Nightmare

/ˈnaɪt.mɛə/ · noun

Meaning

A very unpleasant or frightening dream..

Definitions by Sense

1. A very unpleasant or frightening dream.
2. (figuratively) Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.
3. (now rare) A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
4. (now chiefly historical) A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis.
5. (intransitive) To experience a nightmare.
6. (transitive) To imagine (someone or something) as in a nightmare.
7. (transitive) To trouble (someone or something), as by a nightmare.

Example Sentences

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.

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.

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!

Synonyms for nightmare

Antonyms for nightmare

Related Words

Word Forms

• nightmares
• night-mare
• nightmaring
• nightmared

Usage Notes

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