Dark Fantasies

Nightmares are extremely intense emotional experiences, often confronting the dreamer with an existential threat to the self, and sometimes even to humanity as a whole. It has always been a particular challenge for artists working in different media and genres to convey this extraordinary intensity. This volume examines the psychological and cultural significance of anxiety-driven dreams and explores features of a specific aesthetic of the nightmare. Its historical focus is the 20th and 21st centuries when the nightmare came to be seen as the epitome of, and the most appropriate metaphor for, an all-encompassing human barbarism. This period also saw the emergence of new theoretical approaches to the understanding of nightmares and of innovative artistic movements and genres dealing with this domain of dreams, such as surrealism, fantasy, and the horror film. The essays in this volume engage with the psychoanalysis of nightmares, their presentation in literature and film, and with autobiographical accounts of nightmares in response to personal traumas and civilisational catastrophes such as endemic abuse, wars of extermination, genocides, torture and prison camps.