Dark Folklore (eBook)

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THE OLD HAG: FOLKLORE AND SLEEP PARALYSIS

Those words came from one of the listeners to my online folklore programme, ‘The Folklore Podcast’, in response to a request for information from anyone who had first-hand experience of sleep paralysis.

The medical condition of sleep paralysis is not as unusual as you might think, with statistics suggesting that 8 per cent of the general population have suffered an episode.2 It occurs as an individual is either entering or leaving the stage of sleep known as REM (or rapid eye movement) and physically presents as an inability to move the limbs, head and torso. In many cases, this may be accompanied by hallucinatory aspects that lead both to fear and a feeling of suffocation or pressure on the chest. Although we understand the medical reasons for the sleep paralysis state now, it has culturally been widely attributed to more superstitious origins, such as visits from demons and other evil spirits in the night, because of these seemingly very real visions.

In the example quoted at the beginning of this chapter, a sufferer describes the physical stage of the condition without touching on any illusory aspects. Even in medical circles, sleep paralysis is often referred to as ‘old hag syndrome’ because it is common for the hallucinations to take the form of a stereotypical hag as well as the other demonic forms. The imagined creature may appear to sit on your chest and be responsible for the breathing problems. It is this aspect of old hag syndrome that first caused it to enter into folklore and superstition, over the centuries, in similar ways around the world. As we shall see, however, as with most folklore it has developed and adapted over time through association with shifting cultural patterns and the like.

Professor Owen Davies notes that accounts and discussion of sleep paralysis may be found in both European and Chinese writings over the last two millennia, so the experience is far from new.3 Many sources, including Davies, suggest that the earliest reference to what we now call sleep paralysis may be found around 400 BC in a Chinese book of dreams. This is, however, a little more speculative than it may first appear.

The book in question, Zhou Li / Chun Guan, emerged in the pre-Chin period and it noted that the government at that time had set up imperial staff who acted as official dream interpreters. Dreams were placed into six categories, one of which was named ‘E-meng’. This translates as ‘dreams of surprise’. While there is no direct evidence that this category represents sleep paralysis per se, many writers consider that it is similar, with another category, ‘Ju-meng’ (‘fearful dreams’) symbolising nightmares.4

A few centuries later, during the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 30–124) the Chinese written character ‘yan’ appeared in the first Chinese dictionary, Shuo Wen Chieh Tzu. This combined the two individual characters for ‘ghost’ and ‘oppression’ and is generally taken to mean something along the lines of ‘being oppressed by ghost at night and paralysed’.5

In less enlightened times it was natural for people to draw on the more supernatural and superstitious beliefs of their culture to explain both the things happening around them and those happening to them that they did not understand. This is certainly true of medical conditions before modern treatments and cures began to be discovered and goes some way, for example, to explain the proliferation of folk medicine, charms and spells recorded around the world.

For a person afflicted by sleep paralysis, the experience would naturally be an extremely frightening one. The pressure on the chest may come from breathing difficulties or choking, and so in very early Greek accounts, the phenomenon was known as ‘throttling’ or ‘the throttle’. The earliest recorded case of what is recognisably sleep paralysis is disputed. It has been claimed that the Greek physician, Themison of Laodicea, writing in the first century BC, has the first reference. However, although he refers to the concept of throttling in some letters of the time, there is no clear description of a full case of sleep paralysis.

More likely to have recorded the first true case is seventh-century Byzantine physician Paulus Aeginita. In Section XV of his writings, which examines ‘Incubus, or Nightmare’ (which we will look at in more detail shortly), he says:

We certainly find all the common attributes of the state of sleep paralysis in this description, even if medicine has since learned that it is not connected with issues of digestion (although we will pause and look at cheese later!).

Extensive early writings on the phenomenon may also be found in a chapter among the many hundreds that make up the three Persian manuscripts named Hidayat, written by the physician Al-Akhawayni Bukhawi. Drawn up in the tenth century, during what was known as the Golden Age of Islamic Medicine, Bukhawi wrote on the subject prior to a description of the condition and treatment of epilepsy.

Often the experience that a person goes through during an episode of sleep paralysis will be accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations (i.e., those when waking from sleep) or hypnogogic ones (hallucinations experienced when falling asleep), depending on the time at which the sleeper suffers the attack.

The first detailed case study of the condition is probably one published in Latin in a 1664 collection by Dutch physician Isbrand van Diemerbroeck. These works were translated into English in 1689 by William Salmon, a doctor and collector of books. He gave the translation the title Practical Disputations of Isbrand de Diemerbroeck. Case History XI was called ‘Of the Night-Mare’ and reads as follows:

He continued to make an interesting diagnosis of the condition:

The last statement is an interesting one because modern medicine seems to corroborate this idea.

We now have a good understanding of the symptoms. Sleep paralysis is caused when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is disturbed. Because the body’s central nervous system is active at this time, visual and auditory senses are enabled, but because the brain blocks muscle activity during this part of the sleep cycle to prevent injury during dreaming, paralysis is still experienced in the waking state. The sequence of events and resulting hallucinations may come...