As if to thwart psychoanalysis, nightmares in Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya do not present signs and symbols that need to be decoded in order to give us a clearer picture of the protagonist Victoria’s unconscious self, but rather feature characters who are quite clearly recognisable as the unsublimated cast of her waking life. Instead of gesturing at a proto-Freudian understanding of dreams as manifesting material that needs to be decoded, the novel opens a lens onto pre-Freudian theories of dreaming that still held currency for Dacre’s readership: dreams as signs from an external, rather than an internal, power, and nightmares as symptoms of bad physical health. As well as functioning as a bridge to these extra-textual theories, Zofloya also draws on the specifically gothicGothic literary possibilities afforded by nightmares. The continuity between Victoria’s nightmares and her realityReality affirm Eve Sedgwick’s observation that the archetypal “Gothic dream” is a “duplication of the surrounding reality,” but nightmaring in Zofloya goes a step further when the oneiric realm itself becomes prey to Victoria’s will via the machinations of her diabolically aligned servant, the titular Moor Zofloya. This intervention into dreamspace helps to mark Victoria out as a uniquely extreme and sensational gothic villain.