The Nachtmerrie: Death by Sleep Paralysis

Thanks to my FB friend Scott for this utterly fascinating article. Ever heard of SUNDS (Sudden Noctural Death Syndrome)? Me neither. Read about it here, how scores of people all around the world have died in their sleep from paralyzing fear.

By 1986, the Hmong deaths had slowed, but remained a striking epidemiological fact. Adler was a graduate student at UCLA studying traditional belief narratives at the time. She’d been researching what she called “nocturnal pressing spirit attacks,” or what scientific literature called sleep paralysis. Fascinatingly, sleep paralysis is known to just about all cultures, and it is almost always associated with nocturnal evil. In Indonesia, it’s called digeunton (“pressed on”). In China, it’s bei gui ya (“held by a ghost”). The Hungarians know it as boszorkany-nyomas, “witches’ pressure.” In Newfoundland, the spirit that comes is called the Old Hag, and the experience of sleep paralysis, ag rog, “hag ridden.” The Dutch name comes closest to what English speakers know. They call the presence nachtmerrie, the night-mare. The “mare” in question comes from the German mahr or Old Norse mara, which denoted a generally female supernatural being who in Adler’s words, “lay on people’s chests, suffocating them.” The etymology of mare isn’t clear, but the term is a fruit of the Indo-European language tree, likely from moros (death), mer (drive out), or mar (to pound, bruise, crush).

This is so intriguing. I’ve never experienced any sort of paralysis during sleep. The worst dreams I’ve had involve me moving in extreme slow motion, desperately trying to run from something, but completely unable to move quickly. I do remember one terrifying dream where I was trying to reach for my rosary but no matter how far I stretched my arm I couldn’t grasp it. I don’t remember any paralysis, though. And I once dreamt I was in the Apocolypse. The skies were dark and all around the land seemed to be war-ravaged. The faces of the people around me were stricken with terror and worry. Everyone was lining up in front of tables to get tickets to leave. I know. Weird, right? Tickets to try to leave the freakin’ End of Days. Amidst the chaos I heard someone say, very somberly but without fear, “There is nowhere to go. It is everywhere.” Anyway, back to the SUNDS story, which half-way through delves into the nature of belief and biology– and the theory that intense (negative) beliefs might literally kill you.

Drawing on all this evidence, Adler makes the provocative claim that the Laotian immigrants of the 1980s were in some sense killed by their powerful cultural belief in night spirits. It was not a simple process.

“It is my contention that in the context of severe and ongoing stress related to cultural disruption and national resettlement (exacerbated by intense feelings of powerlessness about existence in the United States), and from the perspective of a belief system in which evil spirits have the power to kill men who do not fulfill their religious obligations,” Adler writes, “the solitary Hmong man confronted by the numinous terror of the night-mare (and aware of its murderous intent) can die of SUNDS.”

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