The OG Sleep Paralysis Demon

A nightmarish column on using folklore in tabletop RPGs

You wake in the middle of the night. It’s almost pitch-black, only the thin sliver of moon silver slipping past the edges of the blinds to light the room. Disorientated, you go to move. You can’t. You try to shift your head. You can’t.

A figure stands in the corner of the room, hidden in shadow. It crawls towards you, limbs too long, its hands reaching. You try to move, run, cry out for help. You can’t. It pulls itself up and on top of you, feet crushing your chest, pinprick eyes staring down at you from hollow sockets. It smiles. You faint.

In the morning, you tell yourself it was just a dream. Sure, those deep bruises still mark your chest, but you could have done that to yourself. Right?

I. The Mare

In Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, nightmares aren’t merely signs of poor sleep or a troubled mind, but the direct result of a malevolent presence.

The mare (alt. mære, mara), from which we get the English word nightmare, is a malicious spirit that slips into a person’s room at night and sits on their chest (just like my cat), causing their dreams to go sour¹. When it isn’t messing with people’s dreams, mares also ride horses to exhaustion and entangle the hair of the sleeping into knots. Visually, a mare typically appears in the form of a human woman.

One of the first written accounts of a mare is from the 13th-century Norse Ynglinga saga². After King Vanlandi abandons his wife Drífa for ten years, she hires the Finnish sorceress Huld to help get revenge. Huld summons a mare to ride the King, eventually crushing him. This would be an example of the mare as a conjured spirit, though sometimes the mare is instead a witch or cursed sleeping woman having an out-of-body experience.

If you do end up the target of a mare, however, things aren’t hopeless³. To defend yourself, you can sing protective verses, or you can try and confuse it by doing things like putting your shoes back-to-front (right on the left, left on the right) beside your bed. Alternatively, you can plug your bedroom’s keyhole so the mare can’t get in—or have a friend plug your keyhole from the outside in the middle of the night, trapping the spirit inside with you.

II. The Night Hag

The mare isn’t a creature unique to Scandinavia. In fact, it’s not even unique to Europe more broadly. Monstrous creatures and apparitions that appear when one is sleeping can be found the world over⁴.

Grouped under the generic term of ‘night hag’, these spirits include incubi and succubi (if you want to get raunchily demonic), jinn and ifrit (in the Arabic world), the Alp (an evil German elf), the Mokthi (a fez-wearing Albanian spirit), the dukak (an Ethiopian personification of depression), and your deceased relative returned as a ghost (this one is from all over the place, including many East Asian countries).

I won’t keep listing so as to not keep us here all day, but take this as a sign you can be as creative and flexible with your in-world equivalents as we have been here on Earth.

III. Actual Sleep Paralysis

If the title hadn’t already given it away, you’d likely already be thinking: this mare/night hag business sounds a whole lot like sleep paralysis! And, dear reader, you would have made an astute observation.

With sleep paralysis, the sufferer is unable to move or speak upon awakening⁵. This symptom is often accompanied by fear, panic, imagined sounds, visual hallucinations, and… an intense pressure on one’s chest. It’s not a leap to look at folklore like the mare as not just an early explanation for nightmares but as a way of explaining the otherwise seemingly inexplicable effects of sleep paralysis.

A ‘fun’ fact about sleep paralysis is that it appears to be a cultural factor at play⁶. Those who experience hallucinations during sleep paralysis often come to associate these hallucinations with the presence of the supernatural, and the supernatural threat is linked to whatever is the most appropriate spirit or creature for the cultural background of the sleep paralysis sufferer. Hallucinations reported during sleep paralysis include ghosts, demons, shadow people, hags, and, of course, aliens.

My Dream, My Bad Dream (1915) by Fritz Schwimbeck

Using the Mare in Your Game

So now you know the story, how can you use it in your game?

I. A Restless Spirit

Your PCs—adventurers, investigators, or just simple troubleshooters—are assembled for a simple task: to find out why their client is unable to sleep and put a stop to it. Each night, he sees a monstrous spirit appear on his chest, tormenting him and keeping him awake. If it’s a modern setting, his doctor might think it’s simple sleep paralysis, but the client knows better. He’s haunted by an evil spirit, and he’s going to keep being haunted until it’s somehow stopped or his heart gives out, whichever comes first.

Has the client angered someone enough to curse him or to find someone capable of setting a mare on him? Has he acquired some cursed artefact that needs to be returned to its rightful place? Or, perhaps, the veil between the dream world and our own has grown awfully thin, and the PCs will need to travel into it and slay a demon on its home turf? Whatever the answer, the PCs will need to hurry to find it. Their client is running out of time.

II. A(n) (Un-)Full(-filling) Rest

In many traditional role-playing games, there’s nothing more important than getting a good night’s sleep. After all, it’s typically how you restore hit points, recover spell slots, and regain the use of spent abilities. In those games, the mare’s ability to disrupt rest might just make it the scariest monster of all.

In this conception, the mare isn’t a physical threat but rather a puzzle to solve. Perhaps a certain item in the party’s possession needs to be purified or destroyed, or a warlock the party angered needs to be mollified. Alternatively, they might just need to figure out an old-fashioned solution—if they can trap the mare in a PC’s bedroom, perhaps then it becomes corporeal and you can stab it to death? If so, can they risk a physical confrontation running on half-empty?

The only thing to be aware of in using this plot idea is that keeping a PC from regaining their abilities is a quick way to make that character’s player extremely frustrated. Consider allowing a partial refresh so they get back some spell slots but not all of them, or let them pick between regaining abilities and health, for example. You want to make the mare a sufficient threat but not at the expense of everyone having fun.

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And that’s it for the Mare!

Thanks for sticking with Mythoi through our hiatus—Honours is keeping me sufficiently busy! We’ll be back again soon with another piece of fantastical folklore!

~ A.C. Luke

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1. Hall, Alaric. “The Evidence for Maran, the Anglo-Saxon "Nightmares"'.”Neophilologus, vol. 91, 2007, pp. 299-317.

2. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. Translated by Lee M. Hollander. University of Texas Press, 2010.

3. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/nightmare.html

4. Green, Thomas A. Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. ABC-CLIO, 1997.

5. Sharpless, Brian A. "A Clinician's Guide to Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis". Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, vol. 12, 2016, pp. 1761-67.

6. Jalal, Baland, and Devon E. Hinton. "Rates and Characteristics of Sleep Paralysis in the General Population of Denmark and Egypt." Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, vol. 37, no. 3, 2014, pp. 534-548.