nightmare

noun

1. A very unpleasant or frightening dream.

   “I had a nightmare that I tried to run but could neither move nor breathe.”

   “July 18 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Riseshttp://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/ With his crude potato-sack mask and fear-inducing toxins, The Scarecrow, a “psychopharmacologist” at an insane asylum, acts as a conjurer of nightmares, capable of turning his patients’ most terrifying anxieties against them.”

2. (figuratively)Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.

   “Cleaning up after identity theft can be a nightmare of phone calls and letters.”

   “If Euston is not typically English, St. Pancras is. Its façade is a nightmare of improbable Gothic. It is fairly plastered with the aesthetic ideals of 1868, and the only beautiful thing about it is Barlow's roof. It is haunted by the stuffier kind of ghost. Yet there is something about the ordered whole of St. Pancras that would make demolition a terrible pity.”

   “The Red Holocaust is best interpreted in this light as the bitter fruit of an^([sic]) utopian gambit that was socially misengineered into a dystopic nightmare by despots in humanitarian disguise.”

3. (archaic)A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.

   “It haunted me, however, more than once, like a night-mare.”

   “They plague and annoy lazy men-servants and untidy maids with frightful dreams; oppress them as the nightmare; bite them as fleas; and scratch and tear them like cats and dogs; and often in the night frighten, in the shape of owls, thieves and lovers, or, like Will-o-the-wisps, lead them astray into bogs and marshes, and perhaps up to those who are in pursuit of them.”

   “I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!”

4. (historical)A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis.

   “The Night-mare generally ſeizes people ſleeping on their backs, and often begins with frightful dreams, which are ſoon ſucceeded by a difficult reſpiration, a violent oppreſſion on the breaſt, and a total privation of voluntary motion.”

   “Had been afflicted in the night with that strange complaint called the nightmare.”

verb

1. (intransitive)To experience a nightmare.

   “Brother Fary of Omaha was nightmaring the rest of the night.”

   “It’s been 21,900 hours, 912 days, 130 Saturday nights, 30 months, 3 years since October 16, 1988 when I was stunned awake, straddled by a man I did not know. First I think I’m nightmaring.”

   “Every night, Liesel would nightmare.”

   “He must be imagining that behind the rain of leaves was a dark-haired man sitting in his chair, smiling away. He must be so fed up with himself that he was nightmaring while awake.”

2. (transitive)To imagine (someone or something) as in a nightmare.

   “She was the last person I’d expected to see, although I had not expected to see anyone at all. For a moment I thought it was a nightmare, and that I was nightmaring the whole thing.”

   “Stars have no need of intimidation, which makes them mightier than all the godheads nightmared by mere humanity.”

   “I hurried through the arch, was dipped into shadow, and was glad to have my screaming eyes rinsed clean of this vision of a scrabbling, gibbering hell, worse than any nightmared by Bosch or Goya.”

3. (transitive)To trouble (someone or something), as by a nightmare.

   “THe day is broke! Melpomene, be gone; / Hag of my Fancy, let me now alone: / Night-mare my ſoul no more; Go take thy flight / Where Traytors Ghoſts keep an eternal night; […]”

   “Thou things imponderable dost price and weigh / By scales untrue ’gainst the gewgaws and gauds / O’ the World; thy ledger ’neath thy head dost lay / For pillow, nightmared with dreams of thy hoards.”

   “And in my sleep a vision nightmared me:— / The steeds I tended, and at Rhesus’ side / Drave in the car, I saw as in a dream / Mounted of wolves that rode upon their backs; / And with their tails these lashed the horses’ flanks, / Scourging them on.”

   “[…] I slept fitfully—it was hot, the very pillows seemed to sweat—and when I did fall off in sleep, I tossed and tossed, disturbed, I think, by the call of old-new affinities, nightmared by the tall Sudanese who paced my dreams, veiled in a yashmak, stuttering.”

   “The thing beckoned to me, grinning horrible out of its gape-agog slit-face, and it whispered to me, about things that I . . . well, never you mind that part. / “It was that powder, I tell you, as was nightmaring me. So I took the jar out behind-house and I dropped it down the convenience. Yes, the earth-closet. I went back to bed, but I still couldn’t kip much.”