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The 'mare' in 'nightmare' has nothing to do with horses. It comes from Old English mære, a spirit believed to sit on people's chests as they slept, leaving them with a feeling of being crushed and unable to breathe.

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'Nightmare' is recorded from around 1300 as the name of this spirit and of the choking feeling it brought. Only in the 1820s did it come to mean any bad dream, and soon after any distressing experience. The same creature appears across Germanic and Slavic folklore, as German Mahr and Swedish mara, and the French word for a nightmare, cauchemar, joins an Old French verb meaning 'to trample' to the same Germanic root. Today the experience behind the legend is usually identified as sleep paralysis: waking briefly while the body is still held in the stillness of dreaming sleep, sometimes with a sense of pressure on the chest or of someone in the room. Turkish folklore has its own name for it: karabasan.

Türkçe oku
İngilizcede kâbus anlamına gelen “nightmare” sözcüğündeki “mare”, bugün “kısrak” demek olsa da atla ilgili değildir. Eski İngilizcede mære, gece uyuyanların göğsüne oturduğuna inanılan bir varlıktı; kişi ezildiğini ve nefes alamadığını hissederdi.

“Nightmare” 1300 dolaylarından beri bu varlığın ve verdiği boğulma hissinin adı olarak kayıtlarda geçer. Her türlü kötü rüyanın adı olması ancak 1820'lerde oldu; kısa süre sonra çok sıkıntılı her türlü deneyim için de kullanılmaya başlandı. Aynı yaratık Cermen ve Slav halk inançlarının birçoğunda görülür: Almancada Mahr, İsveççede mara diye anılır. Fransızcada kâbus anlamına gelen cauchemar da Eski Fransızcadaki “çiğnemek, ezmek” fiiline aynı Cermen kökünün eklenmesiyle oluşmuştur. Bugün efsanenin ardındaki deneyim genellikle uyku felciyle açıklanır: Kişi kısa bir süre uyanır ama beden henüz rüya uykusunun hareketsizliğinden çıkmamıştır; bazen göğüste bir baskı ya da odada biri varmış hissi de eşlik eder. Türk halk kültüründe bu deneyimin adı karabasandır: uyuyanın üstüne çöken “kara basan”.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Mare (folklore)
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