ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the microdissociative episodes that comprise by far the most frequent, and the most typical sleep-utterances. Macrodissociative sleep-utterance episodes are uncommon events characterized by extensive, elaborate, florid speech lasting one or more minutes. To adequately characterize sleep-utterance episodes, one must take into consideration the subject’s reported experience, behaviour, electrographic concomitants, and durations of each. Electrographic concomitants of sleep-utterance episodes possess great variability, both within and across subjects. D. Sewitch studied sleep-utterance incidence in relation to time of night in two sets of self-professed, chronic sleep-talking subjects, all of whom slept without interruption in their usual home-like setting with no laboratory equipment except tape-recording devices. General agreement prevails among reports providing data on a relatively large heterogeneous pool of subjects that most sleep-talking occurs in association with non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. NREM utterance episodes are characterized by persistence of intermittent muscle tension and/or amplifier blocking, again with extreme variability.
