Nightmare

How to Explain It

"This is a nightmare. It follows dream logic, not waking logic. Locations shift without warning. Familiar people become unfamiliar. Objects behave strangely. Play the nightmare from inside it. Your character does not know they are dreaming."

Objectives

Nightmare develops the ensemble's ability to physicalize abstraction and to sustain an alternative theatrical logic without reverting to realism when the scene becomes difficult. It also trains players to draw genuine material from a contributor's experience with care and specificity, rather than using the contribution as a comic prop.

The game reinforces the principle that emotional truth can be conveyed through theatrical convention rather than realistic representation: a nightmare can be more honest about fear than a realistic scene depicting the same events.

Scaffolding

For groups new to non-realistic scene work, introduce Dream or transformation exercises before working with Nightmare. Players need practice operating in non-realistic theatrical space before they can do so confidently with another person's material.

For groups with facility in character and scene work, push toward greater physical commitment and less verbal explanation. Nightmare scenes tend to weaken when players begin explaining or narrating what is happening rather than embodying it.

Common Coaching Notes

• "This is not a joke about her nightmare. This is her nightmare."
• "Dream logic: you do not need to explain the transition. Just arrive somewhere else."
• "The fear is the center of the scene. Keep finding your way back to it."
• "Commit to the image. Do not step outside it to comment on it."

Audience Experience

Nightmare games are engaging for audiences in part because they trigger a recognition dynamic: audiences who have had similar anxieties see their own experience reflected in the dramatization. The game functions as a kind of collective acknowledgment of shared fear, which creates a different relationship with the audience than games premised purely on comedy.

The game can be funny (anxiety is often absurd when externalized), but it should not be played primarily for laughs. A Nightmare scene that is performed as comedy throughout will feel like it is mocking the audience member's contribution rather than honoring it.

Pacing

The scene should build rather than peak immediately. Begin with an evocative image or situation derived from the described nightmare and let the ensemble amplify it gradually. Scenes that start at full intensity have nowhere to go. The build creates the uncanny quality that distinguishes Nightmare from a standard heightened scene.

Casting

Players who excel at sustained emotional commitment and physical precision tend to serve Nightmare scenes best. The game is less suited to performers whose primary strength is verbal wit; the theatrical mode is imagistic rather than comedic.

Amy Seham documents Nightmare as a game format in Whose Improv Is It Anyway? (2001), describing an ImprovOlympic performance in which players free-associated, exaggerated, and recombined elements from an audience member's personal story to improvise a piece called "Kate's Nightmare." The format illustrates the long-form tradition's interest in drawing on real personal material as the source for ensemble fiction.

Matt Fotis places Nightmare alongside Dream and Freeze as a recognized short-form game in the ImprovOlympic repertoire in Long Form Improvisation and American Comedy (2014), noting that these games were used as openers and closers for full-length shows in the early years of the company.

The Nightmare game belongs to a cluster of exercises and games that use non-realistic logic as their operating principle: along with Dream scenes and free-association formats, it reflects an interest in theatrical surrealism that appears in physical theatre traditions influenced by the work of Antonin Artaud and various twentieth-century European avant-garde movements. No single originator within the improv tradition has been documented.