Volume 32, Number 5 · March 28, 1985
A Hard Day's Night
By Charles Rycroft
The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams
by Ernest Hartmann
Basic, 294 pp., $18.95
According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the primary meaning of the word 'nightmare' is a 'female monster supposed to settle upon people and animals in their sleep producing a feeling of suffocation,' and it only secondarily refers to 'a bad dream producing these or similar sensations.' It is, in fact, a word that harks back to the largely lost world of evil spirits, demons, incubi, and succubi, when dreams were not, as they are now, products of our own mental processes but were portents, threats, visions, and visitations from another world.
Review, 2855 words
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