ABSTRACT
Although the predominant medium for the objectification of experiences in dream states is a pictorial-realistic one (percept- and image-like), verbal utterances or phonic-like forms do occur, with varying frequency, in the dreams of many persons. For various reasons—for example, their greater refractoriness to recall in a waking state—such linguistic-like forms have rarely been discussed in the psychological literature; even less often has “speech in dreams” been subjected to a comprehensive description, analysis, and classification. Freud (70), it is true, did deal to some extent with “dream speech”; his major focus, however, was on the psychodynamic factors and unconscious motives presumably underlying distortions and aberrations. Perhaps the only one to provide a considerable body of examples of “dream‘speech”—examples accumulated over a period of 20 years—was E. Kraepelin; it is, therefore, on the protocols presented in his monograph (138) that we chiefly, although not exclusively, rely in discussing the ways in which words and sentences are handled in dreams. In our brief discussion, we shall consider “speech in dreams” in terms of our diagram of the four generic components of symbol-situations (Chapter 3).
