Hello!
Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter, and welcome to the very first installment of my new monthly column.
These days I have been thinking a lot about language learning dreams and dreaming. We tend to use these terms more in a figurative than in a literal sense, as in it was my lifelong dream (that is, my hope, my aspiration, my desire) to open my own academy – and now, with your help, I have done so, so many thanks for that! And people often come to me saying it is their dream to act on their polyitis to become a polyliterate polyglot, that is, to learn this, that, or the other handful of languages to a high level.
However, there are also ways that language learning and literal dreaming (that is, nocturnal visions) can go hand in hand. I have been an avid explorer of the phenomenon of dreaming for over thirty years now, at times documenting my own nightly visions in a detailed fashion, and at others actively suppressing those memories so that I could concentrate on analyzing them in literature – or upon learning languages as obsessively and intensively as I could. Still, over the years I have had periods of more active dream recall, and in these stages I realized that the more I was progressing in polyliteracy, the more my dreams mirrored literary episodes in different languages.
Thus, I consciously tried to merge interests in languages and literature with my interest in oneirology to see if I could deliberately induce this type of dream. I have been able to do this with some measure of success, thereby adding several hours of linguistic use and exposure to each day (or night), and as we are going over my techniques and methodology in the Path of the Polyglot lectures, I will soon endeavor, for the first time ever, to explain how I do this.
Thinking about how to present this has probably gotten me thinking me more about nocturnal dreaming again, which has led me to a recent health breakthrough that I am happy to share with you in case it might help anyone else. We all know how important it is to get a good night’s sleep, but most of us also unfortunately know how hard it can be to do this. I myself have never had any trouble falling asleep when I get tired in the evening and sleeping solidly for about five hours, but then I wake up and, for the past few years, have been unable to fall back to sleep again.
My mind usually whirls about, first trying to figure out what woke me, then directing its attention to the coming day. About a month ago, however, I finally hit upon the cause of my waking, which in hindsight is so obvious that I cannot believe it took me so long to realize it. We dream in cycles throughout the night, and I was awaking in perfect rhythm to this, that is, after an intense period of R.E.M sleep. Therefore, when I wake in the night, I now just think “now what was I dreaming…?” This leads me to recall the images, and thence to reenter the dream and thus to sleep better and longer each night again. I was probably prompted to do this because of the constant references to dreams that we have been reading about in Plutarch’s Lives in the Great Books of the West. If you have similar difficulty falling back asleep, give it a try – it may work for you as well.
I'm looking forward to the beginning of the second academic quarter of 2023 at the Academy, and the many wonderful insights awaiting us. I hope to see you there!
Best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
