Nightmare Archetypes

A detailed Summary of Nightmare Archetypes

For as long as people have slept they have experienced nightmares. It was a common thought in the 18th century and before that the dream anxiety attack or nightmare was caused by a demon pressing on the chest of a person during sleep. (Anch et al.) Nightmares have even been considered to be signs of black magic, evil affiliation, or possession. Nightmares mainly consist of being chased, hunted, or threatened by dark characters that we fear. They could also include variations of everyday activities.

(Hadfield) Nightmares have literally been around forever, so how do they manage to still stir our emotions and scare us? My theory is that the nightmare concept is unchanging but the content of what we find scary changes with each generation and each era. During the 18th century people feared witches and demons but most of us don't believe in such characters today thus we are not scared of them. However, today we do fear such things as ghost and homicidal maniacs. Our nightmares have managed to find our greatest fears, whatever they may be, and horrify us over and over again.

Everyone has bad dreams or nightmares but most of these bad dreams are experienced as children and they eventually go away as the individual gets older and "grow

s out of them." As children we all have bad dreams that make us wake up screaming, shaking, or even sweating. The dreams are not only upsetting to the children who experience them but also their parents who are awakened in the middle of the night by a deathly cry for help from their precious child. The adult instinct is to rationalize the nightmare and just assume that it is repressed unconscious thought; this is the way Freud explained it. Sometimes these dreams come without any explanation as to why, and sometimes we help them to come by watching a scary movie, reading a scary book, or listening to a scary story. In a short essay that accuses humanity of being "mentally ill," Stephen King quotes, "[w]hen we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are tempting the nightmare."(748) When we have nightmares, no matter what the reason, the dreams themselves are quite scary but what scares people the most is the realistic feel of the dream, and the ultimate fear is that it will come true.

Stanley Solomon describes the horror film as "a protected access to a nightmare world otherwise shunted outside of civilization by the twentieth-century forces of sophistication, science, and sociology." (794) This would explain why when children have nightmares their parents try and comfort them by telling them the difference between their f

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