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Nightmares, especially post-traumatic nightmares, have posed major problems for the theory of dreams. If it is presumed that the manifest dream is virtually unmodified representation of the traumatic event - something like a vivid, affect-laden night-time memory - then it would seem that the manifest and latent ‘content’ of the dream are identical, and there is neither dream work nor the representation of unconscious wishes as fulfilled, nor the need for distortion and disguise that accompanies the expression of unconscious wishes. Furthermore, since nightmares are anxiety dreams which wake the sleeper, the function of dreams as guardians of sleep is not in evidence. Affects in dreams are presumably dampened but certainly not amplified (Freud 1900, p. 467). Accordingly, the enormity of affect - which has made the word ‘nightmare’ paradigmatic for overwhelmingly frightful experience in the face of which one is helpless - seems to belie the stimulus modulating function of dreams.
Perhaps the most perplexing feature of the nightmare revolves around the issue of wish fulfilment. If a dream is the disguised expression of an unconscious wish represented as fulfilled, how is one to account for the generation in dream life of an unmodified replay of an experience of sudden and overwhelming trauma? The dream, in recreating the terrifying experience, seems to act in ways utterly different from that in which stimuli or wishes are represented as fulfilled by the consummatory act of hallucination that we call dreaming.
These issues, of course, have a prominent place in the history of psychoanalysis. Writing of anxiety dreams, Freud (1900) was careful to demonstrate that such dreams were only apparent contradictions of the theory of wish fulfilment. The anxiety, he took great pains to point out, belonged not to the manifest dream scene which appeared to generate them, but rather to the latent dream's thoughts (p. 580), and were reflective of the conflict (either libidinal stasis,