'Nightmare' - a path with no horses

Sometimes the path of a word’s story is darker than we originally predict.

Take the word nightmare, for instance. Imagine the following entry in a glossary of juvenile literature:

sin'-i-steed (noun) – a wild horse creature in Lois Lowry’s children’s novel Gossamer that inflicts nightmares upon sleeping humans. From sinister + steed, referring to –mare in ‘nightmare.’

Inspired by Lowry’s imaginative derivation, I looked up nightmare in my NOAD (New Oxford American Dictionary) – watching, of course, for an equine reference, but not really expecting to find one. After all, few of us wake up in a cold sweat over dreams of stampedes.

Unfortunately, I was right.

I suggest we button up our jackets, because a chill wind is blowing down this wooded path. The sunlight is suddenly veiled; night is falling with abnormal eagerness. You may want to mark the trail with pebbles or rocks, in case we lose our way, or need to make a fast retreat.

As we lean into the wind and press on against our better judgment, the question rises in our minds: what is the source of our nightmares? We know the signs: the pumping adrenaline; the struggle for breath; the body jerking upright in self-preservation; the sweat; the hand reflexively checking the chest, the center of life; the racing heartbeat. All humankind, regardless of language or culture, has intimate knowledge of this terror.

Our journey will reveal how our linguistic forefathers (and -mothers) explained this phenomenon.

Thick darkness has fallen around us now; there is no moon. We are in the Dark Ages in England; I can’t make out the time or place. The Anglo-Saxon domination of the native Britons is complete, down to the language that we now call Old English. Breaking through the eerie quiet, a woman's scream spits forth one word repeatedly in contempt and blind terror: Maere! The shadows shift palpably around us.

Old English maere means ‘incubus,’ a male demon that has sexual intercourse with sleeping women – not to be confused with the contemporary term mearh, ‘horse.’ We shudder in this place where people fear demons as a legitimate threat when their eyes are closed – or use them as an excuse for infidelity or deformity when their eyes are open. We turn back, hurriedly retracing our steps (thank you for marking it well) and search for the later marriage of night and maere, the spawn of our study.

The Middle Ages is where the official wedding takes place. We suspect the two were sleeping together long before this. But here we are struck by an interesting development: in place of the word nightmare, the people inhabiting England in this period are repeatedly referring to a “night hag." A peasant on a manor is trudging through the muck of a field, circles under his eyes, complaining about how the hag rode him all night. So now we observe that the ‘mare’ of nightmare has acquired a purely feminine meaning – that of a she-demon straddling a person’s chest to suffocate her victim’s breath, effectually trapping the soul.

Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon root maere has near cousins in other Germanic and Nordic languages – and so does our fateful word nightmare: in these countries today, the word for terrible dreams also means “she-demon of the night.” On our walk back to the present, the shadows retreat behind us and pale patches of sun hesitantly alight on the forest floor. Now that we are approaching safety, our inculcated superiority complex returns. We begin to dismiss our ancestors’ supernatural oppressors as figments of their uneducated imaginations. Dreams are just a product of our subconscious mind, we remind ourselves.

However, we are startled by a foggy trailhead hooking off of this path – the etymology of the word incubus itself. The Latin word incubo actually means – we stare at each other in disbelief – ‘nightmare,’ from Latin incubare meaning ‘lie on.’ Chilled by the implications, we hurry on toward the present . . . If peoples from various ancient times and cultures have perceived similar evil forces, could it be that our 21^st century senses are simply desensitized to a common reality?

Back in the shelter of our own era, we could distract ourselves by discussing the meaning of the word haggard, which surely is related to ‘hag ridden’ . . . or we could look at pictures from my European travels of Romanesque church carvings depicting demons attacking unfortunate medieval souls.

But eventually, we will have to close our eyes, as all our ancestors before us, and enter a dark world beyond our control.

Wishing you peaceful dreams until next time, no thanks to this journey –

Ety