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Fantasy vs Nightmare - What's the difference?

fantasy | nightmare | Related terms |

Fantasy is a related term of nightmare.


As nouns the difference between fantasy and nightmare

is that fantasy is that which comes from one's imagination while nightmare is a female demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.

As a verb fantasy

is (literary|psychoanalysis) to fantasize (about).

fantasy

Alternative forms

* phantasie * phantasy (chiefly dated)

Noun

(fantasies)
  • That which comes from one's imagination.
  • * Shakespeare
  • Is not this something more than fantasy ?
  • * Milton
  • A thousand fantasies begin to throng into my memory.
  • (literature) The literary genre generally dealing with themes of magic and fictive medieval technology.
  • A fantastical design.
  • * Hawthorne
  • Embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread.
  • (slang) The drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.
  • Derived terms

    * high fantasy * low fantasy

    Verb

  • (literary, psychoanalysis) To fantasize (about).
  • * 2013 , Mark J. Blechner, Hope and Mortality: Psychodynamic Approaches to AIDS and HIV
  • Perhaps I would be able to help him recapture the well-being and emotional closeness he fantasied his brother had experienced with his parents prior to his birth.
  • (obsolete) To have a fancy for; to be pleased with; to like.
  • (Cavendish)
  • * Robynson (More's Utopia)
  • Which he doth most fantasy .

    See also

    * fancy ----

    nightmare

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A female demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
  • * 1817 , (Walter Scott), Rob Roy :
  • It haunted me, however, more than once, like the nightmare .
  • *1843 , (Edgar Allan Poe), ‘The Black Cat’:
  • *:I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!
  • A very bad or frightening dream.
  • I had a nightmare that I tried to run but could neither move nor breathe.
  • * July 18 2012 , Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Rises [http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/]
  • With his crude potato-sack mask and fear-inducing toxins, The Scarecrow, a “psychopharmacologist” at an insane asylum, acts as a conjurer of nightmares , capable of turning his patients’ most terrifying anxieties against them.
  • (figuratively) Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.
  • Cleaning up after identity theft can be a nightmare of phone calls and letters.

    Synonyms

    * (demon said to torment sleepers) incubus (male demon afflicting female sleeper), succubus * (bad dream) night terror (sleep disorder)