Last night, I had a dream about Japan. It wasn’t a nightmare. It also wasn’t nice.
This part of my dream started being in a van or something that someone else was driving, and being stopped by Japanese police. It turned out the van had some kind of illicit substance in it, but none of us knew what was going on. The police detained all of us. I thought I could use my knowledge of Japanese to communicate with them. I tried. They kept responding in English. They pretty much refused to speak Japanese with me, even though they clearly understood what I was saying.
Finally I gave up. I got them to let me go to the bathroom (asked in Japanese, they answered in English, and the conversation was in English from then on)… and I went in search of one. I ended up somehow in an auto parts store in California, so that was the end of the Japan part of the dream. (My dreams tend to be detailed, vivid, and dynamic).
While I know where some of the elements of that dream came from (just before I went to sleep I was thinking about a scene were some British guy, I think a top gear guy, was pulled over in Japan), it really reflects how I see my Japanese in a real way. I can’t speak it well enough to speak with Japanese people, and every time I try it just ends up going back to English. Maybe this was my dream trying to tell me to just effing give up.
But I won’t, because I’m a baka who doesn’t know when to quit.