Nightmares

Why do we have nightmares? I've always been fascinated by this concept. Nightmares are interesting because they force us to gaze upon something that we either didnt want to see, or that we have kept buried away and now it suddenly rises before our eyes. I know very little about the whole concept behind how a nightmare occurs in the brain, but I do know about nightmares themselves. Having a nightmare is like having a dark reflection. Nightmares tell us about ourselves and what we're afraid of. What plagues us and what it is that we dont want to see. The skeletons come out of the closet, and they dont just come out, they come out and dance before our eyes and poke fun at us. The most recent nightmare I had which has stuck with me is an interesting one. There was a man wearing some kind of pilots uniform, his face however was dark and there was an eyeball-like thing floating around him. He was laughing and then all of a sudden I was in a small pipe, crawling through, crawling until I saw, at the end of the pipe, a dark reflection of myself staring back at me. Just staring and not moving, our eyes connected. I remember feeling very uneasy looking at this image of myself. When I woke up I felt disturbed. This was a nightmare but a very odd one. This is what is so fascinating about nightmares. They seem to have no rhyme or reason to them and yet they disturb us. Sometimes I'll have a nightmare and wake up, looking around and wondering if it actually happened. Of course, back 'in the old days' there was an explanation for this: nightmares were caused by demons. Demons came into our rooms at nigth and sat on our chests when we were sleeping, this caused us to have a nightmare. Here is an example of this: http://www.kser.org/shows/dawghaus/photogallery/photo7606/fuseli-nightmare.jpg
If anyone else has any prominent nightmares that they'd like to post, please do so and maybe we can all examine them and find out what they mean...jolly good fun!