"As in, I would prattle on and converse in Spanish - fluently. Except, at the time, I wasn't actually fluent."
My dreams frequently claim I am a master composer, and that this tune is wonderful, or that I've written a really clever joke, or that they've told me something important. None of the things I've ever dragged up to the waking world have ever even remotely panned out as the dream promised. (If I may anthropomorphize for convenience.)
I've come to the conclusion that that is the dream, in some sense. You dream that you were fluent in Spanish, but not just that you abstractly believed in it but that you had the experience. But what language were you speaking? Nothing. Nothing comprehensible, and possibly literally nothing at all; simply the empty experience of fluency without any concrete referent.
Which makes the Dunning-Kruger effect more comprehensible, if it is possible to experience the feeling of "competence" divorced from almost anything concrete. Dunning-Kruger IMHO happens when the competence is firing and the person in question has no counterbalancing reasons to suppress it. So one of the keys of true competence is to be sure to eschew that feeling, in favor of seeking out the ways in which you are not competent. That is another way of looking at "deliberative practice", where you are always practicing just a wee bit beyond your capability. If you don't do that, it's too easy to rest on your laurels and feel soooper confident and awesome that you've really licked this Twinkle Twinkle Little Star tune, so now you really know what you're doing.
That kind of makes sense, thanks! It has puzzled me for years. It was very convincing dream Spanish, like fluency in technical verbiage and speaking about higher order mathematics - all in Spanish when I still had a hard time asking for a room for the night.
I had a similar experience while doing undergrad physics. I would dream up incredibly elegant solutions to hard calculus problems ... wake up, write them down and go back to bed. In the morning I would find stuff like dx/dx = c or some other trivial or incorrect equation.
My dreams frequently claim I am a master composer, and that this tune is wonderful, or that I've written a really clever joke, or that they've told me something important. None of the things I've ever dragged up to the waking world have ever even remotely panned out as the dream promised. (If I may anthropomorphize for convenience.)
I've come to the conclusion that that is the dream, in some sense. You dream that you were fluent in Spanish, but not just that you abstractly believed in it but that you had the experience. But what language were you speaking? Nothing. Nothing comprehensible, and possibly literally nothing at all; simply the empty experience of fluency without any concrete referent.
Which makes the Dunning-Kruger effect more comprehensible, if it is possible to experience the feeling of "competence" divorced from almost anything concrete. Dunning-Kruger IMHO happens when the competence is firing and the person in question has no counterbalancing reasons to suppress it. So one of the keys of true competence is to be sure to eschew that feeling, in favor of seeking out the ways in which you are not competent. That is another way of looking at "deliberative practice", where you are always practicing just a wee bit beyond your capability. If you don't do that, it's too easy to rest on your laurels and feel soooper confident and awesome that you've really licked this Twinkle Twinkle Little Star tune, so now you really know what you're doing.