Nachtmerrie

Before the nachtmerrie was a word for a bad dream, it was a being that caused them. The Dutch mare — nachtmare, nachtmaar — slips into bedrooms through keyholes, cracks and knotholes, settles its weight on the chest of the sleeping and rides them until they wake sweat-soaked, breathless and unable to move. The name descends from Proto-Germanic *maron, from a root meaning to crush or press, and it survives inside every Dutch and English nightmare.

Dutch tradition made the mare specific: often the wandering form of a living woman — a seventh daughter was fated to become one, as a seventh son became a werewolf — it plagued stables as eagerly as bedrooms, riding horses to a lather and knotting their manes into marevlechten, the tell-tale mare-braids. Against it stood a whole domestic arsenal of sieves, crossed shoes, horse skulls and counting-charms: folk engineering against what medicine now calls sleep paralysis.

The Legend

The mare's method never varies. It enters through the smallest opening a builder left — the keyhole, the crack, the knothole — sometimes glimpsed as a small pale figure, a cat, a rat, or something hairy. Then it climbs onto the sleeper's chest and presses. The victim, pinned and speechless, endures a vivid, crushing dream and wakes drenched and exhausted, with the sense of a weight only just departed. By one tradition it must leave by the very hole it entered.

Its second victim was the horse. Stalled animals ridden by the mare stood sweating and wild by morning, worn thin, their manes and tails worked into tight tangles no groom could explain. In Dutch, the affliction bent the language itself: nachtmare drifted into nachtmerrie under the pull of merrie, the word for a female horse — the night-fiend and the mare of the stable fused into a single word that the whole country still uses for its bad dreams.

The Record

The being has a long Dutch paper trail. A fourteenth-century Middle Dutch text, Brother Gheraert's Natuurkunde van het gheheelal, already names the maren; the Evangeliën van den Spinrokken of 1518 records encounters with them; and Kiliaan's great Dutch dictionary of 1599 defines the mare as an incubus. Farther north the type is older still: the thirteenth-century Ynglinga saga tells how a mara conjured by sorcery trod the Swedish king Vanlandi to death in his sleep.

Later folklore collections mapped the belief across Limburg and Brabant, Flanders, Friesland, Utrecht, the Gooi and the islands. Not every tradition made her a horror: on Terschelling the mares were said to sing beautifully and braid horses' manes with artistry rather than malice, and one strand of legend promises that a man who traps a nachtmare — by sealing the opening she came through — may win a wife of unusual beauty and wisdom, at least until she finds the hole again.

The Lore

The countermeasures are a museum of sympathetic logic. A sieve hung over the bed or a net draped across it; shoes set crosswise at the bedside; a horse skull or horseshoe nailed above the stable door; barley scattered so the compulsive visitor must count every grain until dawn. Charms survive verbatim — one Dutch spreuk orders the 'ugly beast' to wade all waters, blow through all trees and count all grasses before it may come back to torment the speaker.

Under the folklore sits a real experience: sleep paralysis, the waking-dream state of immobility and chest-pressure that medicine documents in every culture. The mare is the Low Countries' native name for it, one member of a family that includes the Old Norse mara and the French cauchemar — that last word carrying the same Germanic mare inside it. Every time Dutch speakers call a bad dream a nachtmerrie, they cite the demon without knowing it.

Field Notes

• ✦ Often the roaming form of a living woman; a family's seventh daughter was fated to become one.
• ✦ Rode stalled horses to exhaustion, leaving them sweat-soaked with manes knotted into 'mare-braids'.
• ✦ Entered through keyholes, cracks and knotholes — and had to leave by the same opening.
• ✦ Defences included sieves over the bed, crossed shoes, horse skulls on stable doors, and barley the mare must count till dawn.
• ✦ Named in Middle Dutch by the 14th century; Kiliaan's 1599 dictionary glosses the mare as an incubus.

Case File

Classification

Nightmare spirit

Category

Spectral/Undead

First Sighted

Attested in 14th-century Middle Dutch texts

Habitat

Sleepers' bedrooms

Reported Size

Human-sized or smaller

Also Known As

Mare · Maar · Nachtmaar

Sources

• ↗ Mare (folklore) - Wikipedia
• ↗ De nachtmare: een Nederlandse nachtmerrie - Abe de Verteller