Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month, she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting: www.dreamhealings.com
It’s spooky season! So, for this month’s dream analysis, let’s talk about the night-mare. Many of you have written asking about sleep paralysis and why you’ve seen a witch or evil spirit holding you down. This is a world-wide phenomenon that has been happening for ages, appearing in folklore across the globe dating as far back as Sumerian text. You are not alone. So for this reason, I will address this concept as a whole instead of using one specific dream.
The word “nightmare” is a compound word meaning an evil entity, spirit or demon of the night. Across the languages of the world, the etymology reveals the same meanings, showing us the connection we all share to this idea. It has been used throughout time more often in reference with sleep paralysis than its more modern use today of a scary dream. However, this “mare of the night” that holds you down is not always female. What the entity shows up as is correlated with the ideology in which the dreamer grew up. The “old hag” or witch is seen most often in Western cultures because it is a symbol of an evil supernatural being of the night in the dominant religion of Christianity.
We know now that sleep paralysis happens when the body remains asleep when the mind is jolted awake. This, for most dreamers, is fear-inducing because you can’t move your body, often leading to the feeling of being trapped. I say “most” because many lucid dreamers are not frightened of sleep paralysis because they recognize the feeling of dreaming. So, many lucid dreamers don’t often experience an evil being holding them down. This is cause for me to believe that this entity is directly linked to the emotional outburst of fear.
The reason for the night-mare’s appearance comes from stories that vary widely depending on where you are on the globe. There is the myth of Lilith — a beautiful woman taking revenge — or a vampiric bat that haunts the village, an angry spirit husband punishing his wife or the old hag that sits on your chest cast by a spell. The similarity in all these stories is the fear, which has become a very real thing. This fear is so compounded and so believed (fed into) that it has even been linked to Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome due to extreme panic.
So, let me put forward my personal understanding. I am a highly lucid dreamer and have had many episodes of sleep paralysis. Yet, I never encountered this evil being until I was told of it. That is to say, the night-mare did not exist in my dream space until someone else’s fear of her was shared with me. This is why I suggest the night-mare to be an egregore — a non-physical entity that arises from collective beliefs.
Stay with me. An egregore is a form of energy created by strong emotions. Have you ever experienced fear feeling palpable in a room? If so, you have experienced an egregore that was formed by many people’s intense fear being fed into one idea. The night-mare is an idea that has been fed fear for centuries all over the world, thus becoming an egregore. This night-mare, existing now in the collective dream realm, is attracted to fear as energy attracts like energy. It shows up most often when fear stemming from sleep paralysis is pushed out into the dream realm, because this is its origin energy.
Creepy, but it’s important to remember that we don’t have to experience fear when we experience sleep paralysis. Feeling fear may be a learned behavior from stories we’ve heard or coming from our epigenetic history caused by so many centuries of feeding and believing in this egregore.
When I personally experienced it, I had already taught myself how to wake up from sleep paralysis, so the night-mare did not last long. There are a few ways to escape the grasps of sleep paralysis. One method I use and teach is to create the sensation of falling to wake the body. This works most of the time and is a great thing to practice, but I would not suggest it if you are experiencing fear during sleep paralysis. This is because it is not working toward alleviating the actual problem of fear. It is only a quick fix and should be used as such if the next method is not working.
To solve the problem of fear I practice and teach this: remember that you are sleeping. Remember the science of why sleep paralysis is occurring. Then release the need to wake your body, trusting that it will indeed wake as it normally does everyday. Let your body sleep. Enjoy your time with your mind awake. You are lucid! So leave this scene of frustrations and fear and go into a space of freedom and bliss. Separate the experience of sleep paralysis from the emotional charge of fear. Remember, the night-mare cannot exist in the energy of peace.