200 Years Later

I had a bad dream, so I got on the internet and started looking up how not to have bad dreams. I can't believe this has never come up in any kind of conversations I've ever had with anyone.

A nightmare isn't bad dreams. It's a mare that comes at night. And the old way they said it was Mara, a Night Mare. It's a creature. It's not dreams. But not a horse. Not that kind of mare.

This thing comes at night and sits on your chest. It presses down on you so you can’t move. Sometimes it chokes you. Sometimes it strangles you. Sometimes it just sits there staring directly into your eyes while you lie there completely helpless. And I’m reading this thinking, what? I had never heard any of this before.

Because now, when somebody says “nightmare,” they just mean a bad dream. You dreamed something unpleasant. Maybe you were being chased.  No. Apparently, originally, a nightmare was the thing doing it to you. The creature itself. It sits on your chest and puts the bad dream into your mind.

Then, somewhere over time, everybody just started using the name of the creature to mean the dream. The thing disappeared, and the experience kept its name. Which is a little suspicious.

It was supposedly a creature for hundreds of years, and then everybody decided, no, no, forget the creature. It’s just dreams now. Just bad thoughts at night. I don’t know how they know that. Usually when all of this is happening, I’m asleep.

Can you imagine living back then? You wake up after having sleep paralysis. You saw something sitting on your chest. You couldn’t move. You couldn’t breathe. It leaned down and looked directly into your face.

So the next morning, you go to breakfast and try to tell everybody what happened.

You say, “There was something in my room last night.”

And they say, “Oh yeah. That was the mara.”

What?

“The night mara.”

Then they just keep eating.

You’re sitting there waiting for the rest of the explanation, but apparently that was the explanation.

You say, “It sat on my chest.”

And they’re like, “Yeah, it does that.”

“It tried to choke me.”

“Sometimes.”

“It stared straight into my eyes.”

“Sounds like the mara.”

Then everybody gets quiet and goes back to breakfast.

And you’re looking around the table thinking, hold on. There is a creature that comes into people’s rooms at night, sits on their chests, paralyzes them, chokes them and puts terrible dreams into their minds?

And nobody thought this was worth mentioning?

You start asking questions, but nobody wants to answer them.

They just say, “Don’t worry about it.”

Not a big deal.

And you’re thinking, the hell it isn’t.

And then 200 years later, they just drop the creature and say, it's dreams. What? I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? The article says it's Old Norse, So that creature has existed for all that time, and then it just doesn't?