Foreign Language In The Night

Have any of you ever dreamed in a foreign language? Or gotten short messages that way?

Today, while looking in my i-phone notes for the password to my bank -- I can NEVER remember all these passwords -- I ran across something I'd written there in the middle of the night weeks ago with only a vague recollection of it. It said "ook sein pond."

It was a little astonishing. I'd resolved a couple years ago to write down significant things that "join" my vivid dreams & already had one incident that can't be explained except for my theory. The idea is, when I wake up with a thought that seems unusual, I'll remind myself by writing a note in my phone for morning & then look it up. It started when I woke one time with the word "fegnet" in my head, almost as if someone had just printed it on a white board in my head. I visualized it: ffegnet, in a pretty script. I remembered it somehow & searched the internet next morning for some meaning, it meant nothing to me. An antique German Christmas card on E-bay was about the only thing I found with the word written in a fancy script in a poem. I typed the line into translate & something about being blessed came up. That wasn't satisfying enough for me, so I wrote to a German professor whose name I found online to ask him if there was anything else he could tell me about the word. He wrote back & told me the word is actually "segnet." Which is a verb meaning blessed. He told me the script from the card (I'd sent him a clip) was written in an old German gothic script in which s's look like two small f's. So no wonder I could not find much about it, I'd been typing in the wrong word.

Meanwhile, my hobby is ancestry & I realized that this word dream thing had happened very near to the day I'd gone to the local historic National Cemetery to visit the grave of an ancestor I never realized existed. He was killed in the Battle of Peachtree Creek in Atlanta --a New York man who was my 2nd great uncle & whose grave I've been driving past almost 20 years without realizing it! The discovery that my uncle was killed in Atlanta -- I know almost exactly where he died based on descriptions of the battle -- was even more amazing after I realized, theoretically, that I had a message from him in German, which was his native tongue. His grandfather was actually a Hessian desserter who fought in the Revolutionary War as a very young man, then married a woman of a Puritan family & settled in NY. So I'm thinking German was probably still spoken in the family at the time of his childhood. I felt like he somehow sent me that word as a thank you for the prayers I offered up at his graveside! I took French in high school & German in college, but never learned that word I'm certain. Plus, I'm horrible at languages and the fact that I mistook the s to be an f somewhat makes it less likely it was just a word I heard one time. It was a visual thing in my dream.

Fast forward to the latest, which I was truly surprised to see today."Ook sein" translated from German means "be ok." I have no recollection of dreaming it, but must've written it in my phone. I'm wondering if my uncle somehow knows I was in the hospital with A-fib back in October & was wishing me well? The actual thing I wrote down was "ook sein pond" which... I have no idea.

I'd love to hear what any of you think or if you've had similar experiences. I'm just going with my first intuition about the source of these words. Even after taking German, I know I never learned "ook" as a form of "to be." Totally new to me, maybe even a colloquialism? Thanks for your thoughts.

Mrs. Ramsay/Pelatiah