Nightmares — between psychoanalysis and modern neurology

Nightmares are constantly present in our lives and literature for various purposes. Over time, they have been considered premonitions, divine messages or rationalizations of extreme situations, dreamy fulfillments of desires, or repeated attempts to succeed in a current conflict. In times of revolt, dreams can offer radical alternatives, giving artists a way to tell dangerous truths. To bring light into this, let’s take a close look at what psychoanalysis and neurology have to say.

The nightmare can be characterized as a frightening or disturbing dream, which has the potential to arouse in the subject feelings such as fear, sadness, despair, disgust, or a combination of them. Nightmares usually occur during REM sleep and contain visual images, accompanied by a certain degree of narrative structure, sometimes representing elaborate stories, and sometimes short clear or even illogical sequences. The dreamer tends to wake up suddenly from a nightmare and immediately enters the alert, conscious state, being almost ready to act on surroundings if the danger were to be really present.

The distinction between nightmares and bad dreams is made by the ability of the nightmare to wake the sleeper, at the moment of maximum intensity. Also known as anxiety dreams, nightmares attracted the interest of Sigmund Freud, who first…