Those of you who either speak or are learning another language will be able to relate when I say that my dreams sometimes include random snatches of either Spanish (which I studied in high school and part of college) or German (which is, of course, the official language in Austria). Shortly before I returned from my Christmas holidays in the U.S., I had a dream that I was back in Austria already and ordering meals, bus tickets, etc. in German. I remember using “bitte” (please) a lot, so though my German is still broken and disjointed, at least it’s polite!
Well, last night my dream included snatches of Spanish. While touring my old elementary school (don’t you hang out in your old elementary school in your dreams? No?), some friends and I encountered a small boy. He was very charming and super cute, with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes, and was apparently lost – being originally from Mexico. Yep. How we deduced that he was from Mexico I’m not sure (because his appearance sure as heck didn’t give it away – he looked like an escapee from an IKEA catalog in Sweden), but we could tell that he didn’t understand much when we spoke to him in English. So I, ever the linguist (ha!), hoped that my Spanish would come back to me and asked, “¿Como estás?”
His reply indicated that he was either a) confused to mental abstraction to find himself in the U.S. when he obviously belonged in Mexico, or b) not really Mexican, but a Swedish IKEA catalog escapee who bravely swam across the cold North Sea and the Atlantic to reach the coast of Georgia, where he hitchhiked several hours inland to take refuge in an elementary school building, and was so exhausted from the journey that he didn’t have the energy to correct our assumption that he was Mexican – because his response to my friendly, “How are you?” was “Cien.” Yes, cien, the Spanish word for “hundred,” which, coincidentally, rhymes with bien, which would have been an appropriate answer to my question. I looked at my friends and muttered, “Yeah, that’s not right. He means bien.” Ah, those crazy IKEA catalog escapees! Always trying to pull a fast one on the world.
