[elpakal]

Raised multilingual here (as in father spoke one, mother spoke another, living abroad and US back and forth). I don't know about the stronger social ties but I have found that thinking in a different language helps me get to sleep easier. There are times when I'm spinning around in webs in English (work, life etc) at night, and when I switch over to Spanish thoughts I fall asleep easier.

Maybe just stuff like that is enough to make a difference.

[cyberax]

Switching into another language also helps if you are stuck in an environment where you do not want to pay attention (e.g. on a bus with blaring ads that you can't mute or with a rude neighbor yapping on their phone).

[iLemming]

> helps me get to sleep easier

I grew up speaking multiple languages. My monolingual friend once asked in which language I dream, and I said - "not sure, I think in all three different ones I'm currently fluent". "But how do you know?", he kept pressing. "Ah, well, they come with subtitles", I joked. But since then I often wonder, how do we recognize a language in our dreams?

[inigyou]

I think my dreams use semantic vectors that come with a tag saying they came from sensory input even though they didn't.

I am mostly monolingual but I would expect them to come with a language tag too. I believe a dream about Bob talking about cats in Spanish would directly activate your neural network like V_cats + V_spanish + V_bob_is_talking without activating the parts that would decode auditory input into that semantic vector.

[HPsquared]

That's nice, like the brain switching to "home mode" maybe?

[barrenko]

Learned some french recently, heavy bouts of insomnia due to moving / stress - I will try this advice exactly this night.