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The most famous work of this Swiss artist is undoubtedly “Nightmare”, or, to be more precise, a series of four paintings. In these famous oil paintings, Fuseli depicted an incubus seated on a sleeping woman. An incubus is a demon who appears to a woman at night when she is asleep and seduces her (the male equivalent is a succubus). These ‘sexual’ demons are actually a symbol that combines repressed desire and fear of desire. Freud later explained that unwanted sexuality is expressed in our dreams as a nightmare and Füssli figured it out himself much earlier, after studying European folklore: where female demons and male ones torment the hypocritical righteous and their facially virtuous wives with lust at night.