ABSTRACT
A. J. Ayer, in the course of refuting Malcolm’s arguments, cites the possibility of sleep-talking incidents as fulfilling an outward criterion of verification. It would be fascinating to attempt to engage a sleep-talker in a specific dialogue and a test for comparative recall in subsequent wakefulness and sleep-talking states. The onset of sleep, which seems to be the onset of non-rapid eye movement sleep in most humans, entails the cessation of the processes. Like the field of memory research, the burgeoning area of psycholinguistics has been developed largely on the basis of the study of linguistic behaviour of normal subjects during wakefulness, and those with functional psychoses or organic brain pathology. According to Allan Rechtschaffen, the belief that a sleep mentation report is a valid indicator of sleep experience is based on faith in the orderliness of verbal communication and orderliness in relationships between reports and experience.
