Edinburgh Napier University

  Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the manner in which people experienced and represented terrifying dreams changed in far-reaching ways. This chapter considers, first, what a nightmare is and how it works, then, how key thinkers, writers, and artists construed and constructed the experience of a nightmare, in the period bounded by the lifetimes of Samuel T. Coleridge and Sigmund Freud. Evidence from private and public writing and image-making shows authors and artists engaging with and updating the traditional nightmare template (attack by a supernatural antagonist), at the same time developing a new style of visualizing bad dreams, wherein the threat is entrapment, embedded in mise-en-scène, rather than direct attack. Important in both efforts was the focus on representing mise-en-scène (naturalistic and fantastic) in popular media. Imagery created by the first asylum artists demonstrates the uptake of this “modern” nightmare template before 1914; in the 1930s, it appears also in the nightmares of Berliners living under Nazi rule. Innovations in dream-representation worked in tandem with shifts in actual dream-experience, as a century of industrial revolution necessitated recalibrations of mentality, compelling people to adapt to radically different urban environments, conditions in which the novel modern nightmare of entrapment could flourish.