History Main / PastExperienceNightmare

* Tony catches Ziva moaning and whimpering in her sleep when she stays at his apartment in the ''Series/NCIS'' episode "Shiva," and she [[DarkAndTroubledPast does not need to explain]] to him what she was dreaming about.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'', Alternian trolls as a race experience horrific nightmares and sleep in sopor slime to suppress the visions. They're implied to be caused in part by Doc Scratch.

* In ''Manhwa/IWish'', there's an alien species recruited as mercenaries for wars because of their abundant strength, though they in-turn only have a memory-span of 24 hours and forget everything that happened the day beforehand. It initially appears to be a case to make the continued fighting easier on them, but it turns out [[spoiler:that continued memory of the people they have killed start off as nightmares, but become real to the species, and will end up being killed by the remnants of their deeds]].

* ''WebVideo/DreamSMP'':
** During the first anniversary of L'Manburg's independence, Tubbo tells Wilbur that he still sees explosions and fireworks (from being [[PublicExecution publicly executed]] for being a [[LaResistance Pogtopian]] [[TheMole spy]] in [[TyrantTakesTheHelm Manburg]]) whenever he closes his eyes.
** Similarly to Tubbo, his best friend Tommy also has these, having once told Ranboo that he had nightmares of Wilbur's speech suggesting [[ThenLetMeBeEvil they be "the bad guys"]] in Pogtopia, where Wilbur's [[SanitySlippage mental health had taken a steep nosedive]].

* In ''Fanfic/HumanCuriosity'', England has a bad dream about [[spoiler:discovering that Portugal was "killed".]] He also had some weird dreams that he found unpleasant, which later turned out to be his repressed memories.

* Heather Hudson has a dream sequence after the death of her husband in ''ComicBook/AlphaFlight'': in the graveyard, one by one, the team members leave her. Then her dead husband's rotting corpse rises out of the grave and chases her.
* In his first appearance in ''Amazing ComicBook/SpiderMan'' #101-102 ComicBook/{{Morbius}}' backstory is retold through the nightmares he suffers, in which he keeps recounting the scientific accident that turned him into a living vampire and killing Emil immediately after. He is occasionally shown to be reluctant to go to sleep because he knows he'll have more nightmares.

* Franchise/{{Batman}} in various media and usually focusing on reliving the night of his parents' murder, with story appropriate variations.
* ''Comicbook/{{Empowered}}'': Basically everyone. Most of the cast is dealing with serious PTSD, with the obvious result.

* Several of the members of the post-''Comicbook/ZeroHourCrisisInTime'' ''Comicbook/LegionOfSuperHeroes'' have recurring Bad Dreams following the "[[ZombieApocalypse Legion of the Damned]]" arc, in which many of them were taken over by [[TheVirus The Blight]].
* A variant of this trope appears in ''ComicBook/ThePunisherMAX''. Frank's worst dream is actually a happy dream of an alternate future in which his family didn't go to the park and he is a grandfather who is having dinner with his wife, children, children-in-law, and grandchildren. The reason that Frank considers this a bad dream is because it painfully reminds him that his family is dead when he wakes up.

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'' stories provide some examples:

* In "Swamped", a vegetative ComicBook/SwampThing had a confused, pun-sprinkled nightmare about Linda Holland and his humanity.
* In the beginning of ''ComicBook/Trinity2008'', Franchise/{{Superman}}, Franchise/{{Batman}} and Franchise/WonderWoman get together to talk about several strange dreams they keep having night after night concerning a prisoner intent on breaking free.
* At the end of ''ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}'', [[spoiler: Ozymandias]] seems perfectly content that he did the right thing, but seems to show a hint of doubt when he mentions his dream of "swimming towards a terrible...never mind", drawing a parallel between his story and the mariner of the comic-within-a-comic, in which [[spoiler:a man commits horrible atrocities in order to save his home from attack from a dreaded ship of the damned. However, the attack never happens, and he eventually joins the ship, having ironically lost his soul through his attempts to save his village]].

* In ''Franchise/XMen'':

* Yorick, the protagonist of ''ComicBook/YTheLastMan'', gets these frequently. At one point one of his companions comments that they'd hate to live in his mind.

** Comicbook/{{Wolverine}} also has nightmares about the Weapon X program; the episode they appear in has some justification, though, in that his brain is being remotely messed with by the original scientist in charge of the Weapon X program.

* Ed suffers nightmares in ''Fanfic/MyMasterEd'' because of [[spoiler:how terrible the Promise Day was and [[SetRightWhatOnceWasWrong to prevent it]] means erasing almost everyone and everything he's ever known]]. It causes him to become TheInsomniac.

* In ''Webcomic/JoeVsElanSchool'', Joe's three years under the titular JuvenileHell's extremely abusive system have saddled him with a severe case of PSTD. A couple of the comics describing the time after Joe "gratuated" and getting out of Elan, sees him haunted by recurring nightmares where dreams he wakes up back in his old bunkbed at Elan, convinced that everything that happened since his "gratuation" was just a dream, and that he had never escaped. Joe also relates to the reader that he would reguarily have these kinds of nightmares for about a decade after he got out of Elan.

* In ''Manwha/IWish'', there's an alien species recruited as mercenaries for wars because of their abundant strength, though they in-turn only have a memory-span of 24 hours and forget everything that happened the day beforehand. It initially appears to be a case to make the continued fighting easier on them, but it turns out [[spoiler:that continued memory of the people they have killed start off as nightmares, but become real to the species, and will end up being killed by the remnants of their deeds]].

->''"You know I still have dreams, right? Of the explosion? And- And of the fireworks? And... And all of it! I- I still vividly see all of it, every day. It hurts!"''

* In ''Series/Supergirl2015'' story ''Fanfic/{{Survivors}}'' [[ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} Kara]] suffers from nightmares where her mother and her aunt Astra stare down at her reprovingly after [[spoiler:being forced to kill Astra]].

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** And Molly had dreams about her husband and children dying.

* In Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin's ''Literature/TheTombsOfAtuan'', the heroine suffers bad dreams after she [[HumanSacrifice sacrifices some prisoners]].