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Nightmares are [[dreams ]] whose [[contents ]] are unpleasant or [[anxiety ]] provoking and which, depending on their intensity, can awaken the sleeper. Also known as anxiety dreams, nightmares attracted the interest of Sigmund [[Freud]], who refers to [[them ]] for the first [[time ]] in The [[Interpretation ]] of Dreams. There, he shows how nightmares are not an exception to [[dream ]] [[theory ]] and, more specifically, that they are consistent with the theory that dreams are the fulfillment of a [[wish]]. The anxiety experienced during the nightmare can only be apparently explained by its [[content]]. Although intrinsically linked to its accompanying representations, the anxiety arises from a different source. In this [[sense ]] the anxiety of the dream is identical to the anxiety experienced during [[neurosis]].

Based on this analogy, Freud claims that nightmares are dreams with a [[sexual ]] content whose [[libido ]] is transformed into anxiety. The content is generally exempt from any [[form ]] of [[distortion ]] and represents the unveiled realization of a [[repressed ]] [[desire ]] that has shown itself to be stronger than [[censorship]]. The anxiety that accompanies the dream then takes the [[place ]] of the censorship.

Nightmares can awaken the dreamer, and [[sleep ]] can be interrupted before the dream's repressed desire has, faced with the censorship, reached its [[complete ]] realization. In this [[case ]] there is a failure to form the compromise that constitutes the dream, which then fails to fulfill its function as the guardian of sleep.

Although Freud did not [[change ]] his dream theory, he updated it in Beyond the [[Pleasure ]] [[Principle ]] (1920). The [[repetitive ]] anxiety dreams observed in [[people ]] [[suffering ]] from [[traumatic ]] [[neuroses ]] cannot be explained by the fulfillment of a repressed desire. In these nightmares a profoundly unpleasant and anxiety provoking [[event ]] is repeated. To explain this, Freud introduces the hypothesis that the dream serves to [[bind ]] the [[instinctual ]] [[excitation ]] to avoid overwhelming the [[psychic ]] [[apparatus ]] with traumatic [[material]]. In traumatic neurosis this binding function is disturbed.

Ernest [[Jones]], in his book On the Nightmare, [[interpreted ]] anxiety dreams as the fulfillment of a repressed wish associated with [[infantile ]] [[sexuality]]. More recently, [[French ]] authors, relying on experimental findings that reveal that through the different paradoxical sleep cycles the same dream matter becomes increasingly less comfortable as dreaming progresses, have hypothesized that this phenomenon may be the [[reflection ]] of the dream's [[work ]] of organization, integration, or binding. This would result in the gradual [[development ]] of the most archaic [[signifiers]], increasing their complexity, combining them, and dramatizing them in primary [[fantasies ]] that have been relegated to secondary importance. According to this assumption, nightmares are the reflection of the failure of these binding [[processes]], whereby anxiety occurs through the inability to [[repress ]] archaic signifiers.

# [[Freud, Sigmund ]] (1900a). The [[interpretation of dreams]]. SE, 4-5.