The Nightmare by Füssli: When a Demon Sits on Your Chest
A sleeping woman, a demon crouched on her belly. Füssli paints sleep paralysis and unconscious eroticism.
By Artedusa
••12 min read
The Nightmare by Füssli: When a Demon Sits on Your Chest
A woman lying on a bed. Her head hangs back into emptiness. Her inert arms fall. Her white dress slips, revealing her neck, throat, chest. She sleeps. Or she's dead. Or both at once.
On her belly, crouched, a demon. Small. Grotesque. Fixed eyes. He watches her. Or he watches us. He's perched there, on her diaphragm, crushing her with his invisible weight. He's the one causing the nightmare. He's the one paralyzing. He's the one suffocating.
And behind the red curtain separating the bedroom from darkness, a mare's head emerges. White eyes, rolled back. Dilated nostrils. Mane bristling. The nightmare mare. Night-mare. The horse of night. The animal that gallops through our dreams and tramples our soul.
The Nightmare, painted by Johann Heinrich Füssli in 1781, isn't a narrative painting. It's not a mythological scene. It's not a moral allegory. It's a hallucination. A vision. The interior of a dreaming mind. Or going mad. Or dying.
Füssli paints what no one had painted before him: the unconscious. Desire. Fear. Eroticism mixed with horror. Sleep as little death. He opens a door that Freud will cross a century later. He invents modern fantasy.
And he creates one of the most copied, diverted, parodied images in art history. You've seen it a thousand times. In films. In series. On Gothic novel covers. In music videos. The Nightmare has become the visual archetype of the dream that turns into bad trip.
London, 1781: The Scandalous Painting
Johann Heinrich Füssli (anglicized as Henry Fuseli) presents The Nightmare at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in May 1782. He's forty-one. He's Swiss by origin, but has lived in England for fifteen years. He studied in Rome. He copied Michelangelo until becoming obsessed. He draws muscular giants in impossible poses. He reads Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. He paints their visions.
The Nightmare scandalizes. Immediately. Violently.
Not because it's grotesque—though the demon is repulsive. Not because it's fantastic—the 18th century adores Gothic and supernatural. It scandalizes because it's erotic. Sexual. Almost pornographic.
Look at the woman. Her position. Head thrown back. Neck offered. Rising chest. Legs slightly parted under the slipping dress. It's the posture of ecstasy. Of little death. Of orgasm.
And the demon perched on her belly. On her diaphragm. On her womb. He crushes her. He penetrates her symbolically. It's an oneiric rape. An incubus—demon who sexually abuses sleeping women according to medieval demonology.
The English public of 1782 immediately understands. Critics are shocked. Moralists scandalized. Women fascinated. Men troubled. Everyone talks about the painting. Everyone wants to see it.
Füssli becomes famous overnight. He'll repaint the painting at least three times. Dozens of engravings will circulate. Copies, imitations, parodies multiply. The Nightmare goes viral—in the pre-internet sense.
The Incubus: Sexual Demon and Sleep Paralysis
The small demon crouched on the sleeper's chest isn't Füssli's invention. It's an ancient figure. An archetype. The incubus.
According to medieval Christian demonology, incubi are male demons who visit women at night to rape them in their sleep. Their female counterpart, succubi, do the same with men. Saint Augustine speaks of them. Thomas Aquinas too. The Church recognizes their existence. Witchcraft trials regularly invoke them.
But the incubus isn't just religious superstition. It corresponds to a real experience: sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is a neurological phenomenon where, when falling asleep or waking, the brain is conscious but the body remains paralyzed. You can't move. You can't scream. You're prisoner of your own body. And often, this paralysis accompanies hallucinations. You feel a presence in the room. You see a shadow. You feel a weight on your chest preventing breathing.
It's terrifying. Universal. All cultures have myths to explain this phenomenon. Japanese speak of kanashibari. Chinese of gui ya shen (the ghost that crushes the body). Arabs of Jathoom. Scandinavians of mare—the nocturnal mare giving its name to English nightmare.
Füssli paints exactly this. Paralysis. Weight on chest. Malevolent presence. Impossibility of moving or screaming. He visualizes the subjective experience of nightmare with clinical precision.
But he adds eroticism. Because sleep paralysis often occurs during REM sleep—the sleep phase where you dream and the body is sexually aroused. Nocturnal erections. Vaginal lubrication. Body in sexual arousal state while the mind hallucinates.
Füssli fuses terror and desire. He says: nightmare is sexual. Fear and excitement are linked. The unconscious mixes everything.
That's what shocks. Not the demon. The idea that the sleeping woman, vulnerable, is also perhaps aroused. That she suffers and desires simultaneously. That nightmare is also fantasy.
The Composition: Theater of the Unconscious
Füssli composes like a theater director. Everything is artifice. Everything is dramatization.
The room isn't realistic. It's mental space. Symbolic. The bed floats in darkness. The red curtain—heavy, theatrical—separates the scene from black background. Like stage curtain. Like border between conscious and unconscious.
Light comes from nowhere. It strikes the woman, revealing her as on stage. The rest plunges into black. The demon is half in shadow. The mare barely emerges from darkness. Only the sleeper is fully lit.
It's Baroque theater. Caravaggio transposed into fantasy. Violent light. Dense shadow. Maximum contrast.
But it's also strangely modern. Almost cinematic. It looks like a horror film shot. Fixed camera. Immobile monster. Waiting. Tension. Horror that doesn't come—that's already there, installed, watching you.
Füssli freezes the instant. Not action. Not climax. Just suspended instant. Nightmare isn't what happens. It's what is. Permanent. Eternal. Timeless.
The woman won't wake. The demon won't move. The mare won't disappear. They exist in frozen temporality. Like in a dream where you run without advancing. Where you scream without sound. Where time stretches infinitely.
The Colors: Blood Red and Corpse White
Füssli isn't a great colorist. His colors are often artificial, theatrical, almost garish. But in The Nightmare, they work perfectly.
Red. Everywhere. Blood-red curtain. Red cushions. Bed's red. It's passion's red. Desire's. But also blood's. Violence's. Death's.
White. Woman's white dress. Her white skin. Cadaverous white. Virginal white. Violated innocence's white. Shroud's white.
Black. Total darkness. No gray. No transition. Just absolute black from which figures emerge.
And the demon—greenish gray. Corpse color. Mold color. Disease color. He doesn't belong to the living world. He comes from elsewhere. From the unconscious. From death. From putrefaction.
The mare—spectral white. White eyes. White mane. Ghostly. She isn't alive either. She's apparition. Hallucination. Symbol.
Together, these colors create unreal atmosphere. Oneiric. We're not in a real room. We're in dream's mental space. Where colors are saturated. Where contrasts are violent. Where nothing is natural.
The Mare: Animal of Anguish
Why a mare? Why this animal emerging from the red curtain like from a placenta?
In English, nightmare comes from night and mare (female horse). But mare also comes from Old Norse mara, malevolent spirit sitting on sleepers' chests. The word confused with mare (horse). Nightmare literally became the night's mare.
Füssli plays on this etymology. He materializes the metaphor. Nightmare is no longer just bad dream. It's also the animal riding it. The beast galloping in our sleeping heads.
Füssli's mare is terrifying. Her rolled-back eyes. Dilated nostrils. Her head passing through curtain like through cosmic vagina. She's born from darkness. She emerges from nothingness.
She does nothing. Just watches. But this empty gaze, these white eyes without pupils, are perhaps more terrifying than the demon. Because they're inhuman. Completely. Absolutely. Without empathy. Without consciousness. Without soul.
The demon, at least, has eyes. He watches. He's present. The mare, she's absence. Emptiness. Nothingness taking animal form. It's pure anguish. Without object. Without reason. Just there. Watching you with dead eyes.
Anna Landolt: The Rejected Woman
They say Füssli painted The Nightmare after being rejected by Anna Landolt, young Swiss woman he courted. She married another man. Füssli, furious, devastated, supposedly painted this as symbolic revenge.
The sleeping woman would be Anna. The demon would be Füssli himself—the rejected suitor haunting the dreams of she who refused him. The painting says: you can ignore me awake, but I possess you asleep. You can marry another, but it's me visiting your nightmares.
It's psychologically fascinating interpretation. And probably true, at least partially. Füssli was obsessive. Possessive. His letters show a man tormented by desire and frustration.
But reducing The Nightmare to romantic settling of scores diminishes it. The painting transcends biographical anecdote. It speaks of universal unconscious. Of desire. Of fear. Of death.
Anna Landolt may be the trigger. But the painting speaks to all who've had nightmares. To all who've felt that presence in darkness. To all who've woken paralyzed, unable to scream.
The Influence: From Goya to Alien
The Nightmare explodes European visual culture. It becomes immediately iconic. Engraved. Copied. Diverted.
Goya sees it. He draws inspiration for his Caprichos—engravings where sleeping reason produces monsters. For his Black Paintings—visions of horror and madness. Füssli opens the way. Goya follows.
Romantics adore Füssli. He becomes their hero. Byron cites him. Mary Shelley draws inspiration for Frankenstein. Edgar Allan Poe recognizes a brother in him. Romantic fantasy is partly born from The Nightmare.
In the 19th century, Symbolists seize the image. Odilon Redon paints monsters sitting on sleepers. Félicien Rops draws incubi and succubi. Nightmare becomes a genre.
In the 20th century, Surrealists venerate Füssli. Breton salutes him as precursor. Dalí copies him. Ernst cites him. The Nightmare prefigures Surrealist exploration of dream and unconscious.
And today, the image is everywhere. In pop culture. H.R. Giger cites Füssli as influence for Alien. The monster crouching on sleeper's chest. That paralyzes. That penetrates. It's The Nightmare in space.
Dozens of horror films take up the composition. Lying woman. Crouched creature. Paralysis. The Nightmare created a visual archetype still haunting our imagination two hundred forty years later.
Freud and the Unconscious: Füssli Before the Letter
In 1900, Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. He revolutionizes psychology by asserting dreams aren't random. That they express our repressed desires. That the unconscious speaks through oneiric symbols.
Füssli had painted this one hundred twenty years earlier.
The Nightmare is a visualization of Freudian unconscious before Freud. The demon is repressed desire. Paralysis is psychic censorship. The mare is anguish. The room is mental space where all this plays out.
Freud never analyzes The Nightmare directly—strangely, he doesn't seem to have commented on it. But his concept of nightmare as distorted realization of repressed desire corresponds exactly to what Füssli paints.
Does the sleeping woman desire the demon? Is the dream forbidden fantasy's fulfillment? Or is it pure terror? Freud would say: both. Nightmare is desire AND fear. Attraction AND repulsion. Eros AND Thanatos.
Füssli understood this intuitively. Artistically. He didn't have psychoanalytic vocabulary. But he had the image. And the image says everything.
What the Demon Still Watches
Two hundred forty years after its creation, The Nightmare continues watching us. Or rather, the demon continues watching us. With his fixed eyes. Impassive. Empty of empathy.
Because we still have nightmares. We still wake paralyzed, heart pounding, feeling a presence in the room. We still dream we're pursued, crushed, penetrated against our will.
The unconscious hasn't changed. Technology has changed. Society has changed. But the human brain still produces the same nocturnal terrors. Same anguishes. Same forbidden desires.
Füssli painted the interior of our heads. He visualized what can't be seen. What hides. What emerges when we sleep and reason relaxes.
The crouching demon says: I'm still here. In your unconscious. In your dreams. You can ignore me by day. But at night, I come. I sit on your chest. I suffocate you. I visit you.
And you can do nothing. Because you're paralyzed. Because it's a dream. Because it's your own mind creating me.
The white-eyed mare still emerges from red curtain. She still gallops in our nightmares. She tramples our soul.
Füssli died in 1825. But his demon still lives. Crouched. Immobile. Watching. Waiting. In the space between sleep and waking. Where reason sleeps and monsters are born.
You'll sleep poorly tonight.
He awaits you.
The Nightmare by Füssli: When a Demon Sits on Your Chest | Art History
