Dreaming in Chinese

This morning my husband tells me that, some point in the middle of the night, he woke up to find me up on one elbow, leaning over him, eyes wide open. “What is it?” he said. I responded, he says, in a string of Chinese. When he said something like, “I can’t understand you,” I repeated the phrases. We went back and forth until finally he said, “Stop!” at which point, he reports, I rolled over and went back to ‘sleep’.

The only word he could make out in my sleep-talk was ‘ganbei’ which means ‘cheers’ or ‘bottoms up’. He said the rest sounded legitimate – we’ll never know. I have no memory of the event, though I have a long history of somniloquy. If only I could tap into that fluency in my language class. . .