Meaning of nightmare | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A very unpleasant or frightening dream.
2. A very unpleasant or frightening dream. .mw-parser-output .defdate{font-size:smaller}
3. Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.
   figuratively
4. Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure
5. A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
   archaic
6. A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep
7. A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis.
   historical
8. A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis
9. To experience a nightmare

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

CEFR level