Definition of Nightmare

Nightmare

A fiend or incubus formerly supposed to cause trouble in sleep.

A condition in sleep usually caused by improper eating or by digestive or nervous troubles, and characterized by a sense of extreme uneasiness or discomfort (as of weight on the chest or stomach, impossibility of motion or speech, etc.), or by frightful or oppressive dreams, from which one wakes after extreme anxiety, in a troubled state of mind; incubus.

Hence, any overwhelming, oppressive, or stupefying influence.

Related Definitions:

After, And, Anxiety, Any, As, By, Cause, Caused, Characterized, Chest, Condition, Digestive, Discomfort, Eating, Extreme, Fiend, Formerly, Frightful, From, Hence, Impossibility, Improper, In, Incubus, Influence, Mind, Motion, Nervous, Of, On, One, Oppressive, Or, Overwhelming, Sense, Sleep, Speech, State, Stomach, Stupefying, Supposed, The, To, Trouble, Troubled, Uneasiness, Weight, Which

Nightmare Quotations

I always wished for this, but it's almost turning into more of a nightmare than a dream.
Eminem

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
James A. Baldwin

Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock

I was 14 when I started modeling. At the end of that first day my mum said, If you want to do this, you're on your own because I'm not traipsing around London ever again like that. It's a nightmare.
Kate Moss

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
Charles Baudelaire

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
Gerald R. Ford

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.
Jack Henry Abbott

My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.
Barbra Streisand

I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.
David Icke

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Jack Kerouac

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.
Sammy Davis, Jr.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
Florence King

I think it'd be a real nightmare to put a record out and sell 20 million copies and then that's it.
Lenny Kravitz

I couldn't have come up with a better metaphor for my life and my internal conflict. It amazes me how quickly we can manifest our fears; not only had I created my 'I'm never satisfied, I'll drive her away' nightmare.
Kenny Loggins

People say you should read your criticism because it will make you a better person but it doesn't. It just makes you a sad bitter old showbiz nightmare.
Jo Brand

It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in. There's a horrible inescapability to it.
Alan Rickman

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands.
Rem Koolhaas

You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
Morris West

Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
Morris West

It was a nightmare having cameras in the house 10 hours a day for a month.
Kathy Griffin

These days the American dream of home ownership has turned into a nightmare for millions of families. They wake every day to the reality of a horrible decline in the value of the home that has meant so much to them.
Mortimer Zuckerman

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Philip Roth

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
Michael Caine

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.
Robert Wyatt

Now, Tim has been really, really busy, and it's been my job now to kind of deal with everything. And trying to figure out how we balance that, logistically it's a nightmare. But these little jobs make it much easier.
Susan Sarandon

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.
Paddy Ashdown

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.
Sharon Gless

I don't mind being a permanent nightmare for the United States.
Evo Morales

The abduction of a child is a tragedy. No one can fully understand or appreciate what a parent goes through at such a time, unless they have faced a similar tragedy. Every parent responds differently. Each parent copes with this nightmare in the best way he or she knows how.
John Walsh

When I used to go to Elvis's house was always a nightmare trying to get into the house because of so many fans outside the gate and he really couldn't go anywhere without sneaking in or doing something because people just wanted to be around him and to be with him.
Jackie DeShannon

More Nightmare Quotations

Nightmare Translations

nightmare in Dutch is angstdroom, nachtduivel, incubus
nightmare in French is cauchemar
nightmare in German is Alptraum {m}
nightmare in Spanish is pesadilla

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