Metaliteral dreaming: a right hemisphere dominant linguistic activity.

Many dream reports, which take the form of propositional speech, are more meaningful if understood as metaliteral speech. To achieve this understanding the speech sounds must be decoded according to different linguistic rules than govern propositional speech. The basic rules for metaliteral speech were outlined in a recent paper. Those rules came from empirical observation. This paper proposes that the right hemisphere is dominant for the linguistic activity of metaliteral speech because, in one way or another, the rules all seem to depend on the cognitive use of right hemisphere functions, or sometimes, on the absence of left hemisphere functions. The proposed theory rejects an exclusive role for the right hemisphere in metaliteral behavior. By recognizing the subordinate role of the left, the puzzles are solved of the story-like quality to dream reports and the central role of prosody in decoding metaliteral speech.