Nightmares Sleep Disorder

Nightmares as a sleep disorder. Information on Freudian descriptions and thoughts on nightmares and a definition of nightmares.

Nightmare - Disorders of Sleep

Chief among these are:

• (1) agonizing dread and anxiety ;
• (2) a feeling of weight at the chest, interfering with the power to breathe;
• (3) temporary paralysis. 

More elaborately, in the picturesque language of an early writer on the subject :

The modifications which nightmare assumes are infinite; but one passion is almost never absent that of utter and incomprehensible dread.  Sometimes the sufferer is buried beneath overwhelming rocks, which crush him on all sides, but still leave him with a miserable conscious ness of his situation.  Sometimes he is involved in the coils of a horrid, slimy monster, whose eyes have the phosphor escent glare of the sepulchre, and whose breath is poisonous as the marsh of Lerna.  ... Or he may have the idea of a mon strous hag squatted upon his breast mute, motionless, and malignant ; an in carnation of the Evil Spirit whose in tolerable weight crushes the breath out of his body, and whose fixed, deadly, incessant stare petrifies him with horror and makes his very existence unsufferable.  "In every instance there is a sense of oppression and helplessness; and the ex tent to which these are carried varies according to the violence of the paroxysm.  The individual never feels himself a free agent ; on the contrary, he is spell-bound by some enchantment, and remains an unresisting victim for malice to work its will upon.  He can neither breathe, nor walk, nor run, with his wonted facility.  If pursued by any imminent danger, he can hardly drag one limb after another; if engaged in combat, his blows are utterly ineffective ; if involved in the fangs of any animal, or in the grasp of an enemy, ex trication is impossible.  He struggles, he pants, he toils, but it is all in vain ; his muscles are rebels to the will, and refuse to obey its calls.  In no case is there a sense of complete freedom ; the benumbing stupor never departs from him ; and his whole being is locked up in one mighty spasm.

"Sometimes he is forcing himself through an aperture too small for the reception of his body, and is there arrested and tortured by the pangs of suffocation produced by the pressure to which he is exposed ; or she loses his way in a narrow labyrinth, and gets involved in its contracted and inextricable mazes ; or he is entombed alive in a sepulchre, beside the mouldering dead.  There is, in most cases, an intense reality in all that he sees, or hears, or feels.  The aspects of the hideous phantoms which harass his imagination are bold and defined ; the sounds which greet his ear appallingly distinct ; and when any dimness or con fusion of imagery does prevail, it is of the most fearful kind, leaving nothing but dreary and miserable impressions behind it." 

reference: Robert Macnish's "The Philosophy of Sleep," pp.  123-145.

The inability to move may persist after the awakening, and we then have what may be called a waking nightmare.  There may even be no remembrance of the morbid dream, when the nightmare will naturally seem to the sufferer to be wholly an affair of the waking consciousness.  This is the experience of a friend of mine, a well-known American poet and essayist.  He even in isists that at times he knows he has not been asleep.  More commonly, though the precedent dream be forgotten, there is awareness of the fact that one has been sleeping, and the waking nightmare takes the course described in Waller's early "Treatise on the Incubus":

"The uneasiness of the patient in his dream rapidly increases, till it ends in a kind of consciousness that he is in bed and asleep ; but he feels to be oppressed with some weight which confines him upon his back, and prevents his breathing, which is now become extremely laborious, so that the lungs cannot be fully inflated by any effort he can make.  The sensation is now the most painful that can be conceived ; the person becomes every instant more awake and conscious of his situation ; he makes violent efforts to move his limbs, especially his arms, with a view of throwing off the incumbent weight, but not a muscle will obey the impulse of the will; he groans aloud, if he has strength to do it, while every effort he makes seems to ex haust the little remaining vigor.  ... If left to himself, he lies in this state generally about a minute or two, when he recovers all at once the power of volition."

It is not surprising that in pre-scientific days the nightmare was popularly attrib uted to demons, evil spirits, and witches ; and that it gave rise to the vampire super stition, which lingers to-day in some parts of the world.  Its first medical treatment was by shaving the head, bleeding, and the administration of wild carrot, parsley, and peony seeds.  Later, when its connection with gastric disturbances was clearly rec ognized, treatment by means of dieting came into vogue.  This still is the preva lent method of treatment, despite the I'm portant circumstance that it is far from insuring the desired relief.  Moreover, as was pointed out a few years ago by Doctor Ernest Jones :

"Any skeptical inquiry immediately reveals two facts.  First, that all the alleged causes of nightmare often occur, both alone and in combination, in persons who never show any symptoms of nightmare ; a patient whose stomach is half destroyed by cancer may commit all sorts of dietary indiscretions, including even indulgence in cucumber the article of food that is most looked askance at in relation to nightmare he may even sleep on his back, and still will defy medical orthodoxy in not suffering from any trace of nightmare.  Secondly, that a habitual sufferer from nightmare may be scrupulously rigorous in regard to both the quality and quantity of all that he eats, may in fact develop a maladie de scrupule in this direction; that he may martyr himself with elaborate precautions to avoid these and other 'causes' of the malady, and by means of a contrivance of spikes insure against ever lying let alone sleeping on his back, but despite all
his endeavors he will have to endure as many and as severe attacks as before." 

Quite evidently, one need not fear attacks of nightmare unless one has a special predisposition to it.  On the other hand, in order fully to cure nightmare, the nature of this predisposition must be ascertained, and appropriate measures taken to offset it.  Within the past few years, or since psy chology became linked with medicine, marked progress in this direction has been made.  And it has chiefly been made by recognizing that since nightmare is essen tially a form of dreaming, it must be, like all dreams, closely linked to, and deter mined by, subconscious mental states of strong emotional coloring.

American Journal of Insanity, vol.  LXVI, p. 405.  122

In that event, taking into account the characteristic symptoms of dread and help lessness, it would seem logically to follow that nightmare is in the last analysis the product of some subconscious state of exceptional intensity, operating on an organ ism perhaps unduly impressionable by birth.  Such, indeed, is the view now held by the medical psychologists who have studied the nightmare problem.  But they are by no means in agreement as to the exact nature of the subconscious state involved.  Some the Freudian psychologists would restrict it to latent thoughts and wishes connected with the sexual sphere.  These, they say, may be thoughts and wishes of which the individual has never been entirely conscious; but their pres ence in the recesses of his mind can be detected by careful psychological analysis, and to them his nightmare is wholly due.  "The malady known as nightmare," is the way Doctor Ernest Jones puts it, "is always an expression of intense mental conflict centering about some form of 're pressed' sexual desire." 

Nightmares and Freudian Theory 

In proof whereof the Freudians cite numerous cases of night mare in which the detection and elimination of these subconscious sexual ideas have been followed by lasting cures.

It may, however, be reasonably ques tioned whether Freud and his pupils aro justified in thus limiting the causation of nightmare to a single species of subcon scious ideas.  The observations of other medical psychologists would indicate that it may take its rise from any emotional state of a profoundly disquieting character.  Certainly this has been demonstrated in the case of one special variety of night mare the pavor nocturnus, or "night terrors" so common in early childhood, and so succinctly described by one physi cian in these words :

"The child starts up out of an apparently sound sleep, crying with seeming alarm, calling for his mother, and staring wildly around, with every possible expression of terror.  Sometimes he jumps from his couch, and runs headlong into a corner, or seeks concealment under the bed, as if escaping from some frightful object.  The eyes are open, tears flow, perspiration covers the skin, there is the greatest excitement, and the little one, clinging convulsively to his parent, will not be quieted.  Only after a number of minutes does the child seem to recover the power of recognizing his friends.  Presently, however, he lies down, and falls immediately asleep, waking in the morning without the slightest remem brance of the unpleasant event."

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