WRITTEN LANUAGE WRITTEN IN A DREAM

It is rare to see writing in a dream, but once an entire written language appeared in a dream. In the book "The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving - and How You Can, Too (Crown/Random House, 2001), Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tells the story of how the alphabet of Vai, an African written language that first appeared in a dream in the mid-l800s, spread throughout Liberia's capital city of Monrovia, so that almost everyone could read it. In fact, in the surrounding rural areas, the written language boosted literacy to a rate much higher than that of Europe at that time. Dr. Barrett writes that even today people can read the language even though the Liberian government insists that only English be taught in the schools.