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Premonition vs Nightmare - What's the difference?

premonition | nightmare |

As nouns the difference between premonition and nightmare

is that premonition is a clairvoyant or clairaudient experience, such as a dream, which resonates with some event in the future 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.

premonition

Alternative forms

* (obsolete)

Noun

(en noun)
  • A clairvoyant or clairaudient experience, such as a dream, which resonates with some event in the future.
  • A strong intuition that something is about to happen (usually something negative, but not exclusively).
  • Synonyms

    * bad feeling, gut feeling, vision, second sight (informal)

    References

    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)