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Analytic theory generally holds that post-traumatic dreams are exceptions to the wish-fulfillment aim of dreaming, since they express no discernible pleasure need, contain little evidence of classical dream work, and seem to serve the function of mastery. The author's experience treating combat veterans leads him to challenge this view. He finds that dissociative experiences and shame in the day residue trigger nightmares that, like ordinary dreams, have manifest and latent content and aim to provide wish fulfillment through the operation of the dream work. The manifest content of the nightmares is frequently very different from the actual traumatic events. Their overt trauma re-enactment aspect is a screen for the memories of childhood trauma and for contemporaneous experiences of helplessness that engender a persistent sense of shame. The dreamer transforms this unacceptable affect into narcissistic rage which is experienced as persecutory anxiety, the familiar and more acceptable affect of nightmares. Relating the manifest dream to the experience of actual trauma in the course of secondary revision permits the individual to consolidate the isolation of the manifest dream from the memory of narcissistic wounds and shame.