nightmare
Pronunciation Noun
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003
Pronunciation Noun
nightmare (plural nightmares)
- (now rare) A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
- 1817, Walter Scott, Rob Roy:
- It haunted me, however, more than once, like the nightmare.
- 1843, Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’:
- 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!
- 1817, Walter Scott, Rob Roy:
- (obsolete) Sleep paralysis.
- A very bad 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 Rises[http://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.
- (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.
- French: cauchemar, mauvais rêve
- German: Albtraum, Alptraum, (dated) Albdruck, Nachtmahr
- Italian: incubo, brutto sogno
- Portuguese: pesadelo
- Russian: кошма́р
- Spanish: pesadilla, mal sueño
- French: cauchemar, tourment
- German: Albtraum, Alptraum
- Italian: incubo
- Portuguese: pesadelo
- Russian: кошма́р
- Spanish: pesadilla, tormento, suplicio
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003