Staging the Modern Nightmare

Milne, Louise

Abstract

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the manner in which people experienced and represented terrifying dreams changed in far-reaching ways. This chapter considers, first, what a nightmare is and how it works, then, how key thinkers, writers, and artists construed and constructed the experience of a nightmare, in the period bounded by the lifetimes of Samuel T. Coleridge and Sigmund Freud. Evidence from private and public writing and image-making shows authors and artists engaging with and updating the traditional nightmare template (attack by a supernatural antagonist), at the same time developing a new style of visualizing bad dreams, wherein the threat is entrapment, embedded in mise-en-scène, rather than direct attack. Important in both efforts was the focus on representing mise-en-scène (naturalistic and fantastic) in popular media. Imagery created by the first asylum artists demonstrates the uptake of this “modern” nightmare template before 1914; in the 1930s, it appears also in the nightmares of Berliners living under Nazi rule. Innovations in dream-representation worked in tandem with shifts in actual dream-experience, as a century of industrial revolution necessitated recalibrations of mentality, compelling people to adapt to radically different urban environments, conditions in which the novel modern nightmare of entrapment could flourish.

Citation

Milne, L. (2025). Staging the Modern Nightmare. In F. Clemente, & G. Colombani (Eds.), Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century (195–250). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81164-7_8

• Online Publication Date: Apr 11, 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Deposit Date: Mar 17, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 12, 2026
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 195–250
• Book Title: Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Number: 8
• ISBN: 9783031811630
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81164-7_8
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4176306
• Contract Date: Mar 1, 2024