I'd always assumed that the characters in one's dreams talk as in normal life but I recently discovered that this isn't actually so, at least not in my dreams. One needs some degree of lucidity in dreams in order to have any objective awareness of what is actually going on at that moment in time and last year it did slowly come to my notice that the "dream characters" didn't really seem to be saying anything. And I remember that on one occasion I went so far as to confront one of these characters with a direct question and awaited a response. He or she seemed to make a significant effort to speak but all that came out was mumbles, grunts, and a few distorted words in no meaningful order. What I concluded was that the brain isn't capable of giving independent speech to dream characters and that any sort of "speech" that one appears to encounter in dreams, probably including one's own utterances, is just made up of thoughts, in the same way as thoughts in the form of mental verbalizations seem to accompany most of our waking hours.
I can, of course, only speak for my own brain and I've since come across the idea that Wernicke's area in the brain may not be functioning in dreams. Damage to this part of the brain can produce the speech disorder Wernicke's aphasia.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteI read your dream blog and I think I would have come to a different conclusion. In general it's quite common to have characters speak in dreams but the question I would have asked is why have the characters got nothing to say or why are they inchoherent. This is looking at dreams, not simply as a mechanistic function of the brain but as a way of commenting our own personalty and lifestyle and actions. Maybe another point of view from another place which isn't governed by the rational world in which we live.
Hi Peter,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback. Yes, there are dream interpretations that might have something to say about it. Another posting will look at "seeing yourself in a mirror" in a dream and I have noticed interpretations of this in on the internet. I don't discount these but I largely ignore them as I see them as merely subjective speculations. Yes, there is speech in dreams but I still believe that this may be thought speech rather than auditory speech, leastways for me. And I'm only referring to relatively recent experiences of dreams; I don't remember how things were when I was much younger. All my memories of former dreams are visual; there are no auditory memories. Also, I don't have a totally mechanistic view of the brain, as you'll see in future postings.