ABSTRACT
The opportunities made available by experimental dialogues with sleep-talkers may provide unique advantages with respect to the study of perception, information-processing, linguistic output, and self-object relations during sleep and related states. D. R. Burrell’s case of a habitual, florid sleep-talker likewise illustrates the phenomenon of a sleeper engaged in conversation with a wakeful observer and sporadically becoming suspicious and close-mouthed during dialogues. Contemporary observations have been made on attempts to engage sleep-talkers in dialogue with wakeful observers. Experimental observations on dialogue between sleep-talkers and wakeful observers have great significance for the study of psycholinguistic functions during sleep, as well as for the study of psychic dissociation. K. Landauer states that a wakeful observer can often provoke sleep-speech by subwaking-threshold questions and comments. The discrepancy between the content of the subject’s sleep-utterance and the stimulus is striking. The sleeper may say something spontaneously and the wakeful observer tries to “draw the sleeper out”.
