Can we die because of a terrifying nightmare?

If you mean like going into cardiac arrest, yeah, that’s fully possible. You can’t actually die of fear alone as far as I know.

I think so. If you have a nightmare which as, it’s too scary, you can die from your heart stopping. But it’s rare, which I know. The nightmare has to be VERY, VERY, VERY! Scary in order for that to happen. VERY. Scary.

I have always wondered about this. Very often terrifying dreams like falling off a cliff just wake you up—sort of an auto-protection system.

I have had periods where I have had horrifically terrifying dreams and instead of waking up at the fatal moment they just morph to another terrifying situation, from being shot and actually feeling the bullets but instead of dying switching to drowning but instead of dying switching to being buried alive and so on. From dreams like that I eventually awoke drained both emotionally and physically. I have no idea how much strain they put on my system.

I think I have even died in a dream, and found myself in the shadow world—the undead—unable to connect to the living people in my dream. But I [obviously, since shadows can’t type] woke up from those too.

I think, if you are reasonably healthy, they won’t kill you.

If it gives you a heart attack, sure.
But I doubt that would ever happen to me. I have been murdered and crushed to death in my dreams and died in a nuclear explosion, and I found none of that terrifying.

I doubt it. There is evidence that shows that people who stop breathing while sleeping, like if they have a severe case of apnea, have nightmares or night terrors during that time. So, it is believed that it isn’t the nightmare causing the stopped breathing, but actually the other way around. If they cure their apnea they cure their nightmares.

I have been shot, chased by bad people, knifed, all sorts of horrible nightmares where I am terrified, and never died from it.

@ragingloli All that means is that nuclear explosions and being crushed to death are not scary to you. What if you dreamt that you woke up as a bible-belt Republican, and that your life as @ragingloli had only been a dream?

Perchance, according to Twilight Zone’s episode titled Perchance to Dream, which I still find scary after 54 years!

Only if you’re a character in The Matrix.

If you have a heart attack and die in your sleep, no one will ever know whether you were dreaming or what kind of dream it was.

“Nightmares can kill through heart attack or serious arrhythmias only in people with pre-existing heart disease; not in healthy individuals.”

“Source”: Well, I have lost the reference but this seems medically sound (since I am not a doctor but happy to make assumptions.Your heartbeat increases during bad dreams. Ergo.)

I did once dream I was in a fairly chaotic brawl with a vacuum cleaner, it was a blur of hoses & those handy extendable poles you get to reach into awkward corners where dust is just a mightmare.
Anyway, I woke up with hickeys all about my neck & upper torso, not tragic but still.

From time to time I suffer from sleep paralysis, a terrifying condition in which you think you’re awake but can’t move and can’t breathe or can barely breathe. There may also be hypnagogic hallucinations that cause you to think something is actually going on.

When this happens to me, my heart pounds so hard that it feels like it’s going to rip a hole in my chest. I’m in a total panic and feel like I’m suffocating. Once out of it, it takes me a while to spool down—sometimes a long while.

Luckily my husband, who normally sleeps about as lightly as a tree stump, has somehow learned that when I make a certain soft little whimpering sound, he has to respond and jostle me awake. Not gently, either: I wouldn’t care if he shoved me out of bed or left me black and blue, just as long as he made it stop.

These incidents, when I may look like I’m safe in bed, are the most horrifying and frightening experiences I’ve ever had. I don’t doubt that I could die in one if the strain was too much for my heart. And no one would think anything but that I had died peacefully in my sleep.