Dream speech - Traumsprache- speech in which errors occur during a dream

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 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.

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.

Dream speech opens up a new perspective on the psychiatrist Kraepelin, usually seen as the spiritual father of the DSM system of classification of psychiatric diseases and of biological psychiatry. However Kraepelin, one of the first disciples of Wilhelm Wundt, took a lifelong interest in psychology and even edited a journal Psychologische Arbeiten. As one of the booklets of this journal a 104-pages article on dream speech appeared early in 1906, before the 105-pages monograph was published end 1906.

Dreaming for psychiatry's sake

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 censured 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

Already in the early years of his career 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— we can hardly study the schizophasia, because we do not know what the patient is trying to express.

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.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.