Nightmare

“ He stopped groaning, and rested his eyes on each of us and our lanterns in turn, and in his glance there was a mad joy at seeing men and lights—and a mad fear that all would disappear like a vision. Perhaps he had seen men with lanterns bending over him many times, but they had always disappeared in a bloody confused nightmare. ”

“ The darkness deepened, and the flares, increasing in number, gave the place an unreal, ghastly light, like some gigantic and unending nightmare. Something that could not be possible, must not be possible, but which was to go on and on and on endlessly, relentlessly. ”

“ Hardly had he closed his eyes when again that horrible nightmare—no longer a nightmare—- tormented him. Again he felt the pointed delicate fingers carefully feeling their way along the innumerable tangled threads of nerve-matter that lead to the innermost recesses of self. ”

“ Allus have the same nightmare—big sow, big as a steer, trying to eat me up. Wake up so skeered I could run to never. Nowheres to run to. Go to sleep, and have it again. Wake up worse skeered than ever. ”

“ Or is some shred of nightmare returning ever and again out of the black depths of my sickness? It comes and goes, and every time new doubts—hope it may be a dream, fear it may be reality—come with it. ”

“ In the Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you know it is a nightmare.
That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. ”

“ There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless terror? ”

“ Many also have even affirmed, that while they have been lying perfectly awake, they have perceived this nightly tormentor creeping slowly over their feet, and have watched its advances until it has taken its seat on the breast, and inflicted those severe sufferings which no language can fully describe. But we shall consider the nightmare rather as a disease, than the creature of imagination. ”

“ It was all like some hideous nightmare, one of those dangerous, utterly terrifying dreams from which you awaken just in time. They're dangerous because people have died in their sleep just from shock. ”

“ The memory of the special variety, which is known as the nightmare, may be as vivid and persistent as that of the most poignant and striking events of the waking life, and all degrees occur between this realistic persistence and the complete forgetting of a dream which is present only for a few moments after awaking. ”

“ If then some friendly touch or voice awakens him, the vision flees, and he is left stertorously breathing, perspiring, and more tired than if he had broken stone or worked in a tread-mill for as many hours as the nightmare lasted minutes. If not aroused, he may be awakened by his own screams ”

“ It is an almost divine pleasure and wonder to watch the unfolding of a soul-blossom, as you say,—providing that one is strong enough not to be afraid. I am, or have been, always afraid: the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,—and I flee, and bury myself in work. ”

“ Those who fell asleep slept with nerves taut with anticipation and in the consciousness of a nightmare, in which the rending thunders were mixed with reflection upon their own arduous efforts and their part in the future. ”

“ The only type I have now left for examination may be called the “Nightmare type.” It is [Pg 279] allied not so much to the stories of Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool as to stories like that of the Croatian wolf-maiden. According to German and Slavonic belief the nightmare is a human being—frequently one whose love has been slighted, and who in this shape is enabled to approach the beloved object. It slips through the keyhole, or any other hole in a building, and presses its victim sometimes to death. ”

“ It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unheard of, without resemblance to any conglomeration ever seen before, whether of men or things; a pell-mell so strange, so violent and incongruous, that it exceeded the most troubled dreams of nightmare. All the ugliness of the eternal islet, all the shameful vices, all the stupors; all the spasms and all the deformities of the baptized flesh, all the tears of repentance, all the mockery of the debauchee; insanity, cupidity, cunning, lewdness, stupidity, fear, mortal fatigue, stony indifference, silent despair ”

“ Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable? ”

“ This sensation may gradually creep over the whole frame; the patient becoming, in more senses than one, truly etherealized; reduced to the condition of no body and all soul. The objects around are either lost sight of or strangely perverted; fancied shadows flit before the eyes, and then a dream sets in—sometimes calm and placid, sometimes active and bustling, sometimes very pleasurable, sometimes frightful, as a nightmare. Emerging, the figures and scenes shift rapidly, and grow fainter and fainter ”

“ The phantom with the crutch was only a species of machinery, such as that with which fancy is found to supply the disorder called Ephialtes, or nightmare, or indeed any other external impression upon our organs in sleep, which the patient’s morbid imagination may introduce into the dream preceding the swoon. In the nightmare an oppression and suffocation is felt, and our fancy instantly conjures up a spectre to lie on our bosom. ”

“ The possessed man, tossed and shaken in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live creature were tearing or twisting him within, pining as though it were devouring his vitals day by day, rationally finds a personal spiritual cause for his sufferings. In hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. ”

“ This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time.
There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of flying, for instance--it fades away with manhood. ”

“ One form of the zombi-belief—akin to certain ghostly superstitions held by various primitive races—would seem to have been suggested by nightmare,—that form of nightmare in which familiar persons become slowly and hideously transformed into malevolent beings. ”

“ Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that strange nightmare-sensation of being held by invisible power exerted from a distance—is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite inheritance of numberless memories of having been caught? ”

“ After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on an average) every second night in the week.
Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion—which you please—of which I was the miserable sport, was on this wise:——
I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness, although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. ”

“ The nightmare motifs are present to a remarkable degree in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain. There we have the gigantism of the menacing Thing, the supernatural power given to inanimate objects, the ghostly chill, the darkness, and the intolerable oppression of a nameless evil thing beside one. ”

“ We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We newborn infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience. ”

“ This darkened phantasm walks
Where nightmares are:
In a frenzy of life and light,
Crisscross—a menacing throng—
They gibe, they squeal at the stranger,
Jostling along,
Their faces cadaverous grey. ”

“ Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado we display in nightmares—when, knowing we are dreaming, we plunge desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the whole thing over the sooner. ”

“ “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d believe anything. Including nightmares.”
“What’s the matter? ”

“ Now and then, after a bout of too much talking or too much doing, we may dwell tenderly on the thought of complete inaction and stillness. A nightmare is an excellent means of inducing a desire for dreamless sleep. ”

“ Many of them, sick with fright after the accident, shaken by nervous tremours, soaked in cold sweats, and the prey of continual nightmares, got up in spite of everything, and were as eager as any in their desire to fight against the earth, as though they had a revenge to take on it. ”

“ They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. ”

“ but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares. ”

“ I even slept, for I remember that I started to find the cold gray light of an early winter’s day was on my face, and stealing around the room from between the heavy curtains of the window.
Shuddering, but urged by the impulse that rivets the gaze of the bird upon the snake, I turned to see the Horror of the night. Yes, it was no fevered dream, no hallucination of sickness, no airy phantom unable to face the dawn. In the sickly light I saw it lying on the bed, with its grim head on the pillow. A man? Or a corpse arisen from its unhallowed grave, and awaiting the demon that animated it? ”

“ I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. ”

“ Mere mocks of human that do play a part, Are but behind the mask a living death, A muffled night that murmurs of the light, A dread despair where lips have muttered hope.
Still fared we north across that frozen waste Of icy horror ringed with awful night, To seek the living in a world of death; And as we fared a terror grew and grew About my heart like madness, till I dreamed A vague desire to flee by night and creep, By steel-blue, windless plain and haunted wood, And wizened shore and headland, once more south. ”

“ Do ye hear them still?—it was long ago!—
But here in the shadows I wait, and wait!
145 Spirits there be that pass in peace;
Mine passed in a whirl of wrath and dole;
And the hour that your choking breath shall cease
I will get my grip on your naked soul—
Nor pity may stay nor prayer cajole—
I would drag ye whining from Hell's own gate:
To me, to me, ye must pay the toll!
And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!
The dead they are dead, they are out of the way?
And the ghost is a whim of an ailing mind? ”

“ And now, to add to my horror, the light began slowly to wane from the candles,—they were not, as it were, extinguished, but their flame seemed very gradually withdrawn; it was the same with the fire,—the light was extracted from the fuel; in a few minutes the room was in utter darkness. The dread that came over me, to be thus in the dark with that dark Thing, whose power was so intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve. In fact, terror had reached that climax, that either my senses must have deserted me, or I must have burst through the spell. ”

“ A faint breeze stirred the chain, and that which was appended to it swayed gently to and fro.
It was altogether an object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything, increased its dimensions, without changing its shape. It was a condensation of darkness into a definite form. Twilight and moon-rise, stars setting behind the cliff, the clouds and winds, seemed to have entered into the composition of this visible nonentity. ”

“ Gradually, however, the dark truth came out, and orbed itself into that blood-red unity of horror, which has since made the firmest nerves to tremble, and the stoutest knees to shake, which has haunted dreams, inspired poetry, created new and ghastly shapes of superstition, and which, even yet, as the solitary traveller is plodding his way amidst the shadows of an autumn evening, or under the shivering stars of a winter night, can drench the skin and curdle the blood. ”

“ Send her soul into the dark caverns of fear—surround her with unceasing dread—let the ghosts of those you have sent butchered to their doom surround her nightly pillow, whispering strange tales into her ears,—then, when fear grips the maddened brain and there seems no rescue but the grave—then peals the hour. ”

“ I had become a thing apart from mankind—a faun—a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.
It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot—though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. ”