nightmares
The depth-psychology corpus treats ‘Nightmare’ not as a merely clinical curiosity but as a privileged site where somatic, mythological, archetypal, and psychodynamic registers converge and contend. The dominant voice is that of Roscher, mediated and extended by Hillman, who argues that the nightmare demon of antiquity is Pan himself — a thesis that reframes the phenomenon as an irruption of the numinous rather than a symptom of ego-pathology. Against this mythological reading stands the Freud–Jones axis, which interprets the nightmare intrapsychically: repressed desire returns as demonic anxiety, the incubus as censored erotic wish. Ogden’s object-relational contribution draws a sharp diagnostic distinction between the nightmare and the night terror, treating each as emblematic of fundamentally different modes of psychic functioning — the nightmare retaining the capacity for unconscious dream-work, the night terror foreclosing it entirely. Bulkeley and Hartmann contribute the neurobiological frame, locating nightmares in REM sleep and distinguishing them physiologically from night terror’s NREM arousal disorder. Jung maps the nightmare figure onto the lamia and Lilith, connecting it to the destructive-feminine archetype and the daimonic dimensions of the unconscious. Across all these positions, the nightmare serves as a limit case: the boundary between dreaming and waking, between symbol and somatic event, between the personal and the collective or even the epidemic.
Roscher’s thesis, briefly is that the nightmare demon in antiquity is the great god Pan in any of his several forms, and that the experience of the nightmare demon then was similar to that reported in the psychiatry and psychology of Roscher’s own day.
This passage states the governing thesis of the entire volume: Pan is the archetypal substrate of the nightmare, linking ancient demonology to modern psychopathological experience.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
the nightmare is unhealthy, the result of a faulty psyche… The Freud/Jones hypothesis explains the nightmare intrapsychically: repressed desire returns as demonic anxiety. But Roscher opens the way for a mythological perspective: the demon instigates both the desire and the anxiety.
Hillman contrasts the Freudian intrapsychic interpretation of the nightmare as pathological symptom with Roscher’s mythological view, in which the demon is an autonomous instigator rather than a product of repression.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
rape, panic, or nightmare — when consciousness is too ethereal, ephemeral… Rape, panic, and nightmare belong where anxiety and sexuality are taken so concretely that the psyche has
Hillman identifies nightmare as one of Pan’s three signature irruptions into consciousness, each characterized by a violent literalization of the numinous that exposes the limits of ethereal or overly rational ego-states.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
night terrors and nightmares, as I understand them, are emblematic of the two very broad categories of psychological functioning. Taken together, night terrors and nightmares… are emblematic of the st
Ogden elevates the nightmare–night terror distinction from a clinical detail to a structural metaphor for two fundamentally opposed modes of psychic functioning, one capable of dream-work, the other not.
, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004thesis
I now wish first of all to try and explain as objectively as possible the observations and experiences of modern and ancient medicine in relation to the origin and nature of the nightmare.
Roscher’s methodological introduction establishes the comparative medical-historical framework through which ancient and modern accounts of the nightmare will be critically assessed.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the main symptoms of the nightmare are the feeling of pressure generally brought about by lying face downward, inability to move, and anxiety. Macnish calls particular attention to the extraordinary and inexplicable anxiety of the patien
Roscher synthesizes modern medical observation to establish the core symptom triad of the nightmare — pressure, paralysis, and inexplicable anxiety — against which ancient accounts are then measured.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the goat-shaped Pans, satyrs, and fauns necessarily came to be considered as nightmare demons: because in those days goatskins or sheep skins or cloaks made of goats’ hair and sheep’s wool were used to protect th
Roscher provides a materialist-aetiological explanation for why the goat-formed Pan and his kin became nightmare demons, grounding the mythological figure in the physiology of respiratory obstruction during sleep.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
a complete battalion of French soldiers quartered in an old abbey near Tropea in Calabria was attacked by a nightmare during the middle hours of the night… chased by panicky terror, ran out into the open.
The account of epidemic collective nightmare among a battalion of soldiers demonstrates the close structural link between nightmare and Panic, reinforcing the Pan-Ephialtes identification across both individual and collective registers.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
In this classical nightmare we find once more nearly all the characteristics that were regarded as specific to the nightmare by the ancient physicians: the nightmare originated from indigestible food, there was profuse sweating, particularly on the face
The Aristomenes narrative from Apuleius is presented as an exemplary classical nightmare fulfilling all the diagnostic criteria established by ancient physicians, confirming the clinical consistency of the phenomenon across antiquity.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Lilith changed into a nightmare or lamia who haunted pregnant women and kidnapped new-born infants. The parallel myth is that of the lamias, the nocturnal spectres who terrify children.
Jung links the nightmare figure to the archetype of the destructive feminine through the Lilith–lamia mythological complex, situating the nightmare within the broader Jungian framework of the devouring mother.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
nightmarish visions of vivid intensity was quite familiar to the ancient physicians… ‘Once he has gone to sleep he jumps up from his sleep when he sees the monstrous visions’
Roscher documents the ancient medical tradition, from Hippocrates through Galen, of recognizing nightmare visions as pathological symptoms associated with fever, epilepsy, and nocturnal terror.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Nightmares, however, are very different experiences from night terrors. Hartmann says nightmares tend to be long, frightening dreams occurring during REM sleep, most often during the later parts of the night, that awaken the person with
Hartmann’s neurobiological account, as summarized by Bulkeley, sharply distinguishes nightmares (REM-based, imagistic, narrative) from night terrors (NREM arousal disorders with minimal imagery), providing the empirical counterpart to Ogden’s psychoanalytic distinction.
, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017supporting
It is one of the characteristics of night demons and specters that they are linked with night and darkness and that they have to escape if either a light is kindled or if day breaks.
Roscher documents the cross-cultural mythological logic governing nightmare demons — their strict temporal binding to darkness — as evidence of their structural identity with Pan, who also retreats from light and daybreak.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the demon of the nightmare, working only in sleep or the state preceding sleep, or the demon of fever accompanied by restless, fearful dreams (epialos, Epiales), must have had a great deal in common with Hypnos (and Oneiros) from the first.
Roscher traces the mythological genealogy connecting the nightmare demon Ephialtes to Hypnos and Oneiros, demonstrating the deep mythological interweaving of sleep, fever-delirium, and nightmare in the ancient imagination.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
A twelve-year-old boy afflicted with advanced spondylitis dorsalis imagined during his attacks that an animal had jumped on his back and wanted to crush him to death. It can be seen from this how closely related children’s night terrors are to the nightmare.
A case of childhood spinal disease is used to illustrate the somatic substrate of nightmare phenomenology, linking the sensation of crushing weight to pathological physiology and to the folk belief in blood-sucking night visitants.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Let us take this opportunity to recall the insomnia Veneris or somni Venerei (bad dreams of Venus) that are so closely allied pathologically with nightmares. These are erotic dreams associated with gonorrhea, and the doctors in ancient times believed them to be the precursors or symptoms of epilepsy and insanity.
Roscher identifies the erotic nightmare — the incubus tradition — as pathologically contiguous with the classical nightmare, linking desire, disease, demonology, and the lamia-Empusae complex in a single aetiological chain.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Even horses and other animals are tormented by nightmares; the animals sweat profusely and snort loudly and become completely disarranged and have knotted manes, which cannot be combed out and can only be burned out with blessed candles
Roscher extends the nightmare’s phenomenological reach beyond the human to animals, grounding the folkloric attribution of equine disturbance to nightmare demons in a cross-species account of panicky somatic arousal during sleep.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
to the relative frequency of epidemic nightmares and insanity, i.e., that a large number of individuals succumb at the same time, which again resembles panicky terror.
Roscher draws the final identification between epidemic nightmare and collective Panic, concluding his argument that Pan-Ephialtes is the mythological figure underlying both individual nocturnal terror and mass psychological contagion.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the very expression pnigalion… shows that he considered ‘choking, becoming strangled’ as the most essential characteristic of the nightmare, the symptom to which Soranus, Oreibasius, Aetius, Paulus Aegineta, and others have also drawn special
The Greek term pnigalion is analyzed to establish suffocation and choking as the definitional core of the ancient nightmare experience, confirmed by a chain of medical authorities from Soranus to the Byzantine period.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
an erotic nightmare spirit appearing in the form of a satyr… This village had been haunted for ten months by the ghost of a satyr who had evil designs on the women and was even said to have murdered two with whom he was particularly in love.
Philostratus’s account of a satyr-ghost as an erotic nightmare demon is cited as classical literary evidence for the identification of the Pan-satyr figure with the incubus tradition of the nightmare.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
The two most widely known words for the nightmare are epialtes and ephialtes… Alcaeus is said to have used the unaspirated form; otherwise it is considered to be Ionic and sometimes Attic.
Roscher conducts a rigorous philological analysis of the Greek names for the nightmare demon (epialtes/ephialtes), tracing their phonetic variants and etymological significance as part of establishing Pan’s identity with Ephialtes.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
a demon who sometimes appears as a werewolf, sometimes as a nightmare demon with the feet of a donkey or goat, with goat’s ears and a hairy skin, and in many ways recalls the old Greek Pan and the satyrs who of course also appear as nightmare demons.
Byzantine demonology is shown to preserve the morphological features of the Pan-nightmare identification, with the baboutzikarios demon exhibiting the same bestial hybrid form as the ancient goat-legged Ephialtes.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
I wake up screaming, ‘Oh God, Oh God.’ I have never been so terrified. I feel so helpless… the dream shows that Andrea’s powerful energies have turned against her, and her life force, her very blood, is feeding back into
Woodman presents a clinical nightmare of demonic sexual violence as an instance of the psyche’s own energies turned destructively inward, illustrating the nightmare as an expression of autonomous complexes overwhelming the ego.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982aside
we must know the archetypal substructures that govern our reactions; we must recognize the gods and the myths in which we are embroiled. Without this awareness, our behavior becomes wholly mythic and consciousness a delusion.
Hillman situates the study of nightmare within the broader program of archetypal psychology, arguing that mythological reflection on figures like Pan is epistemically necessary for self-understanding in a post-Christian psychological era.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside
the fact that Pan reveals himself in dreams to people during their midday sleep — just as here — justifies this interpretation.
An epigraphic analysis supports the identification of Pan as a deity who reveals himself through dreams and visions, reinforcing the thesis that the nightmare and the midday panic share a common divine source.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside