Bernard O'Shea: I hypnotised myself into learning German in my sleep 

Bernard O'Shea: Watch out 2022, or should I say Achtung 2022 because I'm going to bejaypers the hell out of the Deutsche Sprache.

One of my fondest college memories was during my first rag week as a student. In the mid-'90s literally every college rag week had the same line-ups. Comedians, cover bands, mock events like race nights or fake weddings sprinkled in, there was always a hypnotist. During one of these shows, my friend nominated himself to be 'put asleep'.

I watched him climb the wonky stairs up to the temporary stage like a cocky MMA fighter. He was absolutely full sure of his mental strength that he could never be hypnotised because "it's all (rhymes with colics)". As he sat smugly in front of a couple of hundred fellow students, he smiled outwardly. He wouldn't be made a fool of by what he called "some shite merchant". He casual slugged from his can of warm Harp, watching all the other mental weakling's heads drop like cabbages from the tops of over-packed grocery bags.

He thought he was Elvis, a duck and millionaire, for the next half an hour. He even was obsessed with the chair he was sitting on and was convinced it was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. For our group of friends, it was slagging material for the rest of his life. But there was a catch. He wouldn't believe us. Even strangers he met later that night who told him about his shenanigans, he point-blank refused to agree that it happened. The only thing that could not be hypnotised about was that he was actually hypnotised.

Unusually I didn't slag him about his stage debut. Not because I didn't want to embarrass him but because I was terrified about being hypnotised. For those few drunken few days as we wandered aimlessly through Dundalk's finest hostelries grading the quality of draft McCardles, I thought he was one of the bravest people I knew.

My fear is twofold. Firstly, that I won't come out of a hypnotised state. Secondly, I know I'm mentally weak. I am petrified of being led subconsciously to do anything, even if it's good for me. I've tried weight-loss hypnosis on my phone before, but it never worked. 

Even guided meditations that I do regularly I find difficult. Truth be told, for the last two months I couldn't find the time to do them, so where would I find the time to learn a new language. What about all that time I waste sleeping?

According to insider.com, "If you're trying to learn a new language, but you're finding it a slow process, scientists from Germany may have found a way to help speed things up".

A team of scientists from the Bern Institute of Psychology tested whether learning a new language while sleeping was possible. They tried playing specific phrases into headphones while the participants slept. Using the hypothesis that "Our brains alternate between two phases approximately every half second — active phases or "up-states" and passive phases, also known as "down-states".

During the upstates, the participants formed associations with certain words. Long story short, the brain can learn while sleeping or at least when you think you are sleeping.

I chose Christmas Eve night to start my hypo-sleep odyssey, which would give me about twenty nights of sleep to see if it would work. I found a video on YouTube entitled "Learn German While You Sleep, Most Important German Phrases And Words" that lasts eight hours. It took me nearly an hour to figure out to stop YouTube from turning off automatically on my phone after a few minutes. Once sorted, I lay back and began my first nocturnal logistical lecture. For the first few minutes, I tried to remember the phrases, but by the time it got to "fret much", which means "nice to meet you. About eight minutes in, I dozed off.

By the second week, I hadn't noticed any effect. I knew the first ten minutes of phrases because I was awake, but after that, nothing. After the second week, still, no impact and I was getting seriously bored of listening to it. I usually dose off to a podcast or my newfound love of ASMR, and I felt a bit deprived of my regular nighttime dose of dozy content. I decided to keep it up purely, so I could say I gave it a decent amount of time.

I usually make the dinners in the house. Nothing special, mostly chicken for the kids or the odd pasta dish. However, my wife makes a bean chilli that I love. I was eating it cold from the pot on the cooker, and she started to tell me off, "Bernard put it into a bowl". I said instinctively without thinking, "Ich mag das Essen", followed by "what did I just say?" 

I was in shock. I knew it meant "I like the food" but had no idea how I knew it. Had it worked? I opened my laptop and found the phrase 5 hours and 53 minutes into the recording. I looked over some of the other phrases and didn't recognise or know one of them. But yet my brain remembered that I was eating food and somehow got me to spurt it out in German. Until that moment, I'd never seen or used the word "Essen" and didn't even know that it meant food. More importantly, what in God's name is my brain doing 5 hours and 53 minutes into my sleep every night?

I was about to give up my nighttime hypnosis, but if I could learn one new phrase in just 3 weeks, what could I achieve in a year? According to my calculations, 17 phrases! It will only take me 30 years to learn over 500 commonly used terms, and then I'll be almost fluent. To think my wife told me to take an online class. Those online classes are for those day-learners. Gute Nacht!