Dream speech
Encyclopedia
In 1906 the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin
published a monograph titled Über Sprachstörungen im Traume ("On Language Disturbances in Dreams"). In his psychiatry textbook Kraepelin used the shortcut Traumsprache to denote language disturbances occurring in dreams. Traumsprache is probably best translated as dream speech (because the literal translation of dream language would easily 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 paraphasia
s), disorders of discourse (e.g. agrammatism
s) and thought disorder
s. 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.
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.
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.
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).
Kraepelin's multi-lingual dreams have been compared to a Rosetta Stone
. Deciphering of the Rosetta Stone led to the deciphering of other hieroglyphic texts. Similarly, Kraepelin's work has been seen by some as capable of aiding in the deciphering of dream speech in others (Engels, 2009).
This is, as Kraepelin informs us, an order to the grave digger, named Vi, to bring the coffin for the body during a funeral. Kraepelin notes, that the neologism tafalk is a shortcut for German Katafalk (catafalque). Obviously Vi—in the utterance Vi, tafalk—replaces the syllable Ka.
The associative link between Ka and Vi is easy to reconstruct (Engels et al., 2003). Ka
in ancient-Egyptian
means "life force" (in Latin vis vitae). So the chain reads: Ka—vis vitae—Vi. The grave digger Vi in the dream is in fact a so-called Ka-servant, who assisted in funerals in ancient Egypt
.
Nsens derives from the English word "nonsense", once the letters of the word "one" have been deleted. Literally nsens is nonsense - one. This in its turn links to "crap a ace" ("crap" meaning "nonsense", Greek prefix a meaning "without" and "ace" meaning "one" in dice games). "Crap a ace" is derived from a metathesis
of "carapace", a typical Kraepelin-word for German Schild in Firmenschild. In short four association steps link Schild to nsens:
Schild= (1) carapace - (2) crap a ace= (3) nonsense without one - (4) nsens.
The chain shows an alternation of conceptual associations (e.g. synonyms) and word form associations (character and sound associations).
(1) and (3) are conceptual associations, (2) and (4) are word form associations.
Kraepelin himself — ignorant of the code governing his dream speech — termed nsens an example of "syllable combinations jumbled in a completely arbitrary way." He thinks nsens is Russian. Kraepelin's false assertion, according to the authors, originates from the associative network in his dreaming brain during the production of nsens. It is Russian krapkea, meaning "firm" and so an association to the first part of Firmenschild, that provokes the transformation of "carapace" to "crap a ace". Krapkea as well as "crap" are Kraepelin-words.
In terms of cryptography
(1) and (3) are code
-type associations, emphasizing meaning, whereas (2) and (4) are cipher
-type associations, emphasizing characters (cf. Pincock & Fary, 2007, p. 13).
, which states that during a cocktail party we tune in on our discussion partner, neglecting background noise. However, we notice when someone in the background pronounces our name. This cocktail party effect has been replicated in an experimental set up using the dichotic listening
technique. It has been shown that only our proper name tends to break through the attentional barrier, i.e. breaks through amidst other, neglected, sounds offered to the unattended ear. Thus it follows that our proper name is detected even under conditions of low attention. What happens within outer speech during a cocktail-party, likewise occurs within inner speech in dreams. Code words - linked in sound to our proper name - will be detected in the set of potential associations during thinking. The ongoing thinking process will then deviate because code words will act as priming
-words, influencing the direction in which associations will go (Engels, 2005, p.187).
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)
She also thinks that
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.
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 foms.
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.
Emil Kraepelin
Emil Kraepelin was a German psychiatrist. H.J. Eysenck's Encyclopedia of Psychology identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, as well as of psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics. Kraepelin believed the chief origin of psychiatric disease to be biological and genetic...
published a monograph titled Über Sprachstörungen im Traume ("On Language Disturbances in Dreams"). In his psychiatry textbook Kraepelin used the shortcut Traumsprache to denote language disturbances occurring in dreams. Traumsprache is probably best translated as dream speech (because the literal translation of dream language would easily 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 paraphasia
Paraphasia
Paraphasia is a feature of aphasia in which one loses the ability of speaking correctly, substitutes one word for another, and changes words and sentences in an inappropriate way. It often develops after a stroke or brain injury. The patient's speech is fluent but is error-prone, e.g...
s), disorders of discourse (e.g. agrammatism
Agrammatism
Agrammatism is a form of expressive aphasia that refers to the inability to speak in a grammatically correct fashion. People with agrammatism may have telegraphic speech, a unique speech pattern with simplified formation of sentences , akin to that found in telegraph messages...
s) and thought disorder
Thought disorder
In psychiatry, thought disorder or formal thought disorder is a term used to describe incomprehensible language, either speech or writing, that is presumed to reflect thinking. There are different types...
s. 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.
The other Kraepelin
Dream speech opens up a new perspective on the psychiatrist Kraepelin, usually seen as the spiritual father of the DSMDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders...
system of classification of psychiatric diseases and of biological psychiatry
Biological psychiatry
Biological psychiatry, or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as neuroscience, psychopharmacology, biochemistry, genetics and...
. However Kraepelin, one of the first disciples of Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology"...
, 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 PsychiatryMax Planck Institute of Psychiatry
The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry is a psychiatric institute in Munich, Germany. It is a part of the Max Planck Society.-History:The Institute was founded as Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie by King Ludwig III of Bavaria in Munich on February 13, 1917. The main force behind the...
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
. 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
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
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
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
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.Kraepelin's multi-lingual dreams have been compared to a Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...
. Deciphering of the Rosetta Stone led to the deciphering of other hieroglyphic texts. Similarly, Kraepelin's work has been seen by some as capable of aiding in the deciphering of dream speech in others (Engels, 2009).
Two examples
Kraepelin's dream speech specimens range from rather simple to extremely intricate. Two examples - one from the second corpus and one from the first - illustrate this.Vi, tafalk!
On August 13, 1923 Kraepelin jotted down the following example of dream speech:This is, as Kraepelin informs us, an order to the grave digger, named Vi, to bring the coffin for the body during a funeral. Kraepelin notes, that the neologism tafalk is a shortcut for German Katafalk (catafalque). Obviously Vi—in the utterance Vi, tafalk—replaces the syllable Ka.
The associative link between Ka and Vi is easy to reconstruct (Engels et al., 2003). Ka
Egyptian soul
The ancient Egyptians believed that a human soul was made up of five parts: the Ren, the Ba, the Ka, the Sheut, and the Ib. In addition to these components of the soul there was the human body...
in ancient-Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
means "life force" (in Latin vis vitae). So the chain reads: Ka—vis vitae—Vi. The grave digger Vi in the dream is in fact a so-called Ka-servant, who assisted in funerals in ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
.
nsens
While Vi, tafalk! is quite easy to analyze, in the same article (p. 1290) the authors demonstrate how the associative paths leading to the complex neologism nsens (in dream specimen no. 107 of Kraepelin's first corpus) can be reconstructed from its origin Firmenschild (= "company sign").Nsens derives from the English word "nonsense", once the letters of the word "one" have been deleted. Literally nsens is nonsense - one. This in its turn links to "crap a ace" ("crap" meaning "nonsense", Greek prefix a meaning "without" and "ace" meaning "one" in dice games). "Crap a ace" is derived from a metathesis
Metathesis (linguistics)
Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...
of "carapace", a typical Kraepelin-word for German Schild in Firmenschild. In short four association steps link Schild to nsens:
Schild= (1) carapace - (2) crap a ace= (3) nonsense without one - (4) nsens.
The chain shows an alternation of conceptual associations (e.g. synonyms) and word form associations (character and sound associations).
(1) and (3) are conceptual associations, (2) and (4) are word form associations.
Kraepelin himself — ignorant of the code governing his dream speech — termed nsens an example of "syllable combinations jumbled in a completely arbitrary way." He thinks nsens is Russian. Kraepelin's false assertion, according to the authors, originates from the associative network in his dreaming brain during the production of nsens. It is Russian krapkea, meaning "firm" and so an association to the first part of Firmenschild, that provokes the transformation of "carapace" to "crap a ace". Krapkea as well as "crap" are Kraepelin-words.
In terms of cryptography
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
(1) and (3) are code
Code
A code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....
-type associations, emphasizing meaning, whereas (2) and (4) are cipher
Cipher
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...
-type associations, emphasizing characters (cf. Pincock & Fary, 2007, p. 13).
The Kraepelin code
Words like 'carapace', 'krapkea', and 'crap' constitute the 'Kraepelin' code, a set of words that sound like parts of the proper name Kraepelin and influence/direct associational processes. The key role of the proper name can be explained by referring to the so-called cocktail party effectCocktail party effect
The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations. The effect enables most people to talk in a noisy place...
, which states that during a cocktail party we tune in on our discussion partner, neglecting background noise. However, we notice when someone in the background pronounces our name. This cocktail party effect has been replicated in an experimental set up using the dichotic listening
Dichotic listening
In cognitive psychology, dichotic listening is a procedure commonly used to investigate selective attention in the auditory system. In dichotic listening, two different auditory stimuli are presented to the participant simultaneously, one to each ear, normally using a set of headphones...
technique. It has been shown that only our proper name tends to break through the attentional barrier, i.e. breaks through amidst other, neglected, sounds offered to the unattended ear. Thus it follows that our proper name is detected even under conditions of low attention. What happens within outer speech during a cocktail-party, likewise occurs within inner speech in dreams. Code words - linked in sound to our proper name - will be detected in the set of potential associations during thinking. The ongoing thinking process will then deviate because code words will act as priming
Priming
Priming may refer to:* Priming , a process in which the processing of a target stimulus is aided or altered by the presentation of a previously presented stimulus....
-words, influencing the direction in which associations will go (Engels, 2005, p.187).
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 FromkinVictoria Fromkin
Victoria Fromkin was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.- Biography :Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria...
on schizophrenic speech, Chaika long held the position that schizophasia was sort of an intermittent aphasia
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
while Fromkin stated that schizophrenic speech errors could also occur in "normals," the debate has now been ended because according to Chaika (1995)
She also thinks that
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
Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. is an author and psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School. She is known for her research on dreams, hypnosis, and imagery and has written on evolutionary psychology. Barrett is a Past President of The International Association for the Study of Dreams and of the...
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 foms.
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
- Kraepelin's dream about Freud's Signorelli parapraxis
- cocktail party effectCocktail party effectThe cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations. The effect enables most people to talk in a noisy place...
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 JaspersKarl JaspersKarl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
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
- http://webdoc.ubn.ru.nl/mono/e/engels_h/gesttaind.pdf PhD thesis of Huub Engels (2005) on Kraepelin's dream speech, summary in English on pages 207–214. The Kraepelin-codeCodeA code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....
, detected by sort of a cryptanalysisCryptanalysisCryptanalysis is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information that is normally required to do so. Typically, this involves knowing how the system works and finding a secret key...
of numerous dream speech specimens, consists of various words associated to the proper nameProper name"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
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