How to Study English in Your Dream: the Theory I. Introduction

How to Study English in Your Dream: the Theory
    Good afternoon. Today we are going to discuss how to study English in your dream. Firstly, let me give a brief introduction focusing on connections among English study, imagination, and dream. As this is an ongoing research concerning at least two professional fields, respectively, Foreign Language Acquisition and Cognitive Psychology, which are not that easy to be perceived without a certain amount of basic knowledge. Thus, I will try my best to explain how dreams affect language learning.
    Human Beings receive all kinds of information by five senses—seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. According to reliable census, of all information, 83.3% is taken by seeing, 11% by hearing, 3.5% by smelling, 1.5% by touching, and only 1% by tasting, from which we can see that vision has vital importance in receipt of data. Therefore, the more visualized and vivid the content is, the more impression it would leave you, the more solidly you would lock it up in your memory. That best explains why most people prefer multimedia rather than text book along in English learning.
    Although seeing and hearing together absorb 94.3% of all information, and this can be simply achieved by visualized lessons given by the modern technology, such as, video both on tape and on line, TV, and so on, imagination, or better still, daydreams, that is a mere imagination that floats in your mind normally without any deliberate purposes while being fully in consciousness, usually serve better, for you can easily utilize all your senses for the acquirement of new knowledge. It is more like playing a movie in your mind: not only can you live your past experience over and over again but also apply to all your senses available or not in order to engrave what you would like to learn deeply upon your heart.
    According to the theory given above—the application of all senses in imagination, in this case you are supposed to hear how sweet the woman asking for the coffee sounds, to see how lovely the waiter’s smile look, to feel how hot the coffee is, to taste on the surface of your tongue the remaining fragrance of the black coffee with a teaspoonful of sugar. It is pretty much similar to watching a movie. The only difference between movie and imagination is that by watching a film, you only see and hear what people do and say. Although that means, that 94.3% of all information is received, you never know the coffee is hot and the perfume smells nice unless the woman or the waiter tells you how hot and how nice. Every time, someone offers you a cup of coffee, you might replay "Please, and with a teaspoonful of white sugar in it. Thank you." Although you may prefer no sugar in it, it just somehow becomes an instinctive reaction. Whenever familiar signals received, you respond naturally without even thinking about the answer. That is how people acquire their first and second language since very early age.
    There are few other techniques to enhance the imaginative effect, such as, magnifying, minifying, exaggerating, and etc. Although they are closely related to development of imagination, they are too professional to be included here.
    According to the definition of dream by Freud, dream is the combination of living experience and imagination. We can see that imagination is a part of dream. We just proved how imagination works with English study through five senses. Now let us concentrate on the living experience which takes another part in dream. Literally speaking, living experience is actually nothing more than what you have experienced. As long as one could remember things, he commenced to accumulate his own experience.
    We have already known that dreams consist of imagination and living experience of both past and presence. That living experience is the collection of memories: that through five senses imagination can greatly improve English study. However, there is a slight difference between imagination in a dream and that in fantasy, the former being controllable by consciousness while the latter by sub-consciousness.In another words, one can not manipulate his dream: but he can take firm hold of everything in his fantasy. Thus, your imagination runs freely with your sub-consciousness while it can be manipulated by your consciousness.
    Here comes a review: firstly, English study can be enhanced by imagination through five senses. Secondly, living experience is merely the collection of your own memories of what you have been through since the day you could remember things. Thirdly, dream is composed of imagination and living experience of both past and presence. Fourthly, the difference between dream and fantasy is that dream goes with sub-consciousness in which imagination can run free, and fantasy matches with consciousness in which imagination can be controlled.
    Putting the conclusions above together, we can find out that with a good preparation of living experience concerning English you would like to learn, with a conversion from the English material into vivid imagination in your mind, you can have a dream in English language as depicted at the outset of this lecture.