Dream speech

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.

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 not functioning well, but Broca's area 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. 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 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).

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.

Others on dream speech
Kraepelin's daughter Toni, psychiatrist herself, collected eight examples of dream speech, one of them noted during the second World War, shortly after the death in Holland of the German emperor Wilhelm II. Freud gave a few examples of dream speech, mostly neologisms, in the Interpretation of Dreams. In 1911 Havelock Ellis mentions two specimens of dream speech in The World of Dreams. He also discusses in short 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 zemřel (died) transformed into seme: according to Jakobson, because the liquidae l et 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 directly 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 indirectly zemřel 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 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.

A special method
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 langauge, and word-form-associations. Of particular importance are so-called idiosyncratic associations, peculiar to a specific individual (here the dreamer). Partial chains, build starting from both the dream speech specimen and its meaning (provided already by the dreamer), should meet in between without any discrepancy.

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 "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, 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."

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.

Application: dream speech and Elyn Saks
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 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 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.

Basic publications

 * Engels, Huub (2006). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache 1908–1926. Wageningen: Ponsen & Looijen. 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.