It finally caught up with me…

After a year and a month of intensive language study, I finally started speaking Chinese in my dreams.  The bad part is that I can’t speak it any better in my sleep state than I do in real life.

In the dream I started speaking to this taxi driver (I was trying to tell him that he was the best driver we’ve ever had,) and I realized that my word order was all wrong.  So I stammered and stuttered and finally got my sentence out, but the fact of the matter is that I pretty much butchered it.  The good part of the dream was when the taxi driver responded (in Chinese) and I picked out and understood certain words.   The funny thing about the dream was that we (Christa and I) were making stupid cultural mistakes in the midst of it.  We were trying to "tip" this taxi driver because he was so nice and helpful and all we did was succeed in offending him.  He told me that it was bad for "guanxi" (our relationship) for me to do that to him (i.e. give him extra money).

Too funny.  I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my week on the Freudian analysis.  If you have any interpretative insight, feel free to share…