Dream speech

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Dream speech (in German Traumsprache) is internal speech in which errors occur 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 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. They have found that during dream speech, Wernicke's area is functioning well, but Broca's area is not, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 on schizophrenic speech, Chaika long held the position that schizophasia was sort of an intermittent aphasia while Fromkin stated that schizophrenic speech errors could also occur in "normals," the debate has now been ended because according to Chaika (1995)

I no longer think that error in [schizophrenic] speech disorder should be necessarily equated with the aphasias which result from actual brain damage.

She also thinks that

The interpretation of meaning of such speech can be quite different according to whether it is perceived as resulting from a true deficit in language production as opposed to resulting from failed intention.

Chaika compares schizophrenic speech errors with intricate speech errors, difficult to analyze. The current Chaika position comes close to Kraepelin's position (1920), 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." (see e.g. Kilroe, 2001).

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. Essentially the same conclusion Kraepelin reached in 1906.

See also[]

• Somniloquy
• Signorelli parapraxis: Kraepelin's dream (Freud)
• Verbal language in dreams

References[]

• Engels, Huub (2006). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache 1908–1926. ISBN 978-90-6464-060-5
• 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, Heynick, Frank, & Staak, Cees v.d. (2003). Emil Kraepelin's dream speech: A psychoanalytical interpretation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 84:1281–1294.
• Engels, Huub (2009). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache: erklären und verstehen. In Dietrich von Engelhardt und Horst-Jürgen Gerigk (ed.). Karl Jaspers im Schnittpunkt von Zeitgeschichte, Psychopathologie, Literatur und Film. p. 331–43. ISBN 978-3-86809-018-5 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.
• Pincock, S. & Frary, M. (2007). Code Breaker. The History of Secret Communication. London: RH Books.

External links[]

• Kraepelin's monograph Über Sprachstörungen im Traume
• PhD thesis (2005) on Kraepelin's dream speech summary in English on pages 207–214. The Kraepelin-code, detected by sort of a cryptanalysis of numerous dream speech specimens, consists of various words associated to the proper name Kraepelin. One such code word is Greek kraipalè, meaning 'hangover.' The smallest code word reads Ka. 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 92-101
• dreaming in foreign languages