Dream speech (German: Traumsprache) is internal speech that occurs during a dream.. The term was coined by Emil Kraepelin in his 1906 monograph ÃÂber 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 paraphasias), disorders of discourse (e.g. agrammatisms) and thought disorders. The most frequently 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.
Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) was a German psychiatrist who studied dream speech as an approach to understanding language disturbances seen in schizophrenia, stating in 1920 that "dream speech in every detail corresponds to schizophrenic speech disorder". Kraepelin presented 286 examples of dream speech in his monograph, the majority of which are of 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 handwritten dream texts are still available today at the Archive of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. These new dream-speech specimens were published in 1993 in Heynick (in part in English translation) and in 2006 in the original German, with numerous notes added. The second dream corpus has not been censored and dates are added to the dreams.
As Kraepelin in 1906 had been collecting dream speech for more than 20 years, he jotted down his dream speech specimens for more than 40 years, with a scientific viewpoint in mind. Kraepelin's dream speech started during a period (1882âÂÂ1884) 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.
Kraepelin had been confronted with schizophrenic speech disorder - called first Sprachverwirrtheit then schizophrene Sprachverwirrtheit and finally Schizophasie - produced by his patients. But âÂÂas Kraepelin statesâ the schizophasia can hardly be studied, because what the patient is trying to express is unknown; 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).
Kraepelin pointed out that the fundamental disturbances underlying dream speech were diminished functioning of Wernicke's area and those frontal areas in which abstract reasoning is localized. Therefore, individual ideas (Individualvorstellungen) get expressed in dreams instead of general ideas. Among these individual ideas he included proper names in their widest sense.
Kraepelin's daughter, Toni Schmidt-Kraepelin, also a psychiatrist, collected eight examples of dream speech in her 1920 work. Sigmund Freud gave a few neologism examples in his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams, and Havelock Ellis mentioned two specimens in his 1911 The World of Dreams, briefly discussing Kraepelin's theory. In 1941, the linguist Roman Jakobson discussed Kraepelin's monograph and contributed one important example to dream speech.In his dream, the Czech word zemà Âel (died) transformed into seme; according to Jakobson, this was because the liquids l and r disappeared. With this example Jakobson wanted to show, that in his deep sleep Broca's area did not function well. This would be a counter-example to Kraepelin's theory that only the Wernicke area is affected during dream speech.
Jakobson presupposes that seme is meaningless and is related to zemà Âel 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 zemà Âel to seme. Note that seme is a meaningful part of Kraepelin's dream speech specimen 49 in which par-seme-nie 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 à  appears in the name of the Czech village Pà ÂÃÂbram. It may also have influenced Jakobson, former member of the Prague linguistic circle, in his zemà Âel-dream.
For the cryptanalysis of Kraepelin's dream speech a special method has been developed, applicable to dream speech of others as well. Reconstruction of associative chains is its aim and it requires precision of linking, use of relevant context information and as short as possible chains. Associations in the chain can be synonyms, sometimes in a foreign language, and word-form-associations. Of particular importance are so-called idiosyncratic associations, peculiar to a specific individual (here the dreamer). Partial chains, built starting from both the dream-speech specimen and its meaning (already provided by the dreamer), should meet in the middle without any discrepancy.
Debating on the nature of disorganized speech in schizophrenia in the 1970s, linguist Elaine Chaika argued it to be an intermittent form of aphasia, while Victoria Fromkin stated that schizophrenic speech errors could also occur in "normals". Chaika later changed her mind:
Chaika added:
Chaika compares schizophrenic speech errors with intricate speech errors, difficult to analyze. Chaika's position comes close to Kraepelin's position, who noted that errors as in schizophasia can also occur in normals in dreams.
At first sight dream speech plays only a marginal role in dream theory. However the important connection of dream and speech is very well illustrated by the following statement of David Foulkes: "However visual dreaming may seem, it may be planned and regulated by the human speech production system."
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 awakeâÂÂall characteristics which benefit poetry but not other forms.
In other work, Barrett has studied verbatim language in college students' dreams and found similar characteristicsâÂÂintact grammar, poor meaning, rhythm and rhymeâÂÂto the literary examples. She suggested this was indicative of reduced activity in Wernicke's area but not Broca's; the language resembles that of patients with Wernicke's aphasia, which is essentially the same conclusion Kraepelin reached in 1906. Linguist Patricia Kilroe in her survey of 500 dreams, did not find poor meaning in dream speech but rather discovered that âÂÂIn 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.â 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.
In her book The Center Cannot Hold Elyn Saks gives several examples of word salad arising during psychotic episodes. But an explanation or helping intervention by her therapists seems lacking. Instead new antipsychotics are recommended each time. There is 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 Bob Cover.
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 reciting in Greek from Aristotle, the father of logic.