They say that when you finally begin to dream things in the language you are studying, it’s a sure sign of progress towards fluency.

Incidentally, when studying for the Japanese Speech Contest I won back in 2008, I employed a method of learning subconciously. I can’t say for sure whether or not it helped, but I recorded my Japanese teacher reading my prepared speech aloud and had it play on a loop throughout the night (obviously at a volume that was just right for both listening and sleeping).

As well as possibly helping me internalise my speech, it was also motivating in that it was the first thing I heard every morning and the last thing at night, so it really helped prepare me mentally for the task ahead. Perhaps you should recommend your Japanese students give the Gakuranman subconcious method a try too! Haha ;)

Hey! So here’s my experience on all this. Only recently have I started to wake up from dreams, remember them, and quickly jot down everything I remember. It was working after that, dreams felt longer and easier to remember. But a week ago I had these two nights where, at first I saw where I was and could hear myself think “Oh, I’m in a dream. Time to remember so I can jot it down when I wake up -smirk-” And then I woke up, but it was like a fake up wake-up because I was still in the dream! And then I dreamt something after that and then I woke up for real afterwards. This happened twice in two days. I nearly got a whiplash from the speed and confusion I got from those nights @.@

But here is a tip to get back into a dream!! At first, when you’re dreaming and realize you’re dreaming you slowly start to wake up (kinda slowly float back into consciousness) but a method I found from somewhere (I forgot where) is to roll your eyes in circular motions. When you do this, it kinda makes you more sleepy and make you drift back into the dream. The first time I did this it didn’t go too well. I panicked and started rolling my eyes crazily so I woke up. So, take it slow and just soothingly roll them.
Anyways, hope that helps! I do have a question, though! Will losing sleep make it harder to see and remember your dream? Thanks! :D

Yup. :D That’s a really nice idea you got there!

Sometimes I wake up to realize that I had an awesome dream so I immediately come up with a dream plan then force myself to sleep again. (without waiting the extra hour)

I can remember this working for me all the time. And now you just planted the idea inside my head… grrr.

I’m going to give it a shot. ^_^

i’ve solved problems while dreaming. Algebra problems. The first time i was really amazed :D

I hate to burst your bubble Koichi but lucid dreaming is a VERY difficult time consuming thing to learn. i wasted almost 2 years trying to do it every night- reading long boring books and tutorials, practicing advanced techniques like WILD, DEILD, VILD, FILD, and DILD, and even taking special supplements and vitamins before i finally gave up.

even those who are considered ‘proficient’ or ‘experienced’ lucid dreamers can only do it about once a week AT MOST. and even those who do manage to learn how can only do it for a very short time. (in my entire 2 years of intensly practicing lucid dreams i only managed 3 or 4 short 5-10 minute lucid dreams. despite this i was considered very well versed on the dreamviews forums (dreamviews.com is the #1 online resource for lucid dreaming- with tutorials, info, and a very freindly forum)

when you consider all of the time and sleep you will waste its just not worth it. besides wasnt it you who said that it is much better to study for 10 minutes a day rather than for an hour once a week.

even with a best case scenario that you become a pro (and thats a mighty big if) you would only have maybe 1 or 2 half hour lucids a week AND THATS BEING GENEROUS

this is a novel concept however it is completely impractical from an experienced lucid dreamers point of view.

You know, I am aware all the time when i am dreaming! I can actually speak with the strangers in my dream. They know i am dreaming too, and they even remind me that I am dreaming!!! sometimes they even ask me how school is going, and have pleasant conversations. It does not last so long, but I am working on that.

You misspelled Dentistry :p
I’ve tried to have Lucid deams before but i ended up giving up :p

if you want any REAL information on lucid dreaming i suggest you stay away from reecejones87. he’s a lunatic.
he’s one of those spiritual hippy type people who ramble about astral projection, OBE’s and aliens

any advice from him will hinder your lucid dreaming or send you in the opposite direction all together

the lucid dreaming community DESPISES reece jones

This is such a cool concept that would be pure genius if it really worked (and I don’t see why it couldn’t!) Don’t know if I have any advice per say, as I have no idea how I do this, but not only do I remember dreams relatively often, I’ve had lucid dreams pretty often too. I don’t use any method to realize I’m dreaming, I just… somehow know it’s a dream. And then I can do almost anything, but it’s also hard to focus on any kind of motives beyond “I’ll say hi to person” or “I’ll just jump up and flyyy..” And one thing I’ve noticed about myself if that, while I can generally control myself, I can rarely control my surroundings at all. It’s hard to practice speaking Japanese with someone if they just keep responding in English.
I have dreamed in Japanese before and it was an awesome feeling. I’d love to be able to make that routine somehow :)

Hello Koichi

I remember one night during the time I studied every day. I was so into it that more than once I found myself dreaming of a situation where I was obligated to use Japanese. I would wake up remembering that I could’nt say a particular sentence or didn’t know a certain word. After a few minutes of feeling weird about being so obcessed with my studying I actually went and looked up the stuff I wasn’t able to say in the dream.

maybe the right way to do it is by finding a way to dream that you’re lost in Japan. And instead of remembering a particular lesson, just try to have conversations with people.

Hope I helped! I’m Really looking foward to TofuguTV!

PS. I think I just had by myself the idea of following you on twitter. I’m sooo original.

WAY TO LUCID DREAMING: I was told that if you write a word on a coloured piece of paper (I’ve got a vague memory that it shall not make sense like the word green on a blue paper but I’m not sure), such as “eyes” on a green piece of paper. Then you look at this paper through out the day, maybe five times or more. Then when you are dreaming (if you are lucky) you will look at this paper (IN THE DREAM). And then the paper will be changed in some way, maybe it is red or it says “garbage”. Then there is a chance that you realises in the dream that “hey, something is wrong! MAYBE I’M DREAMING!”

Studying reading/text via lucid dreaming may not be a good idea. Why? Well, to develop the ability to know when you are dreaming some people develop the “reality testing” habit to examine closely the text/writing you see in the world, especially on screens. The reason for this is that text in dreaming is often unstable (look away and look back and text will have changed) and full of errors as if the resolution given to text-like material in dream is very low. The idea is you come to habitually look for these quirks so that when you try this test in dream you will come to realise you are dreaming.

no he takes them WAAAAY too seriously.

like if i have an OBE right now i can go next door and see my neighber come back and tell him what he was doing. hes a loony

You know, I actually thought of this recently. I’ve been trying to become more efficient with my time, but 1/3 of the day is still used up by sleep. I was thinking if I could study or practice things in my dreams I could improve that much faster. I’m going to be following your progress, and trying this out myself. If it works it would be amazing. :D

In theory, I believe this would only work if you are fluent or near fluent in the language. Whether you are lucid dreaming or dreaming normally, your subconscious tends to gloss over things you don’t know and so you could end up speaking gibberish or reinforcing mistakes without realizing it. For example, I once had a dream where I was speaking German. I don’t speak or study German, so how was this possible? It was possible because I do have a stereotypical impression of what German generally sounds like. It was gibberish, after all, but it seemed realistic at the time, while I was in the dream. Alternatively, you can get lot of the same effect from meditating, or by simply using daydreams and visualization while you’re awake to imagine situations for yourself to practice dialogs. For example, visualize a scenario where you’re in a coffee shop with friends (or whatever), and imagine things you might say and do in that sort of situation in Japanese.

Q: Will losing sleep make it harder to see and remember your dream?

A: For some people I suppose so, but for me… Nope! I can wake up quickly from a dream, and for some odd reason I can remember every from that dream. Most of the time if it’s an annoying dream that I do my best to forget it. Yet I have the habit of where the more I try to forget, the more I remember. T_T
Maybe you should do the opposite from me. Train you brain to remember bits and piece of your dream. Hopefully in time you’ll be able to remember all your dreams. Of course if you have a rediculous dream that is so out there… There is nothing wrong with trying to forget it. It’s best to remember the good ones. ^_^V

I’ve got a story that’s relevant and possibly useful for your endeavor. I have dreamed on several occasions that I was singing with a group of people. In at least two of such dreams, I didn’t know all of the words to the songs that were being sung. These are songs that I couldn’t keep up with if I wasn’t listening to the song while I was singing as there are large sections that I don’t have memorized yet. In one of those instances, the song was in Gaelic. I don’t know what any of the words mean, but I know the chorus. However, in every instance were I was reduced to mumbling along, the other people singing with me in the dream didn’t skip a beat. They were able to continue singing and actually did remember all of the words without a problem (at least that I could tell).

Now, there are two possibilities here. The first is that my subconscious “know” more than I’m consciously aware of. That is, there are memories which I possess and can access, but not in a conscious manner… yet. This is actually widely accepted as fact. The subconscious mind does a lot of stuff in the background of our minds without our being aware of it. The second possibility is that my mind was making it up and making believe that it was the real thing. Much like the blind spots in our vision, we don’t perceive the holes because our brain fills in the blanks and we are none the wiser.

If the later is true, then there’s less hope for learning a language in your dreams. You would, however, be limited to rehearsing what you already knew consciously. You might be able to converse with people in the language in your dream, but they will also be limited by what you know consciously.

If the former is true then this has HUGE potential for accelerating the learning process. You would theoretically be able to speak the language with someone else in your dream who actually knows more of the language than you do (at least in a conscious sense). I can also confirm that I’ve encountered Japanese speakers in my dreams and been unable to fully understand them. I could catch a few words here and there and piece together what they were trying to say. However, whether or not all the other words they were speaking were real or nonsense is something I will never know.

In either case, the cool thing is that we consolidate our memories while we sleep. It sort of like defragmenting a hard drive. By incorporating a language lesson into that process, I would imagine that it might make memories relating to that language easier to access.

I think this may really happen, because I’ve dremead about someone (on Tv ò_ò) speaking in english (which is not my mothertongue), but first I was thinking so much about it and when I saw the dream the guy on TV was speaking so difficult words and then I concluded every word we learn stays memorized in our brain :P

I had a pretty silly dream about someone calling me saying Ojousama Ojou sama (pretty weird right?), I guess I got the dream in Japanese part now I have to control it .

Lucid dreaming prevents REM sleep, which is needed by human beings to maintain mental stability and for the body to recuperate at rest. I have noticed several patients progressively lose their sanity while practicing lucid dreaming. As they got further into it, it became more difficult to have regular dreams. They routinely had disturbing nightmares as time went on. The shooter in Tucson is an example of someone who used lucid dreaming and became mentally unstable. Of course I am not saying that lucid dreaming causes mental illness, but it is not healthy for the human mind to practice it.

I have been practicing Lucid Dreaming for 2 years now, and this past Fall, finally realized how much it could help me with my studying. I just completed my 3rd year of Japanese at Columbia College Chicago. Though it is somewhat difficult for me to achieve lucid dreaming during the school year (because I need to carefully regulate my sleep patterns, which we all know is next to impossible for most college students), I managed to use it a couple of times to study for tests, including a Japanese vocabulary test. I read over my flash cards right before bed for about 25 minutes. When I began dreaming, it soon became lucid and I went right back to studying. I got a very good score on the test. Your idea was a great one, Tofugu san. =]
There are many ways to become lucid in dreams, but beginning with keeping a dream journal, or immediately telling someone your dream as soon as you wake is a good way to start. The ability to recall your dreams is the first step. Once you become able to do so, you should try and find ways to become “conscious” in your dream state. There are many ways, but the ones that have worked most often for me are flipping light switches, and counting my fingers. Do these things often during the day, and you will eventually learn to do them in your dreams. In dreams, the lights do not change, and your fingers will never be the same count twice. The next step is learning not to jolt yourself awake as soon as you realize you’re dreaming. The first couple of times, you will be a in a fragile state. The first time I realized I was dreaming, I was riding a bus, and I realized I had no idea where I was. The second I realized I was dreaming, I stood up to get off the bus. I in that moment actually sat up in my bed. It was, in a way, kind of scary. It gets better. Once you grow accustomed to realizing you’re dreaming, you should start very slowly trying to manipulate them. Before you can study Japanese, or anything else, you need to be able to maintain the lucidity of a dream. It helps to build up a resistance to reality by realizing you can do lots of different things while dreaming. It is possible to lose a grip on a lucid dream and fall out of it if it becomes too dull. Once you’ve mastered, say, breathing under water (which is an amazing experience), I’d say you’re ready for anything. If you are having a lot of trouble reaching this point, you might want to try The Dream Herb, Calea Zacatechichi. It is perfectly legal in the US, and can be either smoked or made into a tea. DO NOT DRINK THE TEA unless you don’t have tastebuds. It is absolutely dreadful. I’ve used it a couple of times, and I can honestly say it does what it claims. My dream became lucid more quickly, and it felt even more real than regular lucid dreams. (In the dream the night I first tried Calea, there were German Shepherds. I can vividly remember how soft their fur was.)
Calea is not for everyone, of course. But as I said before, I was able to achieve brilliant lucid dreams without the use of Calea. I also mentioned I’ve been working on it for 2 years. If you are serious about this, don’t become discouraged with how long it might take. Some people get it faster than others. The more you study lucid dreaming, or even just talking about it, the more it’s driven into your subconscious, and the more it should begin to happen! I wish you the best of luck!

I actually was very good at lucid dreaming when I was younger. I think it is important to be able to wake yourself up out of your dreams. I have a technique I have had ever since I was little that I developed because I used to have a lot of nightmares. When I started to have a nightmare I would tell myself it was a dream, and then blink three times (sort of like Dorothy clipping her shoes) and on the third blink I would wake up. I always remember my dreams as well. I did actually have a dream a while ago where I was writing kanji and reading their meanings aloud, however, when I woke up I realised I was actually wrong in the dream and corrected myself. And since then I have never forgotten that kanji. ^^ Although I have never consciously tried to practice Japanese in my dreams, perhaps I will take it to the next level.

I dreamed that i was lying in a futon inside a hunted house and started hiccuping………a girl started counting until 99 and i woke up >___<

It’s too bad it took you too long. but when I started it took me at most 2 months to learn to have them regularly. I even had my first one on accident, without even trying. It just depends on the person.
And again, I don’t know where you’re hanging out, but I have met at least three people who will have at least one lucid a night. Some of them would even have ALL their dreams be lucid. (Granted, these are people who are both gifted, and they practice all the time)
I don’t even keep a DJ any more and I have at LEAST one lucid a week. Back when I actually practiced, I was having at LEAST 3 a week. I’d often have more than one, or would chain them, so I’d have a bunch in a row. And I was no expert.
Again, maybe the forum I was at (mortalmist) was just full of special cases…

If you make some sort of breakthrough, Koichi, I will give you all of my money so you can publish a book on it. I must have the first copy for free though, and it has to be signed by you with a lipstick kiss next to your name. If you don’t do that, at the very least I could just have a lucid dream and make you do it. You’re mine either way! Ｏ(≧∇≦)Ｏ