I could point at one.
The funny thing is that the old guys were speaking a patois that I could only understand ten percent of, yet I could hear all the words in the dream.
I reminds me of another dream I had a few years ago, in which I was a pupil in a French class, and my teacher was speaking rapidly and clearly in French, and correcting my mistakes.
How is this possible? The fact that I didn’t remember the actual words the teacher and the old guys used the next morning makes me wonder whether my brain was telling me they were speaking clearly, yet without actually producing the words.
Do other people ever dream in languages they don’t speak well?