1884, Marianne Filleul, Ellen Tremaine, or The Poem without an Ending, The Religious Tract Society, page 203:"What happened next I can scarce describe, for it sometimes seems to me as if it wasn't I myself who went through it all, but some one else in a tale, or myself in a nightmarey sort of a dream.
1914, William J. Robinson, "A Visit to the Inferno, or a Case of Appendicitis: A Personal Narrative", The Southern Practitioner, Volume XXXVI, No. 3, March 1914, page 129:To what low degree of criminal degeneracy must man fall to subject a human being to the ante-operative anxiety, to the shock of the anesthesia, to the post-operative vomiting and retching, to the pain of the wound, to the danger of infection, to the horrible paralytic distension of the bowels, to the nightmarey nights, to the fear of death — and all for some wretched lucre or rotten "reputation."
1917, Grace Hodgson Flandrau, Cousin Julia, D. Appleton and Company (1917), page 70:The house itself, which was built before the arrival of the von Ernsts, looked, in an uncertain nightmarey way, like the blurred skyline of a cathedral town.