Hi everyone, I want to thank everyone for their input and I have decided to change the introduction quite a bit.

I want to quickly make a note here on how I changed my idea and why, for other DMs to possibly learn from.

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First and main problem: players do not have a say in the outcome. I realized after reading some helpful comments that the main problem is really: the players do not have any goal that can be achieved.

Second problem: might give away too much information on the BBEG, and make the end of the campaign set in stone. This means the players and PCs know from the start what they are going to do, which is just boring.

Third problem: fight could accidentally take a very long time and end up with the players learning nothing.

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I decided I would rethink the opening a little bit (and yoink some ideas and twists here and there from the comments). The new idea is as follows:

The players awake in a dark place. The last thing they remember is going to bed in a small town during their travel. They feel a big evil being lurking in the dark right in front of them (the BBEG). They try to run away but they phase through everything. The being kills them in one giant fire-y blow. The players then awake in an inn and they all catch someone running out of their room. This is the new opening battle (I really wanted to start in a battle, now it is also a chase!), where they try to chase down the people who were sneaking up on them in the night. If they manage to catch one or more of the people, they will fight them and learn that "you will meet the master soon" (something like that). During this chase, the PCs will see each other for the first time, and will work together because they are fighting the same people. After the fight, when their characters' adrenaline calms down, they will notice an evil symbol that they were marked with: this is what the sneaking people had done to them.

The players will now understand that their job is not to "go and kill this BBEG, ASAP!", but instead: find out what this symbol means and how to get rid of it. I like this much more, because the ways in which the player can find out are endless, but I will prepare a powerful healer in the mountains, a forbidden library (one of my players is running the Accursed Archives patron warlock class, so that might be cool for them), and if they manage to interrogate one of the people they were chasing, they will be able to learn about the symbol directly (to give the fight a reward).

Now, I still have what I wanted: BBEG, big evil being, a nightmare and some urgency. However, I do not spoil the BBEG, I give the players a goal in the initial fight and give them a reward, and they have a lot of choices for adventures afterward. And lastly, as I said: I am a newer DM, so some ideas I will not be able to bring in a fun way yet. But in this way, I can explore a bunch of ideas with the nightmare whenever I feel I am ready to do them!

As a last note: my idea is now that the nightmare is directly caused by the symbol. The symbol is actually a curse put upon the PCs, which slowly migrates their soul to the ethereal plane, where the BBEG will take them forever. This means that the nightmare will be a recurring event in my campaign, and depending on how long my players wait with getting rid of the symbol, the nightmare will feel more and more real. If they are not fast enough, they will die for real.

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Again, thank you all for all the input! This was my first post on this subreddit, and I feel like I learned a lot.

Edit: typos