Dream speech

The term was coined by Emil Kraepelin in his 1906 monograph titled Über Sprachstörungen im Traume ("On Language Disturbances in Dreams").

Kraepelin studied dream speech because it provided him with clues to the analogous language disturbances of patients with schizophrenia.

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.

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.

In 1941 the linguist Roman Jakobson discussed Kraepelin's monograph and contributed one important example to dream speech.

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[6] is supposed to be Russian for some weeks.

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.

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.

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.

[15] In her book The Center Cannot Hold Elyn Saks gives several examples of word salad arising during psychotic episodes.

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.

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'.