Dream speech (in German Traumsprache) is internal speech in which errors occur during a dream. The term dream speech 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 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.
Kraepelin studied dream speech because it provided him with clues to the analoguous language disturbances of schizophrenic patients. Still in 1920 he stated that "dream speech in every detail corresponds to schizophrenic speech disorder."
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 confirmed one of the findings of Kraepelin.
Read more about Dream Speech: The Other Kraepelin, Chaika Vs. Fromkin, Cognitive Dream Speech Research, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words dream and/or speech:
“It is the sorrow; shall it melt? Ah, water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)