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alarm clock. She has to synchronize it with her dream experience of finding Freddy until the alarm rings and to
grab him at exactly the right moment without him getting her first. Curiously, this seems to imply that time
runs at the same pace within someone’s dream as in reality: Nancy’s wristwatch in her dream is synchronised
with the alarm clock in her real bedroom. Thus, dreams in Nightmare appear very reality-like: without a
distortion of time (at least not for the dreamers), without surrealist landscapes etc. Once she has brought the
killer over to her world and attacked him, Krueger seeks revenge, setting Nancy’s sleeping mother on fire (we
remember that she was part of the mob who killed him, turning him into an undead dream phantom in the first
place) who subsequently sinks into her bed, thus entering Freddy’s world for good (and somewhat grotesquely
waving goodbye to Nancy and her father as she does so). After her disappearance in the bed-portal, Freddy
himself emerges out of the same bed, first stretching the sheet into Freddy-shape, similar to the wall above the
bed in the scene mentioned above, then cutting through it and going after Nancy (00:82-00:84). Thus, the bed is
once more identified with a gate into Krueger’s world of nightmares: it is an entry as well as an exit point for
the dreamer/victim and the killer alike – Freddy now explicitly coming out of the bed (without Nancy’s
mediation), and finding the sheet as his first obstacle.
Another interesting as well as iconic scene in which the bed is depicted in this function, is the one rendering
Glen’s (Johnny Depp) death (00:65) – though the passage works only one way for Glen who does not try to
consciously enter or exit the dream world. As Pinedo writes, he ‘lulls himself into a false sense of security. After
all, he is home in bed, his parents are downstairs, and he is surrounded by stereo and television.’ (Pinedo, p.
95). We find the teenager in his bed, falling asleep – despite Nancy’s vehement warning ‘Whatever you do, don’t
fall asleep!’ (00:58), which she repeats ten years later to her son in New Nightmare (00:73) –, the TV set on his
lap, which plays the US national anthem and announces the time before its picture and sound collapse into
white noise after midnight. Similar to the idea staged in Poltergeist, 15 where ghosts emerge from the television
set’s white noise, as they seem to be transported through a canal in which there is no longer any information
submitted, here, Fred Krueger emerges as soon as the white noise enters Glen’s room at midnight. His red-andgreen-striped
arm reaches out of Glen’s bed and violently pulls him into it. As soon as the boy can no longer be
seen, the hole in his bed spouts a huge blood fountain up to the ceiling. Glen’s body is thus dematerialized and
turned into the equivalent of the television’s white noise: a stream of blur which is yet, somehow, the essence of
what was there before. Although there is no violence shown, this scene sticks to a viewer’s memory as
especially gruesome – perhaps in part because the sense of security and comfort suggested by the bed is so
brutally disrupted.
In this scene, as well as in the scenes discussed above, the bed is, first, established as a direct gateway
connecting waking reality and dream experience. In Nightmare 1’s horrific context it is definitively detached
from positive connotations of repose and refuge as the bed as a safe space turns into a place of sudden and
violent death. By blurring the boundaries between reality and dream, which is done by aesthetic and narrative
means, as well by the fact that harm experienced in a dream affects the real person, Nightmare 1 further draws
our attention to the circumstance that the bed is where a profound ontological insecurity is established as
dream and reality merge into one. We encounter this phenomenon in our everyday lives when an element out
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