I've read a lot about nightmares, but I haven't been able to find an answer to why certain images in them are so scary. It seems most learned people can't even agree as to what, exactly, a nightmare is. Overall, it's enough to sum it up as simply "a bad dream." But what I want to know is, why is something that isn't scary in real life, suddenly so paralyzingly horrific in a nightmare?

In my most recent nightmare, an older woman wearing a simple dress and scarf was staring at me. In real life, I would probably wonder why this woman is looking at me, did I miss her asking me a question or something? But in my nightmare, this simple act was terrifying. I couldn't move. Just a woman looking at me and I was stiff with fear. She wasn't familiar in any way. I just walked into a house, a well-lit house, in my dream and there she was. Why was that scary?

I don't have nightmares often, but when I do, they usually come in a rapid-fire series, each individual nightmare lasting about three to eight seconds each it seems, and I know they're coming before it begins. It's one of those things I can't easily explain. I lie there dreading falling asleep. Then, while I'm still awake, I start to see the nightmares. I've actually reached up to feel with my fingers that my eyes are still open. They are, but all I see are the nightmare images, not the room around me. These images I see as I fight to stay awake prompt even more frightening images from my waking imagination, which instantly become brand new nightmares. It's horrible. It's like something is continuously reading my mind and forcing me to see the awful images the last horror inspired.

But for the nightmares that shouldn't be nightmares, I just wish I knew what it is the mind does that makes a simple thing be a scary thing. The other things I can understand, but this is what I'd like explained.

For anyone interested in reading it, one of the most frightening nightmares I ever had is described in my dream journal. It's on this page of Dream Capture:
"The Demon Among The Dolls"
It wasn't scary until the very end, but the fear was paralyzing.

---

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. -- Octavio Paz