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You can say I had a dream and you can say I had a nightmare. But then you can say He is dreaming, yet you cannot say He is nightmaring....you have to say He is having a nightmare.

Why is that? How did the one shift without the same thing happening to the other? When did this shift occur? Or was dream always a verb? Was there a ever a verb for nightmaring?

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    I know Gen-Z happily makes up verbs via gerund as they see fit. If there is noun Q you can describe as a state of being then Q-ing exists. Example “adulting”. In casual speak for example recounting a story of bad psychedelic trip you could say “I was just nightmaring” and that would probably fly okay. But it’s very very niche.
    – Sidharth Ghoshal
    Commented Apr 23 at 0:58
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    True, but unrelated, since I'm interested here in the traditional centuries-old uses of the words rather than just what kids having been saying since the 2010s, which doesn't really have any bearing on historical usage.
    – temporary_user_name
    Commented Apr 23 at 1:23
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    Apparently it was originally a verb: The earliest known use of the verb nightmare is in the mid 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for nightmare is from 1660, in the writing of Robert Wild, nonconformist minister and satirical poet. It is also recorded as a noun from the Middle English period (1150—1500). oed.com/dictionary/nightmare_v?tl=true
    – Gio
    Commented Apr 23 at 7:09
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    Why is "to murder" much commoner than "to manslaughter", or "to feel" than "to propriocept"? I would guess dreams are more common than nightmares, "dream" is shorter and more convenient to use, "dream" has a lot of metaphorical extensions compared to nightmare (although that may in part be due to the first two things), and English has many other words for imagining bad things that can be used instead. But you won't find a single reason why, or clear proof of it.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Apr 23 at 8:36
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    It isn't really possible to answer "why" questions like this. It's all just accidents of history. Some things become idiomatic, others don't, there's no logic to it. It's like trying to explain why different fashions come and go.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 24 at 20:39

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There are a few historical uses of nightmare as a verb (Oxford English Dictionary has several listed here: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/nightmare_v).

In terms of why it didn't catch on, your guess is as a good as mine - but I would support what a few commenters have said about dream being shorter, more convenient, and crucially more common than nightmare. Common words change much more and faster than less common words (see also - https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/37503/what-is-the-reason-for-having-irregular-verbs).

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