extraordinary%20encounters

ticular experience that gave rise to the word
“nightmare.” Nightmare has come to be a
synonym for “bad dream,” but traditionally
nightmare (from the Anglo-Saxon nicht
[night] and mara [incubus or succubus]) referred
to a specific nocturnal experience. A
menacing supernatural entity, often perceived
as an ugly witch, enters a bedroom and sits on
the witness’s chest, leaving him or her with the
sensation of being crushed. All the while the
victim lies paralyzed and helpless.
Though the experience occurs frequently
to Americans—one in six, according to a scientist
who has studied the phenomenon—
American culture has no name for it. Thus,
those who undergo it are at a loss to understand
it or to put it into any larger context.
Many, having never heard of others’ experiences,
are left wondering about their sanity.
Old Hag 193
Henri Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781 (The Detroit Institute of the Arts, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and
Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman)
The Old Hag is the subject of a classic
work, The Terror That Comes in the Night
(1982), by David J. Hufford, a medical scientist
and folklorist at Pennsylvania State University.
Hufford uses the experience, among
other things, to scrutinize the way psychologists
have dealt with such reports and to examine
the trustworthiness of eyewitness testimony
to anomalous events. Most scientists
and scholars have sought to explain Old Hag
attacks as the result of perceptual errors, faulty
memories, lies, psychotic episodes, or hallucinations
shaped by images in the claimants’
cultural environment. According to Hufford,
they have often discarded witness testimony,
resulting in what Hufford charges was an effort
to reinvent the experience so that it could
be “explained.” Referring to a study by early
psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Ernest