OK, so during the period of time between A1 and a weak B1, I often had a type of babbling dream, where, as I was falling asleep, I was semi-aware of a jumbled mess of words in my target language bouncing around in my mind. It wasn’t quite dreaming, but it also wasn’t something I was doing consciously, or something I had any control over. Sometimes when fully asleep I’d have semi-coherent dreams (of those I could remember), at a very basic level, where some L2 words would be used.
Fast forward a few years and my level is quite a bit stronger (probably a weak B2), but the dreaming/babbling has completely stopped. This is despite a recent intensive period of listening to/reading in L2.
Has anyone else experienced this? I always assumed that the higher your level the more likely you are to dream in L2?
One thing I will say is that I probably ‘struggled’ more during the early stages (A1-B1), and I was probably using material that was too advanced for me at the time, something I don’t do so much of as I’ve reached a higher level of comprehension. Is ‘the struggle’ the main trigger as to what you dream about? Is this something I need to be concerned about?
FWIW, I feel like I’m improving still. It just seems a little strange that dreaming was such a regular experience of the initial process and now it appears to have completely disappeared, and all my dreams are now exclusively in English. The pre-sleep ‘babbling’ thing has stopped too.
It’s probably been a least a couple of years since I had anything resembling an L2 dream, and when I was having them, that period lasted for more than a year. It can’t figure it out, other than to put it down to how taxing the different periods were relative to each other.