By Night Overwhelmed

The experience of falling asleep only to be awakened by terror, realizing you cannot move and feeling something pressing on your chest, is surprisingly common in human experience, though the entity that one sees—or not—often depends on cultural expectations. Night-hag, demon, or invisible assailant, in this special Halloween episode and season four finale, I bring you the story of the “Night-Mare.”

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben, with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

For more on Lilith, check out The Serpent.
For more on witchcraft in early Scandinavia, check out Runes and Songs. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:15 Intro
• 3:05 A History of Nightmares
• 7:14 The Mare and the Witch
• 12:06 Modern Medicine
• 18:41 Conclusion
• 21:33 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben. Just a heads up before we get started, this episode acknowledges the existence of sex. Listener discretion is advised.

Intro
In Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” the protagonist sleeps soundly… at first. As time passes, he begins to feel haunted by a presence, and in one diary entry, he describes a terrifying nocturnal attack, writing:

May 25. As the evening comes on, an incomprehensible feeling of disquietude seizes me, just as if night concealed some terrible menace toward me. I dine quickly, and then try to read, but I do not understand the words, and can scarcely distinguish the letters. Then I walk up and down my drawing-room, oppressed by a feeling of confused and irresistible fear, a fear of sleep […] Then, I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner […] I sleep—a long time—two or three hours perhaps—then a dream—no—a nightmare lays hold of me. I feel that I am in bed and asleep—I feel it and I know it—and I feel also that somebody is coming close to me, is looking at me, touching me, is getting on to my bed, is kneeling on my chest, is taking my neck between his hands and squeezing it—squeezing it with all his might in order to strangle me. I struggle, bound by that terrible powerlessness which paralyzes us in our dreams; I try to cry out—but I cannot; I want to move—I cannot; I try, with the most violent efforts and out of breath, to turn over and throw off this being which is crushing and suffocating me—I cannot! And then suddenly I wake up, shaken and bathed in perspiration; I light a candle and find that I am alone.

This experience of falling asleep only to be wakened by terror, realizing you cannot move, and feeling something pressing on your chest is surprisingly common in human experience, though the entity that one sees—or not—often depends on cultural expectations. Night-hag, demon, or invisible assailant, in this special Halloween episode and season four finale, I bring you the story of the “night-mare.”

A History of Nightmares
Descriptions of spirits who performed “pressing attacks” on unsuspecting sleepers have existed since the beginning of recorded history. Ancient Assyrian texts describe the alû, a malevolent spirit with no ears and no mouth that lies on his sleeping victims. A passage from a cuneiform text describes one such victim as the one, “Whom in his bed the wicked Alû covered, / Whom the wicked ghost by night overwhelmed.” In the closely related Babylonian and Hebrew traditions, this spirit becomes feminine in the figure of Lilith. Apocryphally described in the Abrahamic biblical tradition as Adam’s first wife before the creation of Eve, Lilith is associated with sexual attacks on male sleepers and suffocating or draining attacks on women and children.

Across the Mediterranean, the ancient Greeks had the ephialtes, a masculine spirit typically associated with Pan and the other satyrs, whose name means “leap upon.” The second-century seer Artemidorus Daldianus, wrote in his manual for dream interpretation, the Oneirocritica, “Ephialtes is identified with Pan but he has a different meaning. If he oppresses or weighs a man down without speaking, it signifies tribulations and distress. But whatever he says upon interrogation is true. If he gives someone something or has sexual intercourse with someone, it foretells great profit, especially if he does not weigh that person down.”

Out of the tradition of sexual encounters with these pressing spirits come the figures of the incubus (Lat. incubare, “to lie upon”) and the succubus (Lat. subcubare, “to lie under”), both of which appear to have originated in the West during the first few centuries of the Common Era. With the pathologizing of sexual impulses among early Christian authorities, the sexual component of the night-mare intertwined with the terrorizing one. In his On the City of God, the fifth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote:

There is, too, a very general rumor, which many have verified by their own experience, or which trustworthy persons who have heard the experience of others corroborate, that sylvans and Pans, who are commonly called “incubi,” had often made wicked assaults upon women, and satisfied their lust upon them; and that certain devils, called Duses by the Gauls, are constantly attempting and effecting this impurity is so generally affirmed, that it were impudent to deny it.

Night-mare spirits likewise haunted the Muslim world, where the eleventh-century physician Ibn Sina in his treatise The Canon of Medicine, associated the night-mare, called al-Jathum, with diseases of the brain or mind and identified three terms for the night-mare spirit: al-kabus (“the squeezer”), al-khaniq (“the strangler”), and al-gathum “that which sits upon.” Later, debate arose about whether these entities were spirits, called jinn, or symptoms of a physical, psychological, or spiritual ailment. Other examples abound from places as far afield from one another as Japan, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Iceland. Every continent features some belief in a nighttime visitor determined to press or otherwise torment their helpless victims.

The Mare and the Witch
You may already be familiar with Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare. Completed in 1781, the painting displays an unconscious woman in white, her head and arms thrown over the side of the bed, with a demonic creature perched on her chest and a black horse with bright, blank eyes staring from behind the bed-curtain. Designed to reflect the psychological experience of the night-mare, the painting is both fascinating and disturbing. Contemporary audiences thought so too, and shortly after The Nightmare’s first exhibition at the Royal Academy of London in 1782, the image was parodied, imitated, and mass-produced.

The horse in the picture is likely a play on the term “nightmare,” a term that can be traced back to the Old English maere and Old Norse mara, a wraith-like spirit who was believed to steal horses, riding them at night so that they were exhausted come morning. These malevolent spirits could also tangle the hair of sleepers into “mare-locks,” which could also bring on illness. Among the peoples of Scandinavia, it was believed that witches or sorcerers had the power to invoke the Mara, sending it to attack enemies by night by “riding” them, pressing the chests of helpless sleepers and smothering them.

This association between the night-mare and witchcraft is extensive, reaching back centuries. In the thirteenth-century Ynglinga Saga, written by the Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, a powerful witch assists in the assassination of a king by invoking the Mara. Driva, the abandoned wife of King Vanlande of Uppsala, turned to the Finnish sorceress Huld, begging her to find the means to force Vanlande to return to his queen or, barring that, to kill him. When Vanlande falls asleep that night, the Mara, or night-mare, tramples him. Sturluson writes,

Driva bribed the witch-wife Huld, either that she should bewitch Vanlande to return to Finland or kill him. When this witch-work was going on Vanlande was at Upsal, and a great desire came over him to go to Finland; but his friends and counsellors advised him against it and said the witchcraft of the Finn people showed itself in this desire of his to go there. He then became very drowsy and laid himself down to sleep; but when he had slept but a little while he cried out, saying that the Mara was treading upon him. His men hastened to him to help him; but when they took hold of his head she trod on his legs, and when they laid hold of his legs, she pressed upon his head; and it was his death. The Swedes took his body and burnt it at a river called Skytaa (Skuta), where a standing stone was raised over him […]

Swedish historian of religion Catharina Raudvere has pointed out that Scandinavian folk belief surrounding the Mara or nightmare-hag reflects both the fear of human malice and the shame associated with the sexual dimension of the night-mare.

By the early modern period, the night-mare in Europe and in the Americas took the more familiar shape of the witch, and witchcraft trials feature a number of testimonies from victims claiming to have been “witch-ridden” in the night. One 1599 trial in England features the following example, in which Joan Jorden testified that her neighbor, Olive Barthram, sent a nocturnal spirit to attack her, saying:

At 11 o’clock at night, first scraping on the walls, then knocking, after that shuffling in the rushes: […] [he] kissed her three or four times, and slavered on her, and lying on her breast he pressed her so sore that she could not speak, at other times he held her hands that she could not stir, and restrained her voice that she could not answer.

Jorden’s story combines the fearsome and sexual traditions of the night-mare into a single experience. Even after the end of the early modern “witch craze,” stories of the night-mare experience would intrigue modern physicians and psychologists alike.

Modern Medicine
By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, physicians had begun to transfer the night-mare from the realm of spirit to that of the body, avidly seeking medical explanations for the phenomenon. One such scholar, eighteenth-century Scottish physician John Bond in his 1753 Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare described the experience this way:

The Night-mare generally seizes people sleeping on their backs, and often begins with frightful dreams, which are soon succeeded by a difficult respiration, a violent oppression on the breast, and a total privation of voluntary motion. In this agony they sigh, groan, utter indistinct sounds, and remain in the jaws of death, till, by the utmost efforts of their nature, or some external assistance, they escape out of that dreadful torpid state. As soon as they shake off that vast oppression, and are able to move the body, they are affected by strong palpitation, great anxiety, languor, and uneasiness; which symptoms gradually abate, and are succeeded by the pleasing reflection of having escaped such imminent danger.

By the nineteenth century, physicians concerned themselves with the emotional distress experienced by the patient and the potentially harmful results of abject terror on the body and mind. Scottish physical and philosopher Robert MacNish wrote in his 1834 study, The Philosophy of Sleep:

Imagination cannot conceive the horrors [the night-mare] frequently gives rise to, or language describe it in adequate terms […] Everything horrible, disgusting or terrifying in the physical or moral world is brought before [the victim] in fearful array; he is hissed at by serpents, tortured by demons, stunned by the hollow voices and cold touch of apparitions […] At one moment he may have the consciousness of the malignant being at his side […] its icy breath is felt diffusing itself over his visage, and he knows he is face-to-face with a fiend […] Or, he may have the idea of a monstrous hag squatted upon his breast—mute, motionless and malignant […] whose intolerable weight crushes the breath out of his body.

In a further effort to move the night-mare experience from the realm of the body to that of the mind, early twentieth-century Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud pointed to the tension between the patient’s desire to act and the suppression of movement in sleep, writing:

What is signified by the sensation of impeded movement, which so often occurs in the dream, and which is so closely allied to anxiety? One wants to move, and is unable to stir from the spot; or one wants to accomplish something, and meets one obstacle after another […] It is convenient, but inadequate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to […] We are justified in supposing that this sensation, constantly appearing in sleep, serves some purpose or other in representation, and is brought about by a need occurring in the dream material for this sort of representation […] The sensation of impeded motion represents a conflict of will.

In 1931, Freud’s biographer and friend, Ernest Jones, published his own study, entitled simply On the Nightmare. In it, he claimed that the visions and sensations the victim experienced did not occur in waking. Instead, he insisted that these were dreams, and the misinterpretation of these experiences as real was a sign of either feeble-mindedness or psychopathology. In the manner of his friend and mentor, Jones viewed nightmares as a symptom of unresolved sexual conflict, insisting:

Conflict of this fierce intensity never arises except over matters of sexuality, for on the one hand the sexual instinct is the source for most resistless desires and impulses, and on the other no feelings are repressed with such iron rigor as are certain of those that take their origin in this instinct […] The malady known as Nightmare is always an expression of intense mental conflict centering about some form of ‘repressed’ sexual desire.

It took nearly half a century for American psychiatrist Sim Liddon to change this view of the night-mare by connecting it to the physiological phenomenon of sleep paralysis, writing, “the experience of sleep paralysis has no specific psychological meaning in itself and that it might be interpreted by different patients in different ways.” In the twenty-first century, sleep paralysis has been linked to memories of abuse, trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder, but it also occurs in a large number of healthy people with no such traumatic experiences. The current understanding is a REM cycle out of sequence, in which brain processes normally associated with either sleep or wakefulness become disordered, causing the semi-conscious sleeper to feel the normal suppression of muscle movement in sleep as pressure on the chest and experience auditory and visual hallucinations. While the visions the victim sees tend to vary by culture, the night-mare experience appears to be universal, with documented cases on every inhabited continent.

Conclusion
In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States began an investigation of a string of sudden, unexplained deaths. A large number of Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia, mostly young men from South China, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, were reported to be dying in the night. Many were discovered lying on their backs wearing expressions of extreme fear. These mysterious deaths spiked between 1981 and 1982, and the CDC gave the phenomenon the name Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. The average age of the victims was 33; most had been in the United States for less than two years. A 2008 study claims that most of these unexplained deaths—though not all—could be attributed to arrhythmias and other forms of congenital heart disease, and the new name given to this phenomenon is Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome or SADS. The surviving Hmong immigrants, however, attributed these deaths to another cause. Many said that, since they had been unable to properly worship due to the decades-long civil war in Laos and the Vietnam War, the guardian spirits of their ancestors or village could not or would not protect them from harm. These deaths were the work of evil forces.

Shortly after Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare gained popularity, he created an engraving of the image with these lines from Erasmus Darwin’s poem “Night-Mare”: “So on his Nightmare through the evening fog / Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog; / Seeks some love-wilder’d maid with sleep oppress’d, / Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.”

But just in case you have trouble falling asleep tonight thinking about this, you can always recite this traditional German charm against nightmares: “I lay me down to sleep; / No night-mare shall plague me / Until they swim all the waters that flow upon the earth / And count all the stars that shine in the sky.”

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about the night-mare and sleep paralysis, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes, especially Shelly Adler’s book Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.