Nightmare (pronounced nahyt-mair)
(1) A terrifying dream in which the dreamer experiences feelings of helplessness, extreme anxiety, sorrow etc.
(2) A condition, thought, or experience suggestive of a nightmare.
(3) A monster or evil spirit once believed to oppress persons during sleep.
1250–1300:
From the Middle English nightmare,
from the Old English nihtmare, the
construct being night + mare
(evil spirit believed to afflict a sleeping person). It was cognate with the Scots nichtmare and nichtmeer, the Dutch nachtmerrie,
the Middle Low German nachtmār and
the German Nachtmahr. Another Old English word for it was niht-genga.
Night was from the Middle English nighte, night, nyght, niȝt & naht (night), from the Old English niht, neht, nyht, neaht & næht (night), from the Proto-Germanic nahts (night), from the primitive Indo-European nókwts (night). It was cognate with the Scots nicht & neicht (night), the West Frisian nacht (night), the Dutch nacht (night), the Low German & German Nacht (night), the Danish nat (night), the Swedish & Norwegian natt (night), the Faroese nátt (night), the Icelandic nótt (night), the Latin nox (night), the Greek νύχτα (nýchta) (night), the Russian ночь (nočʹ) (night) and the Sanskrit नक्ति (nákti) (night). Mare had a second etymological track from the sense of the female horse (mare from the Old English mīere). The sense of “nightmare, monster” is from the Old English mare from the Proto-Germanic marǭ (nightmare, incubus) and can be compared with the Dutch dialectical mare, the German dialectical Mahr from the Old Norse mara which produced also the Danish mare and the Swedish mara (incubus, nightmare). The ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European mor (feminine evil spirit). The English and European forms were akin to the Old Irish Morrígan (phantom queen), the Albanian merë (horror), the Polish zmora (nightmare), the Czech mura (nightmare, moth) and the Greek Μόρα (Móra); doublet of mara.
The
original meaning (incubus, an evil female spirit (later often called a goblin) afflicting
men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation) dates from the
thirteenth century, with the meaning shift from the incubus to the suffocating
sensation it causes emerging in the mid sixteenth century. The sense of "any bad dream" is
recorded by 1829; that of "very distressing experience" is from 1831. Nightmare and nightmarishness are nouns, nightmarish is an adjective and nightmarishly an adverb; the noun plural is nightmares. The adjective nightmaresque is non-standard but use is not infrequent.
Bad dreams
Nightmares are regarded by mental health clinicians essentially as part of the human condition. In this they differ from night terror (sometimes called sleep terror), a disorder inducing panic or feelings of morbid dread, typically during the early stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and usually brief in duration, lasting no more than 1-10 minutes. Sleep terrors appear most often to begin in childhood, decreasing (usually) with age but their frequency and severity can be affected, inter alia, by sleep deprivation, medications, stress, fever and intrinsic sleep disorders. Evidence does seem to suggest a predisposition to night terrors may be congenital and there may be an increase in prevalence among those with first-degree relatives with a similar history but the link to inheritance is dismissed by some academics as "speculative".
The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas by the Swiss-English painter John Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli; 1741-1825), Detroit Institute of Arts. It's a popular image to use to illustrate something "nightmare related".
When the political activist Max Eastman (1883–1969) visited Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in Vienna in 1926, he observed a print of Fuseli's The Nightmare, hung next to Rembrandt's (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson. Although well known for his work on dream analysis (although it’s the self-help industry more than the neo-Freudians who have filled the book-shelves), Freud never mentions Fuseli's famous painting in his writings but it has been used by others in books and papers on the subject. The speculation is Freud liked the work (clearly, sometimes, a painting is just a painting) but nightmares weren’t part of the intellectual framework he developed for psychoanalysis which suggested dreams (apparently of all types) were expressions of wish fulfilments while nightmares represented the superego’s desire to be punished; later he would refine this with the theory a traumatic nightmare was a manifestation of “repetition compulsion”. The juxtaposition of sleeping beauty and goblin provoked many reactions when first displayed and encouraged Fuseli to paint several more versions. The Nightmare has been the subject of much speculation and interpretation, including the inevitable debate between the Freudians and Jungians and was taken as a base also by political cartoonists, a bunch more nasty in earlier centuries than our more sanitized age.
The current diagnostic criteria for sleep terrors
The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5, 2013) revised the diagnostic criteria for sleep terror disorder, requiring:
(1) Recurrent periods where the individual abruptly but not completely wakes from sleep, usually occurring during the first third major period of sleep.
(2) The individual experiences intense fear with a panicky scream at the beginning and symptoms of autonomic arousal, such as increased heart rate, heavy breathing, and increased perspiration. The individual cannot be soothed or comforted during the episode.
(3) The individual is unable or almost unable to remember images of the dream (only a single visual scene for example).
(4) The episode is completely forgotten.
(5) The occurrence of the sleep terror episode causes clinically significant distress or impairment in the individual's functioning.
(6) The disturbance is not due to the effects of a substance, general medical condition or medication.
(7) Coexisting mental or medical disorders do not explain the episodes of sleep terrors.
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