Dream speech (in German ''Traumsprache'') is internal speech in which errors occur during a dream. The term was coined by
Emil Kraepelin
Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin (; ; 15 February 1856 – 7 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist.
H. J. Eysenck's ''Encyclopedia of Psychology'' identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychi ...
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
paraphasia Paraphasia is a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia, and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak. Paraphasic errors are most common in patients with fluent for ...
s), disorders of discourse (e.g.
agrammatism
Agrammatism is a characteristic of non-fluent aphasia. Individuals with agrammatism present with speech that is characterized by containing mainly content words, with a lack of function words. For example, when asked to describe a picture of ch ...
s) and
thought disorder
A thought disorder (TD) is any disturbance in cognition that adversely affects language and thought content, and thereby communication. A variety of thought disorders were said to be characteristic of people with schizophrenia. A content-thought ...
s. The most frequent occurring form of dream speech is a
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
.
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. They have found that during dream speech,
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area (; ), also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to B ...
is not functioning well, but
Broca's area
Broca's area, or the Broca area (, also , ), is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant Cerebral hemisphere, hemisphere, usually the left, of the Human brain, brain with functions linked to speech production.
Language processing in the brai ...
is, leading to proper grammar but little meaning.
Kraepelin's research
Kraepelin studied dream speech because it provided him with clues to the analogous language disturbances of patients with
schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...
. Still in 1920 he stated that "dream speech in every detail corresponds to schizophrenic speech disorder."
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
The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie) is a scientific institute based in the city of Munich in Germany specializing in psychiatry. Currently directed by Elisabeth Binder and Alon Chen, it is one of ...
in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...
. 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. 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 (1882–1884) of personal crisis and depression. In 1882 Kraepelin was fired after working only a few weeks at the
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
psychiatric clinic and two months later his father died.
Schizophrenic speech disorder
Kraepelin had been confronted with schizophrenic speech disorder - called first ''Sprachverwirrtheit'' then ''schizophrene Sprachverwirrtheit'' and finally
Schizophasie - produced by his patients. But —as Kraepelin states— the schizophasia can hardly be studied, because what the patient is trying to express is unknown.
However using the classical dream-
psychosis
Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior ...
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
psychanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might ...
, 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).
Fundamental disturbances
Kraepelin pointed out two fundamental disturbances underlying dream speech: a diminished functioning of the
Wernicke area
Wernicke's area (; ), also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to B ...
, and a diminished functioning of 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
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', '' Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
in their widest sense.
Chaika vs. Fromkin
As Kraepelin likened dream speech to schizophasia, what is the current view on the last disorder? While in the famous debate during the '70s between the linguists Elaine Chaika and
Victoria Fromkin
Victoria Alexandra Fromkin (; May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a l ...
on schizophrenic speech, Chaika long held the position that schizophasia was sort of an intermittent
aphasia
Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in th ...
while Fromkin stated that schizophrenic speech errors could also occur in "normals," the debate has now been ended because according to Chaika
She also thinks that
Chaika compares schizophrenic speech errors with intricate speech errors, difficult to analyze. The current Chaika position comes close to Kraepelin's position, who noted that errors as in schizophasia can also occur in normals in dreams.
Cognitive dream speech research
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."
[David Foulkes' work marks a turning point in dream theory: from the language of dreams to a linguistic view on dreams. (see e.g. Kilroe, 2001)]
Recent research has confirmed one of Kraepelin's fundamental disturbances. In the book
The Committee of Sleep
''The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—and How You Can Too'' is a book by Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett is an American author and psychologist known for her research on dream ...
, Harvard psychologist
Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett is an American author and psychologist known for her research on dreams, hypnosis and imagery, and has written on evolutionary psychology. Barrett is a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and a past president of the Internationa ...
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. Essentially the same conclusion Kraepelin reached in 1906.
See also
*
Spanish wikipedia site on dream speech with a discussion of the schizophrenia of
John Forbes Nash
John Forbes Nash Jr. (June 13, 1928 – May 23, 2015) was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow ga ...
, known by the book and the film ''
A Beautiful Mind''.
*
French wikipedia site on dream speech with a discussion of the schizophrenia of
Elyn Saks
Elyn R. Saks is associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law, and a MacArthur Foundation Fel ...
.
*
Dutch wikipedia site on Emil Kraepelin with a discussion of his schizophrenia-cryptogram (dream speech, May 1908).
*
Kraepelin on Freud's Signorelli parapraxis
*
Somniloquy
Somniloquy, commonly referred to as sleep-talking, is a parasomnia in which one speaks aloud while asleep. It can range from simple mumbling sounds to loud shouts or long, frequently inarticulate, speeches. It can occur many times during a sleep c ...
, a
parasomnia
Parasomnias are a category of sleep disorders that involve abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, and dreams that occur while falling asleep, sleeping, between sleep stages, or during arousal from sleep. Parasomnias are dissociate ...
in which a person physically speaks while asleep
*
Verbal language in dreams
Verbal may refer to:
People
*Verbal (rapper) (born 1975), Japanese rapper and music producer
* Verbal Kent (born 1978), alternative hip hop artist from Chicago
* Verbal Jint (born 1980), South Korean musician, rapper and record producer Languag ...
Notes
References
Basic publications
* Engels, Huub (2006). ''Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache 1908–1926.''
* Heynick, F. (1993). ''Language and its disturbances in dreams: the pioneering work of Freud and Kraepelin updated.'' New York: Wiley.
* Kraepelin, E. (1906). ''Über Sprachstörungen im Traume''. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Further reading
* Chaika, E. (1995). On analysing schizophrenic speech: what model should we use? In A. Sims (ed.) ''Speech and Language Disorder in Psychiatry''.pp. 47–56. London: Gaskell
* Engels, Huub (2009). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache: erklären und verstehen. In Dietrich von Engelhardt und Horst-Jürgen Gerigk (ed.). ''
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers (, ; 23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jasper ...
im Schnittpunkt von Zeitgeschichte, Psychopathologie, Literatur und Film''. p. 331–43. Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag.
* Kilroe, Patricia A. (2001). Verbal Aspects of Dreaming: A Preliminary Classification. ''Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams''. Vol 11(3) 105–113, Sep 2001.
* Kraepelin, E. (1920). ''Die Erscheinungsformen des Irreseins''.
External links
Kraepelin's monograph ''Über Sprachstörungen im Traume''PhD thesis (2005) on Kraepelin's dream speechsummary in English on pages 207–214. The Kraepelin-
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
, detected by sort of a
cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
of numerous dream speech specimens, consists of various words associated to the
proper name
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', '' Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
Kraepelin. One such code word is Greek ''kraipalè'', meaning 'hangover.' The smallest code word reads
''Ka'', an ancient-Egyptian word for ''life force''. The code words drive the associations leading form the intended to the disturbed utterances in dreams. (ch. 6 lists several code words).
article on Kraepelin's dream speech in German on pages 92-101dreaming in foreign languages
{{Dreaming
Speech
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses Phonetics, phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if ...
Language disorders
nl:Kraepelin's droomtaal