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Dream speech (in German Traumsprache) is internal speech which occurs during a dream. The term was coined by Emil Kraepelin in his 1906 monograph titled Über Sprachstörungen im Traume ("On Language Disturbances in Dreams"). The text discussed various forms of dream speech, outlining 286 examples. Dream speech is not to be confounded with the 'language of dreams', which refers to the visual means of representing thought in dreams.
Three types of dream speech were considered by Kraepelin: disorders of word-selection (also called ), disorders of discourse (e.g. ) and . The most frequent occurring form of dream speech is a neologism.
While Kraepelin was interested in the psychiatric as well as the psychological aspects of dream speech, modern researchers have been interested in speech production in dreams as illuminating aspects of cognition in the dreaming mind. Some have found that during dream speech, Wernicke's area is not functioning well, but Broca's area is, leading to proper grammar but little meaning.
In his monograph Kraepelin presented 286 examples of dream speech, mainly his own. After 1906 he continued to collect samples of dream speech until his death in 1926. This time the dream speech specimens were almost exclusively his own and the original hand written dream texts are still available today at the Archive of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. These new dream speech specimens have been published in 1993 in Heynick (in part in English translation) and in 2006 in the original German, with numerous valuable notes added.See Engels (2006) The second dream corpus has not been censored and dates are added to the dreams.In May 1908 Kraepelin dreamed of mental illnesses suddenly breaking in. He called them Blirr-Blerr. End April 1908 Eugen Bleuler introduced schizophrenia as an alternative name for Kraepelin's Dementia praecox. Blirr-Blerr is Kraepelin's substitute for schizophrenia. See Engels (2009, p.337).
| Blirr-Blerr (dream speech, May 1908) | Psychische Krankheiten,These are the Schizophrenien (the schizophrenias), introduced by Bleuler. die plötzlich (blitzschnell) hereinbrechen. Als besonders prägnante und glückliche Neubildung aufgefasst. Absicht der Frau mitzuteilen deswegen. |
Kraepelin's dream speech started during a period (1882–1884) of personal crisis and depression. In 1882 Kraepelin was fired after working only a few weeks at the Leipzig psychiatric clinic and two months later his father died.
However using the classical dream-psychosis analogy, he tried to first study dream speech in the hope that this would lead to insights into schizophrenic speech disorder. And so Kraepelin got used to recording his dreams, not to interpret them for personal use as in psychoanalysis, but to use them for a scientific study. Kraepelin was not only able to record the deviant speech in his dreams, but also the intended utterance (which was lacking in the deviant speech of his patients, who clearly cannot cross the boundary from psychosis to reality). For example, most neologisms (the deviant utterance) in Kraepelin's dreams have a meaning (the intended utterance).
Jakobson presupposes that seme is meaningless and is related to zemřel without any intermediate associations. However, there may be another explanation, conforming to Kraepelin's theory, of Jakobson's example if a perfectly fitting associative chain can be found linking zemřel to seme.
Note that seme is a meaningful part of Kraepelin's dream speech specimen 49 in which par-seme-nieKraepelin links this neologism to Paar semaines. is supposed to be Russian for some weeks. Jakobson, born in Russia, may have been intrigued by parsemenie and have used it in his own dream. In another dream speech example of Kraepelin (no 113) the Czech letter ř appears in the name of the Czech village Příbram. It may also have influenced Jakobson, former member of the Prague linguistic circle, in his zemřel-dream.
She also thinks that
Chaika compares schizophrenic speech errors with intricate speech errors, difficult to analyze.For an example of a parapraxis difficult to analyze, see Signorelli parapraxis. The current Chaika position comes close to Kraepelin's position,Kraepelin (1920): Das die Traumsprache in allen Einzelheiten der schizophrenen Sprachverwirrtheit entspricht. who noted that errors as in schizophasia can also occur in normals in dreams.
Recent research has confirmed one of Kraepelin's fundamental disturbances. In the book The Committee of Sleep, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett describes examples of dreamed literature in which the dreamers heard or read words which they awakened later wrote and published. She observes that almost all the examples are of poetry rather than prose or fiction, the only exceptions being one- or several-word phrases such as the book title Vanity Fair which came to Thackeray in a dream, or similarly Katherine Mansfield's Sun and Moon. Barrett suggests that the reason poetry fares better in dreams is that grammar seems to be well preserved in dream language while meaning suffers and rhyme and rhythm are more prominent than when awake—all characteristics which benefit poetry but not other forms.
In other work, Barrett has studied verbatim language in college students' dreams and found them similar in these characteristics—intact grammar, poor meaning, rhythm and rhyme—to the literary examples. She observes that this is suggestive that of the two language centers in the brain, Wernicke's area must not be functioning well, but Broca's area seems to be, as this language resembles that of patients with Wernicke's aphasia, which is essentially the same conclusion Kraepelin reached in 1906.
However, linguist Patricia Kilroe in her survey of 500 dreams, did not find poor meaning in dream speech but rather discovered that “In both structure and content, much of dream speech may pass for waking speech, although generally in shorter and simpler utterance forms. Even the oddities of dream speech such as neologisms and nonsense statements occur in waking discourse, either as unintentional errors or as intentional products of the creative use of language.”
While Wernicke's area and Broca's area are implicated in dream speech, verbal activity in dreams is not isolated to the brain. Though reduced in amplitude, motor impulses to facial and lingual muscles accompany dream speech and dreamed conversations. Such muscle potentials can be detected with electromyography, and to an extent, decoded and reconstructed as audio speech.
There is however a striking resemblance between an aspect of dream 51 in Kraepelin's monograph and a psychosis of Saks arising because she received for a memo a generally very good (that is not excellent) from her professor Robert Cover.Saks (2007, p.191-193).
In dream 51 the strange phrase tripap=3 can be explained by reading pap as a rebus p-a-p, that is p without p, thereby eliminating pap from tripap and leaving tri=3, a true statement, because tri is Russian for 3. Understanding the rebus as well as seeing that Kraepelin in his dream is concentrating on letters is essential here.
Equally, looking in the first name Bob at letters, a logical expression 'B or B' goes in hidden, once the middle o is interpreted as the Spanish word for 'or'. Now B is an academic mark of the second highest standard (after an A). The first name of her professor is thus linked with an academic mark and the attention for this name, then leads to the first names Elyn and Ronna of Saks, explaining the start of her psychotic episode, soon leading to her remarking that there are no no's (compare an no in Ronna) in a law book and recitingLaw= ley in Spanish and leyn means 'to recite'. See wiktionary. in Greek from Aristotle, the father of logic.For a more detailed discussion see the French Wikipedia site Langage de rêve.
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