Outsmarted by my own subconscious

I dreamed last night I was in Norway. Now, I've never been to Norway, but in my dream my mind managed to have everyone speaking a language that was enough like Danish* that I got the gist of it, but different enough that I kept having to ask people to repeat themselves, as well as generating a dialect form (for the hunch-backed elderly train-conductor character) that, while it sounded nominally Danish-like, I couldn't understand at all.

How does a brain do that?

Geekman would say it doesn't, since he adheres to the theory that you don't experience dreams as you remember them anyway. He claims to have read studies that show that people woken up after less than two seconds of REM sleep will recite a long complicated narrative that they couldn't possibly have dreamed in that amount of time. He argues that this shows we just dream in rapid unconnected snapshots that we unconsciously piece together into a coherent whole after waking. I always reply that if our brains can piece these into a narrative in the second between waking and "remembering" the dream, then they could have created these narratives in the few seconds of REM sleep too. But I usually lose this argument.

Anyway, on waking, I could actually remember word for word the question a fellow passenger in this Norwegian train had just asked me, so I know my mind really was using actual Danish and Swedish words. But somehow it was generating sentences that I was finding hard to understand.

Outsmarted by my own brain first thing in the... um... morning.** Grumble.

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*My day-time brain knows that spoken Norwegian is more like Swedish than Danish, but since my Danish is much better than my Swedish, I guess my brain went for the easy option. Lazy even in sleep :)

**I only just woke up, hence it must be morning. And you are on the other side of the world anyway and won't realise what a decadent time of day it is here, you internet, you.