Ernest Jones’s Psychoanalysis of the Nightmare

Record summary

Ernest Jones’s On the Nightmare examines nightmares, incubus and succubus traditions, nocturnal oppression, and related sexual and religious symbolism. Although published before modern sleep-paralysis research, it is a key historical text for comparing sensed-presence experiences across folklore, psychoanalysis, and bodily accounts of nocturnal immobility. Jones assembled material from European traditions and clinical literature, but his Freudian interpretation is historically situated and not equivalent to contemporary sleep physiology. Researchers should distinguish reported phenomenology from symbolic explanation and verify the source chains of translated examples.