Nightmares, Sleep Paralysis and Witchcraft Accusations

Owen Davies
Owen Davies

The historical record shows that personal experience of bewitchment was multifarious, concerning livestock, goods, chattels, and agricultural processes. However, over the last five centuries the majority of those experiences that were deemed severe enough to lead to the formal accusation, prosecution, or physical assault of supposed witches, concerned people suffering from ill health, or some other form of physical or mental discomfort.


Other medical conditions of a psychological or neurophysiological nature, such as depression, schizophrenia and epilepsy are also recognisable.


In the English language, one specific manifestation of the sleep paralysis experience was known as the nightmare, and in many European cultures, its cause was attributed to witchcraft. This “nightmare” experience can also be identified in other accounts where people claimed to have been nocturnally oppressed by such related supernatural beings as the Devil, animalistic fairies, and the spirits of the dead.


Sleep paralysis is not a rare phenomenon. Recent surveys amongst a variety of populations around the world suggest that 20-45% of people experience at least one sleep paralysis episode in their lifetimes (Kotorii et al. 2001; Cheyne et al. 1999; Blackmore 1998; Spanos et al. 1995; Wing et al. 1999; Wing et al. 1994; Ohaeri et al. 1992; Fukada et al. 1987).


Speech is likewise impeded, and only inarticulate sounds can be made. Most episodes last less than ten minutes, but as long as thirty minutes has been reported (Thorpy 2001, 6). Sufferers may, however, feel their paralysis has gone on for considerably longer. The experience that will be defined as a nightmare in this discussion has a number of other accompanying diagnostic features that occur less frequently, perhaps amongst 5-20% of the population. As Cheyne et al. (1999b, 316) point out, reports suggesting over a third of the population experience sleep paralysis may give the “false impression” that a large proportion of the population are experiencing what I shall now describe.


They usually concern a sense of a physical presence in the room, which manifests itself either visually, aurally, or both. Those who have had such an experience often describe the strong sense of fear or even terror such as presences provoke. One of the respondents to the sleep paralysis forum of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurology website gives an inkling of how frightening the nightmare can be. The man had fought for thirteen consecutive months in frontline combat in Korea, but said of his one nightmare attack in 1964: “Never, before or since, have I ever experienced the fear of that night.”




Sleep paralysis has been a topic of discussion amongst European and Chinese writers for more than two thousand years. The influential Greek physician Galen examined the causation of the nightmare or ephialtes during the second century AD, and a description of the experience appears in a Chinese book on dreams dated to as early as 400 BC.

Descriptions of the “nightmare”, however, only appear in English in the later medieval period. One fourteenth-century manuscript describes, for example, how the “nightmare” lay on top of people at night (Kuhn and Reidy, 1975), and the word was included in the earliest printed English-Latin dictionary, the Promptorium parvulorum of 1499, where it is translated as “Epialtes, vel effialtes, geronoxa, et strix.”

Cures for those suffering from the night “mare” appear in late Saxon manuscripts, though these make little mention of the actual symptoms (Jolly 1996, 146, 149; Kittredge 1929, 21). One of the most detailed early medieval accounts of the nightmare experience, concerning a twelfth-century English knight, Stephen of Hoyland, makes no reference to the “night mare” because it is in Latin, and so the term “ephialtem” is used to describe Stephen’s “intolerabili phantasia vexari” and “in somnis oppressus”, which was attributed to a demon (Robertson 1876, 44).

The main medical explanations for the experience up until the twentieth-century were based upon Galen’s view that it was the result of gastric disturbances. These led either to noxious undigested vapours rising to the head and irritating the nervous system, or alternatively caused a distension of the stomach, which impeded circulation and led to stagnation of the blood.

With the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis during the earlier-twentieth-century, new explanations for the nightmare were sought in not a bodily malfunction but mental conflict. It was one of Freud’s pupils, Ernest Jones, who put forward the most detailed psychoanalytical interpretation of the experience in his erudite study ‘On the Nightmare’ (1931).




Meanwhile some fun was had spotting literary appearances of the nightmare, sightings being confirmed in the work of several nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novelists, such as Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, and Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Beautiful and Damned’ (Schneck 1994; Davies 1997; Herman 1997; Schneck 1971).


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