Nightmares and war

The nightmare is a dream in which the stimuli can no longer be contained and absorbed by the inner world. In the course of evolution, when the psyche began to perceive an irremediable otherness, it also began to have not just dreams but also nightmares. The nightmare describes an encounter with a mortal inner enemy-otherness: one is traumatized not only by a physical sensation, but also by the impossibility to integrate-tolerate the other. In the First World War, soldiers start to kill the surrendering enemy. At the same time the problem of soldiers suffering so-called “shell shock”, troubled by nightmares, explodes. It is not a coincidence. The nightmare is the inner match to that event: an intolerable adversarial encounter.