Aeyde Traum Ch. 01

'Nightmares' by Jamieson Webster

A personal essay on the line between a dream and a nightmare

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is strangely simple: we dream in order to keep sleeping. Dreams protect sleep by allowing the mind to roam freely—fulfilling wishes, replaying fragments of memory, staging entire inner films. In dreams, everyone is a kind of genius. We compose comedies, tragedies, romances, and horror stories with astonishing inventiveness, without needing an audience or an editor.

Sleep closes the ordinary circuits of life. We no longer attend to the external world, nor are we required to act or react. The classic psychological image of the reflex arc—stimulus followed by response, sensation of heat followed by the retraction of the hand—is suspended. Consciousness retreats; the body enters a state of near-paralysis. For Freud, this was not a deficiency but a liberation. With perception dimmed and action halted, the mind is finally left alone with itself. The doors of consciousness close, and we are released from responsibility. We can wander, desire, and turn inward. He admired this freedom deeply, even reverently.

And yet desire is rarely simple. What we want often frightens us. Wishes generate anxiety, guilt, even dread. Be careful what you wish for. The dream’s task is disguise: it cloaks overwhelming or forbidden wishes in strange, displaced forms. Hence the absurdity of dreams—illogical, fragmented, theatrical, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Nightmares, Freud said, are failed dreams. They fail at their double task: they neither disguise desire sufficiently nor manage to protect sleep.

I once dreamed that I reached into my hair, towards the back of my neck, and felt a thin, cool strand woven into my hair. I first thought it was a beautiful satin ribbon. But then something that felt like scales. Was a dead snake braided into my hair? “Yuck” I thought to myself. When the strand suddenly moved. A snake slipped forward across my collarbone, its body warm and startlingly alive. I woke with a sharp inhale, a gasp—the kind that reminds you you’re still here.

In Hungarian, nightmare is boszorkány-nyomás—“witch’s pressure”—a phrase that links bad dreams to weight on the chest, to breathlessness, to a terror that knocks all the air out of you. Waking, I noticed how quickly my body had moved: from front to back, from thought to heartbeat, from death to life. I was frightened nearly to death—and yet astonishingly alive. That gasp felt like a first breath, as if something in me had been shocked back into circulation.

Snakes are among the oldest mythic figures: symbols of danger, temptation, renewal, and desire. In myths they are healers; in others, warnings. In Greek lore they belong to Medusa, embodiment of the feminine, a gaze that can either hold and caress or turn you to stone. Medusa is mother, protector, monster, muse. But in Freud’s language, the snake is also unmistakably phallic: a stand-in for masculine desire, potency, or mischief. Dreams adore this multiplicity of meanings. They make a single symbol carry many stories at once.

Nightmares often exaggerate ordinary emotions—fear of being overwhelmed, seen too closely, or wanting something too much. For some, the nightmare is falling; for others, teeth crumbling, or being chased, an unseen intruder, or waking with the sense of paralysis. Mine was a snake, holding together the contradictions of danger and attraction, the maternal tangle and the sexual one, shedding the past yet returning us to what binds us and braids into us. Its movement against my skin startled me awake, but it also left a trace of something vital, as if an old current had stirred.

When the alarm in my body ebbed, I found myself laughing. The dream had impeccable comic timing. You think you know what frightens you? Try again. Nightmares are often like this—they push just past what we can bear, they test the limits of our psychic elasticity. The dream had the structure of a joke: a disarming question—Is there?—followed by a punchline. Oh boy is there ever! I was both the author and the butt of this joke. The dream mocked my certainty—my belief that I had already encountered the worst. Fear, it reminded me, always has another trick waiting.

Later, I realized the dream took place near the top of the stairs in my home, exactly where my mother once slipped and frightened us both. Suddenly the snake was no longer only a snake. Thinking of my mother and falling, I was deeply concerned for her, worried about her in old age. But at another time, I was often afraid of her. In my mind, she resembled Medusa. The dream braided two times together: the childhood sense of my mother as overwhelmingly alive, and the present moment in which she feels more fragile, her vitality softened by age. A nightmare often contains two opposing wishes at once—the wish to keep someone close and the wish to be free of them. They let us feel everything without needing to choose. Get this snake away from me! Better a dead than alive one! But also, I love this snake It is part of me.

This is often one of the more unsettling truths about dreaming, and one Freud insisted we not avoid: dreams can be selfish, omnipotent. They care little for morality, decency, or the feelings of others. Our worst wishes are not the exceptions in dreams; they are the rule. Nightmares frighten not only because of what they show, but because of what they allow us to want without consequence. Interpreting your dreams is like confession: dreams reveal what must be understood and let go.

In this sense, the snake dream was a beautiful commentary on my relationship with my mother and on survival itself. Time softened what once felt unbearable. The dream could afford to be comic because something had shifted. Humor became evidence of psychic movement, a sign that terror had been metabolized enough to be played with. But the dream also whispered another truth: there is always another transformation ahead like losing your mother, growing old yourself, shedding another skin.

Dreams always contain a hidden nightmare. Nightmares, in turn, conceal our most vulnerable wishes. Like a glove turned inside out, they demand reversal to reveal their lining. At night we encounter both our generous impulses and our aggressive ones—our care and our cruelty, our longing and our resentment. We are free to know all of it and to play.

This freedom would become the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. The analytic situation deliberately recreates aspects of the dream state. The patient lies down, enters a slightly altered mode of attention, and speaks without having to manage the face or reactions of another. Freud called this free association; the analyst meets it with free-floating attention. The analyst sits behind, listening quietly.

My office is dimly lit. The couch is uncomfortably close to a bed. There is even a pillow. I exist for patients only in that room, in that light. I am a strange figure: present and absent, intimate and distant. A bit like a dream. Sometimes I think of myself as a witch of sorts, exerting my own gentle version of “witch’s pressure.”

Therapy, like dreaming, belongs to a transitional space. The pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called it neither subjective nor objective but in-between. Other spaces share this quality when they suspend ordinary demands—hotel rooms, libraries, lobbies, airports, trains. Places where identity loosens, where time stretches, where thought can drift. Waystations. No-man’s-lands. Inviting thresholds.

I do my best thinking in movement. Planes and trains feel deeply erotic to me. The world recedes; the familiar dissolves. Motion frees me from coherence. It is easier to let thoughts arrive when I am not required to be fully present. Like sexuality itself, there is something infantile and rhythmic in it—rocking, suspension—alongside the flights of fancy we carry into adult life.

What threatens these transitional spaces today is not simply the lack of sleep, but saturation. The iPhone has profoundly altered my capacity to enter dream states. Everything—work, intimacy, distraction, catastrophe—is always there, ready at hand. I no longer need to travel to feel elsewhere; elsewhere lives in my purse. We roam endlessly, scrolling without destination. But roaming has become a prison: monetized, archived, surveilled.

What once belonged to the mind’s private freedom—its wandering, its fantasies, its capacity to frighten itself safely—has been externalized and exploited. There is little tolerance for psychic opacity, for withdrawal, for silence. Even our reveries are tracked. This may be psychoanalysis’s nightmare: that the mind’s most fragile freedoms are no longer protected but turned against us, fed back to us as content.

Will future generations resist this trade-off between convenience and psychic life? Will they insist on spaces where meaning is allowed to be slow, symbolic, unresolved? Or will dreams survive only externally, glimpsed in feeds, returned to us from elsewhere? As one psychoanalyst put it, our unconscious now lives outside us, returning not in dreams but in the Real.

Still, dreams persist. They arrive when I least expect them—on nights when I have done nothing to invite them, when I fall asleep exhausted or distracted or annoyed. They do not care about my phone, or calendar, or sense of preparedness. They come anyway. They remind me that something in me remains unreachable, not fully optimized, not entirely colonized.

When I wake from a nightmare, heart racing, I recognize that I am still capable of being surprised by myself. That memory, resentment, love, and fear continue to speak in their own idiom. Dreams do not promise comfort. But they insist on contact. To protect dreaming is to allow for a transitional space—however brief—where something ungoverned can appear. When I close my eyes, something in me still wanders, still stages its strange, petty little dramas, still refuses to be entirely known.

And for now, that feels like enough.

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