ABSTRACT
Somniloquy is the utterance of speech or other psychologically meaningful sound inassociation with sleep without subjective simultaneous, critical awareness of the event in its real environmental context, or how it might appear to a wakeful observer. Sleep-utterances include nonlinguistic vocalizations that often seem devoid of psychological significance, such as isolated monosyllabic grunts, brief moans, groans, and sighs frequently occasioned by or associated with a change in body position. The defining feature of lack of simultaneity between critical awareness and sleep-speech episode was included to cover the few occurrences of chiefly rapid eye movement-sleep-associated somniloquy in which subjects, in the course of vocally responding to people or events in a dream, awakened themselves and stated their hunch that they might have been talking in their sleep. Sleep-speech is used as a noun to refer to the product of sleep-speech as a process; sleep-utterance and sleep-vocalization are synonymous as the most inclusive set and may indicate process or product of the process.
