A Psychophysiological Study of Nightmares and Night Terrors: I. Physiological Aspects of the Stage 4 Night Terror

Imagination cannot conceive of the horrors and the incomparable dread of this experience.

In Recent Years there has been a renewed interest in the phenomenon of the nightmare as part of the upsurge in dream and sleep research stimulated by the new physiological methods. Mack (1970) has suggested that the investigation of nightmares is important because:

Severe anxiety dreams or nightmares contain in themselves, or are related to, so many fundamentally important clinical phenomena that they present a unique challenge and opportunity for the land of investigation that can lead to the development of psychoanalytic and other psychological theories. The psychology and physiology of dreaming, the problem of anxiety, the adaptation to external threat or trauma, the relation of nightmare to psychosis, the development of early ego functions and mental structures, the psychic handling of aggression, the relationship between erotism and destruction, and the various forms of regression with which such dreams are associated-all are among the major topics that come under consideration when one attempts to achieve a comprehensive view of the nightmare [p. 205].