-
Chapter 2: Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the ''Nightmare' in Premodern England
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the ‘‘Nightmare’’ in Premodern England janine rivière Terrifying dreams frequently wakened early modern English men and women from their sleep. On July 16, 1658, Thomas Vaughan, a Welsh alchemist and cleric residing at Oxford, had the following nightmare: ‘‘I was pursued by a stone horse . . . and I was griviously troubled all night with a suffocation att the Heart, which continued all next day most violently, and still it remaines, but with some little remission.’’1 Vaughan is describing a kind of dream experience that premodern English people knew as the ‘‘nightmare,’’ ‘‘mare’’ or ‘‘incubus’’—a particular kind of experience in popular belief associated with assaults of witches and demonic beings, or, in medical circles, diseases of the body. Today this form of the nightmare is understood as a type of sleep disorder that modern scientists define as ‘‘sleep paralysis.’’ This is an experience that typically occurs in hypnagogic (sleep onset) or hypnopompic (sleep offset) states that results in feelings of intense terror, physical paralysis, and the sense of being suffocated.2 As historians Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt have suggested, premodern accounts of the nightmare, often associated with witchcraft, can be attributed to incidents of sleep paralysis. Throughout this essay I will use the terms ‘‘nightmare,’’ ‘‘mare,’’ or ‘‘incubus’’ to refer specifically to a premodern form of the experience that is entirely different from modern notions of nightmares that refer to terrible dreams in general. One of the nightmare’s most horrifying aspects was the victim’s encounter with a strange malevolent presence, or being, that attacked while 50 European Experiences of Dreaming he or she lay in a paralytic state and lay on the chest preventing the victim from moving or breathing. While medical authors and adherents of natural dreams saw this as a terrifying dream instigated by disorders in the body’s natural physiology, this encounter led many victims to conclude that they had been subject to the real assaults of demons, witches or spirits. Victims commonly described themselves as being ‘‘hag-ridden,’’ or ‘‘witch-ridden.’’ Consequently, there are two schools of thought concerning the nightmare in early modern England. First, those who believed the nightmare was a disease or disorder of the body manifesting in terrible dreams and a deception of the senses into believing what was dreamed was in fact real. Second, those who conversely saw it as the real assaults of witches, demons, or spirits, which I will define as the ‘‘hag-riding’’ tradition. Thus, at the heart of debates about the nightmare experience was the problem of discerning between dreams and reality, as well as doubts concerning the reliability of the senses. This essay will explore and compare medical and popular understandings of the nightmare from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century in order to show the complexity, continuity, and tensions in contemporary attitudes, particularly in medical circles, to the nightmare as associated with terrifying dreams or visions. A survey of medical ideas about the causes and cures of the nightmare over the period 1550 to 1760 shows how slowly these notions evolved and indicates that most writers drew their conclusions from longstanding classical medical theories. The majority of medical texts, including popular handbooks of health and learned medical treatises, argued that the nightmare, or incubus, was caused by indigestion, the supine position of the body in sleep, or humoral imbalances . Similarly, cures for the nightmare/incubus also changed little from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with physicians and medical writers continuing to counsel a strict regimen composed of moderate diet, bloodletting and purging, and avoidance of the supine position in sleep. However, this is not to suggest there were no changes in medical theories about the nightmare. Eighteenth-century writers, such as the physician John Bond (fl. 1750s), who authored An essay on the incubus or night-mare, which was published in 1753, sought to establish more empirical models for the nightmare by appropriating William Harvey’s theories about the circulation of the blood. Similarly, other eighteenth-century medical writers also posited that this disease was a symptom of the nervous condition of the ‘‘Spleen,’’ or ‘‘Hypochondria’’ and ‘‘Hysteria.’’3 As the emphasis on the (2024-03-28 10:03 GMT) Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? 51 incubus shifted from the humours to the circulatory and nervous systems in the eighteenth century, the primary site for the mare...