Two recent dreams have involved language. I don’t usually remember my dreams in much detail but these were short and involved language. Two days ago Facebook informed me that it was the birthday of one former student who returned to Hungary. I wished him happy birthday in English and he replied in English. That night I dreamed I was in a classroom. The first student greeted me in Korean, which I speak to some extent. The second student greeted me in Hungarian. Hang on … I don’t speak Hungarian, so how did this person in my dream speak it, and how did I know that it was Hungarian? Either I have absorbed some Hungarian, somewhere, some time, somehow, or my subconscious just made up something which sounded approximately appropriate and I just knew it was meant to be Hungarian.
Longer ago I had a dream in the thriller genre. The only part I remember is one person pointing a gun at another person, and the other person saying:
Do not shoot.
Do not shoot and Don’t shoot mean the same thing, but contracted forms are less formal and, in this case, more urgent. I can’t imagine anyone facing the business end of a gun saying Do not shoot instead of Don’t shoot, but that’s what my subconscious made that person say. Do not shoot (until, unless …) is more like something said or written in a firearms safety course, or said by a police/military commander. Google Ngrams doesn’t help, processing do not and don’t in the same way. A general Google search shows about 15 million results for “don’t shoot” (in quotation marks for exact match) and 2.5 million for “do not shoot”.
I don’t (or do not) know what conclusions I can draw from these dreams.
I kept an extensive diary during my first stay in Korea 2006-09, which often throws light on my own usage. There are 6 instances of do not and 200 of don’t, including 58 of I don’t know, so I obviously spent most of that time in a state of considerable ignorance.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 
It’s intriguing how one can usually recognize the foreign language that some other speaker is speaking even though one doesn’t know (much more than) a word of that language. Usually, that is – and in doubtful cases, the speaker’s perceived ethnicity is often a clue – but there have been more than a few times when I couldn’t figure it out at all. I can certainly identify written Hungarian on the page, but I’m not sure if I could identify a speaker as speaking Hungarian auditorily alone.
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Around here, I often hear languages other than English more often than English. I probably use visual clues more than aural.
Many years ago I heard a group on a train and really couldn’t tell whether they were northern English or Frisian.
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