What does it mean to dream about having A Nightmare?
Dreaming of having a nightmare, or waking from one within a dream, often reflects fear that has built up and is pressing to be felt.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
Freud held that even distressing dreams serve a wish, though the fear may be the disguise that lets a forbidden feeling through. The nightmare can mark a wish too charged to appear in comfort. He would ask what dread the scene is shaped around.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung might see the nightmare as the psyche forcing attention to something neglected or feared. The intensity can mark how urgently a part of the self wants acknowledging. He would ask what the fear is trying to make you face.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Threat simulation reads nightmares as the sleeping mind running its alarm response, rehearsing danger in vivid form. They often spike during stress, fear, or unresolved threat in waking life. The continuity is usually with a real source of distress.
Threat-simulation theory (our summary).Mythological
Many cultures pictured the nightmare as a visiting spirit or a weight pressing on the sleeper, and devised charms to ward it off. Such beliefs gave shape to a terror that felt like more than mere dreaming. The dream may echo that old sense of being beset in the dark.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).For writers
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out.
In literature
Shakespeare gives Richard III a night of accusing ghosts before Bosworth and lets the dream do the moral accounting the character will not do awake. Coleridge's Pains of Sleep is the more honest document, describing recurring nightmare from the inside without shaping it into a lesson, which is much rarer and much harder.
Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1593); Coleridge, The Pains of Sleep (1816). Both public domain.What it does in a story
A nightmare lets a story show what a character cannot admit, with no obligation to be coherent. That licence is also the trap: because a dream can contain anything, it is the easiest place in a manuscript to write something that means nothing.
Genre conventions
Horror uses it for the false scare and the wake-up, which readers now expect and discount. Literary fiction uses recurrence, since the same dream returning is more troubling than any single one. Historical fiction uses the prophetic dream, which needs a world that believes in them.
How to subvert it
Write a nightmare that is entirely undramatic, in which nothing happens that would frighten anyone else, and let the character be badly shaken by it anyway. Fear that cannot be justified to a listener is the most recognisable kind and the least written.
Try this
Write a character trying to explain a nightmare at breakfast and failing to make it sound like anything. Let them give up mid-sentence.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing.
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.