[quote]debraD wrote:
[quote]Elegua360 wrote:
Ever since I was a little kid, I have experienced a form of sleep paralysis/night terror that’s identical to the experience of being hag-ridden.
If you’re not familiar with that term, it’s one version of a common story about a supernatural being that sits on your chest while you sleep, and strangles you (or sucks out your soul or your blood or otherwise does horrible things to you).
Basically, for me it meant that I’d wake up in the middle of the night, pretty much unable to move, with the sense that a living thing was on my chest. Sometimes I’d actually see some vague black shape creeping up from the end of my bed.
It remains the most horrifying set of experiences in my life – FAR more frightening than any ‘real’ frightening or dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered. It would happen once every few months when I was a kid, but it’s pretty rare these days – last time I experienced it was this September, but before that it was about a two year gap since it happened.
Incidentally, this is something that for me was inherited – I later in life learned that my mom and several of her ancestors experienced the same thing.[/quote]
I had no idea there was not only a name for this but paintings! lol Somehow I feel validated yet terrified to go to sleep again.[/quote]
There are male and female personifications of that type of experience. Men were said to be attacked during sleep by female demonic entities called succubi and women were assaulted by incubi- the masculine equivalent.
The painting you posted depicts an incubus drawing life force from a sleeping woman. Most of the legends of creatures visiting sleeping victims and devouring them gradually were an attempt to explain why somebody’s health would deteriorate with no visible explanation.
What couldn’t be seen with the naked eye in daylight usually meant that whatever happened was being done under cover of darkness. And since darkness was the realm of the supernatural, the deterioration had to have a supernatural cause. Couple rampant superstition with a fertile imagination and you have the visual expression of a creature many have felt but never seen.