ABSTRACT
L. J. West has stated that dissociation as he defines it may occur even during organic deliria; many parallels are observable between behaviour, experience, and cognition in deliria, sleep-utterance episodes, and the other more classical dissociation syndromes. West defines psychic dissociation in terms of a disturbance of integration of cognitive components involved in information processing. Sleep-utterances express input from endogenous sources, i.e., they appear to arise spontaneously, requiring no external stimuli to initiate or sustain them. The findings of both W. Penfield and L. Roberts and G. Schaltenbrand resemble other features of sleep-utterance phenomena, particularly with regard to memory disturbance in association with an immediately prior utterance. Sleep-utterance may be viewed from a somewhat different but complementary perspective offered by the theory of microgenesis of thought, perception, and behaviour. It is possible that the probability of sleep-utterance episodes is greatest when the antagonistically based equilibrium between sleep-waking systems becomes unstable.
