From: miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: Don't interrupt me you dream character!
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 20:25:44 GMT

In article <Dec.29.14.06.50.1992.20682@ruhets.rutgers.edu> farris@ruhets.rutgers.edu (Lorenzo Farris) writes:
>In article <1992Dec28.201143.548@tcsi.com>, miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.) writes:
>
>> I've heard that many people who are bilingual also feel that they
>> have a kind of personality split -- i.e., they feel like a slightly
>> different person when they are speaking their second language.
>> This might make them ideal subjects for dream-personality
>> personality research.  
>> 
>
>I wouldn't quite call it a personality split. This is related to the
>fact that one typically adopts different personae in different
>situations. I expect you exhibit a different personality at a bar than
>you do visiting with family, at least a little different. 
>
>It just happens that it is typically a different set of people that
>one would interact with depending on the language one uses. 
>
>In my own case, I find that if I speak my other language with an
>American who speaks it, or with a scientific colleague from that
>country, I exhibit the same persona as I would if I were speaking in
>English. 
>
>If you want to do dream personality research, you could find a great
>variety of behavioural cues besides language to work with. So there is
>hope for you monolinguals.
>-- 
>Happiness is just a                     ******************************
>remembrance away.                       *  Lorenzo Farris            *
>                                        *  farris@ruhets.rutgers.edu *
>                                        ******************************

There is already some dream personality research going on -- I was just
suggesting a new approach to it.

This line of speculation was kicked off by Maiko Covington's reports
of having dream personalities speak different languages in her dreams,
including languages that the corresponding real-life people didn't know
(But that Maiko did.)  She was wondering how this was possible -- a
reasonable puzzlement, given how counter-intuitive it is.

It's hard to remember that people in dreams are really just projections
from memories of people in real life, and that the abilities and
knowledge they have can include all the abilities and knowledge that
the dreamer has (but no more.)

[Obviously I'm neglecting the potential parapsychological aspect here.
That's for another discussion.]

If Maiko dreams of a monolingual English-speaker speaking Japanese,
it's probably because that dream personality has access to Maiko's
various speech centers -- including the ones that handle her Japanese
ability.  What's surprising is that a memory of a monolingual person
would be matched to a language that person doesn't have in real life.
Is this random, or is there some mechanism behind it?

My hypothesis about how this could happen with some frequency was that
the appearance before the dream-ego of a person associated with one
language fires up the set of speech centers in the brain associated
with that person/language combination, for use by the dream-ego --
POSSIBLY limiting access to those speech centers by other dream
personalities, and thus POSSIBLY increasing the chance that those dream
personalities will hook into any existing alternate speech centers.
Bilinguals are interesting subjects in view of this hypothesis precisely
because they have (at least some) distinct alternate speech centers that
dream personalities might access.

But maybe I went too far when I conjectured that there are latent
dream personalities associated with the languages of a bilingual
by way of some kind of personality split perceivable even in waking
life.  Your "personae" explanation sounds like a more accurate view
of it.  I was speaking from the point of view of being basically
monolingual.
---
Michael Turner
miket@tcs.com
Newsgroups: alt.dreams