Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  Other relatively isolated tribes, like the Umeda of Papua New Guinea, show similar tendencies. It is not uncommon for hunters, on the night before a major hunt, to sleep on top of specially scented sacks that lead them to have erotic dreams and orgasms. Experiencing nocturnal ejaculations was considered to be a good omen, since sex between hunters and women usually followed a successful hunt and dreams of sex hinted that sex would come for real in the near future.55

  So if the Hadza and Umeda can be seen as models of how people have historically responded to sexual dreams, this suggests that the ancient human condition embraced rather than feared sexual dreams. Somewhere along the way, during the evolution of society, the wheels came off the wagon and sexual dreams became something to dread. Can we blame the Greeks or Romans for this?

  In ancient Greece, sexual dreams appear to have also been a cause for joy. It was common for dreams to be interpreted, and Herodotus wrote about the Greek traitor Hippias, who helped the Persians during their invasion when they landed at Marathon. Hippias had a dream of sleeping with his mother: “He dreamt of lying in his mother’s arms, and conjectured the dream to mean that he would be restored to Athens, recover the power which he had lost, and afterwards live to a good old age in his native country. Such was the sense in which he interpreted the vision.” This led him to believe he would one day return to his motherland of Athens in a position of power.

  Similarly, Artemidorus, a Roman dream interpreter who lived in the third century AD, wrote that having sexual dreams involving one’s mother were good for people working in politics, since such dreams represented the love one felt for one’s motherland and were a sign of deep-seated patriotism. Yet Artemidorus was doing his work at a time when sexual dream interpretation was changing, and according to the anthropologist Charles Stewart at University College London, who wrote extensively on nightmares in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2002, incubi in very early forms started to leak into his writings.

  In his Interpretation of Dreams, Artemidorus makes a connection between the playful god Pan, who was known for engaging in dream mischief, and an entity who is mysteriously named Ephialtes. According to Stewart, Ephialtes etymologically seems to mean “to jump on top of,” which is not much different from “to lie on top.” More specifically, he points out that Artemidorus writes, “Ephialtes is identified with Pan but he has a different meaning. If he oppresses or weighs a man down without speaking, it signifies tribulations and distress.” Although the word “incubus” is not specifically used, there are some uncanny similarities between Ephialtes and the monster appearing in Füssli’s The Nightmare.

  Old Man and a Siren. Roman marble relief, fragment, second century AD. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bridgeman Art Library.

  Artwork supports the idea that AD 200 was a time when sleep demons were beginning to become more widely feared. In a marble relief at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a sleeping shepherd is straddled by a voluptuous winged woman with webbed feet. Unfortunately, the relief is fragmentary and the head of the woman has been lost to the ravages of time. For this reason we cannot determine how human she actually is or get a sense of whether she wishes the sleeping shepherd sweet dreams or sexual nightmares. Even so, many argue that the woman is, in effect, a Roman representation of one of Homer’s Sirens. This has led to the relief being named Old Man and a Siren.

  The timing of this transformation of Sirens into sleep demons, like the incubus and succubus, almost perfectly aligns with when Christianity was spreading rapidly throughout the classical world. As Christians came to blame many misfortunes on evil spirits, the neutral daïmônes of ancient Greek lore were transforming into Satan’s fiendish minions. When people ate too much, they fell prey to the demon of gluttony. If they didn’t do enough work, they were plagued by the demon of sloth.

  Demons associated with behaviors that people could control with effort were frightening, but demons of nocturnal sexual thoughts must have been dreadful because (in spite of what many believed) there was nothing anyone could do to control his or her dreams. By identifying dreams as potentially sinful, Christianity effectively led people to fear what their own minds subconsciously conjured. Upon waking, they would be forced to struggle with powerful feelings of guilt, corruption, and the terror of eternal damnation. Both the dreamers themselves and the clergy whom they sometimes confessed to could not or would not accept that such dreams were naturally generated by the minds of good people all on their own. Something, or some things, had to be responsible. Thus the incubus and succubus evolved from their less overtly sexual relatives the Sirens and the less malevolent daïmônes.

  Lingering in limbo

  Even if Christianity was responsible for the transformation of sirens and daïmônes into sleep demons, there are still elements of their evolution as monsters that raise questions. The most perplexing of these is the strikingly different forms they take. In the marble relief Old Man and a Siren, the monster is standing over the man. In Kings of Britain, the demon merely visits Merlin’s mother at night. In contrast, Artemidorus describes Ephialtes as a creature that is “jumping on top” and “weighing a man down,” and in The Nightmare, the demon is literally perched on the center of the woman’s chest.

  If only a fear of sexual dreams was responsible for the formation of sleep demons, one would expect their forms to be reasonably consistent, but this is not what we find. Some sleep demons tend to be associated with chest pressure while others only suggest sexual arousal. This could be because people were trying to come to grips with more than just dreams of sex.

  As the body enters the stage of sleep when dreaming takes place, known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep, the brain effectively initiates a safety mechanism that tells almost all muscles in the body to stop acting. For example, if a dream emerges that leads you to believe you are walking, you do not literally start walking while in bed. The same is true with more violent activities. If you dream about punching someone in the nose, your body, because of the safety mechanism, does not act upon this impulse.56 Yet the safety signal that the brain sends out does not always work as well as it should.

  In some situations, for reasons that are not entirely understood, muscles still take action even though they have been commanded by the brain to remain motionless. Under such a condition, known as REM sleep behavior disorder, people act out their dreams physically. This is why sleepwalking and, in a few noteworthy cases, even sleep-driving, take place. This obviously dangerous disorder needs close monitoring.

  A reverse condition, which is nowhere near as hazardous but often far more frightening, is sleep atonia, or sleep paralysis. In this situation, the safety signal works too well. When the person wakes, his brain ends its dream state and he becomes aware of reality, but his muscles continue to obey the “don’t move” command that they were sent when REM sleep began. As a result, the waking person cannot move. He is literally frozen in place.

  Sleep atonia sounds like the sort of thing that would be rare, but the medical literature indicates the opposite. According to the American Sleep Disorder Association’s Diagnostic and Coding Manual,57 between 40 and 50 percent of the human population experiences sleep atonia at some point. More important, the manual explains that the condition is frequently associated with hallucinations.

  As the mind shifts between the dream state and the waking state, it is common for it to notice things that aren’t actually there. Sometimes noises are heard that belong to a dream rather than reality; sometimes the presence of other people, who existed in the dream, are sensed by the waking dreamer. These are hallucinations, and they are entirely normal and benign for most people, but when combined with sleep atonia, they can become truly awful.

  One particularly frequent hallucination that seems to run hand in hand with sleep atonia is believing a creature of some sort is present in the room with the waking dreamer. Commonly, this entity is described as seated on the waking dreamer’s chest, holding them in place or standing over
them. In the Western world, this combination of hallucinations and sleep atonia takes place often enough for it to have a name: Old Hag Syndrome.

  The name stems from an area in northeastern Newfoundland where a mix of hallucinations and sleep atonia appears to be remarkably prevalent, and people often refer to the hag or ag coming to terrorize them. According to the medical sociologist Robert Ness at Augusta State University in Georgia who reported on the condition in a Newfoundland community during the 1970s, people in the region commonly believed that the traumatizing sleep experiences were the result of being cursed by an old hag who came to them during the night to sit on their chest.

  Observations of this condition are not unique to the English-speaking world. The Chinese tell tales of the gui ya shen, which literally means “phantom that presses on the body”; the islanders of St. Lucia in the Caribbean tell of the kokma, which is the spirit of a dead baby that haunts an area and attacks people in their beds by jumping on their chests and clutching at their throats; and the people of Thailand speak of the Phi um, an enveloping ghost that holds people in their beds as they wake up. When these legends are considered in combination with Artemidorus’s description of Ephialtes jumping on chests, it seems that fear of sleep atonia has been present in communities around the world for centuries and long taken the form of something spectral dwelling half in the waking world and half in a world of dreams.

  Evil evolved

  So it would seem that at some point around AD 200, the terror presented by sleep atonia started to merge with the fear of sexual dreams induced by Christianity. The two fears became one and ultimately developed into the incubus presented in The Nightmare. And the fear has not gone away.

  Modern films like James Watkins’s The Woman in Black (which is an equally terrifying stage play) and Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity and television series like The X-Files gain much of their fear factor from the concept of creatures lurking in the realm between the seen and the unseen. Even though these creatures can be playful, like the succubus that comes to the heroes as they are sleeping in Ivan Reitman’s comedy Ghostbusters,58 more often than not they are truly terrifying, like the demons in Tobe Hooper’s thriller Poltergeist, which upon emerging from the family’s television caused the child Carol Anne to utter the immortal words “They’re here.”

  An intriguing element of many stories about ghosts and demons is that they usually take place in hot spots for spectral activity. This is certainly the case in Ghostbusters, where Egon Spengler says, “It’s not the girl, Peter, it’s the building,” when he defends the lead character’s love interest, Dana Barrett, who is possessed not because she is inherently evil but because the building she lives in was built by a demon-worshipping lunatic. This is equally true of Mary Lambert’s version of Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, where there is much talk of “sour” land; Poltergeist; Stanley Kubrick’s presentation of King’s The Shining; and countless other phantasmal thrillers. Haunted places have a long history, and this leads to the natural question of whether there are certain environmental conditions, which could be present in a specific location, that can induce a combination of sleep atonia and hallucinations. A search through the dream disorder literature indicates there definitely are conditions, like jet lag, alcohol abuse, depression, and chronic anxiety, that can increase a person’s chances of having a sleep atonia episode. However, none of these can reasonably be tethered to a location. So it would seem that there must be something else that makes locations haunted.

  While most people suffer sleep atonia only once during their lives, a very small percentage of the population suffers regularly from the dreaded experience. Most important, this chronic version of the disorder is genetic; meaning parents who have it can pass it along to their children. This inherited version of sleep atonia may not seem especially relevant today, when children break away from their parents as young adults and tend to live in distant locations, but historically it was common for houses to pass from one family member to another over the generations. For this reason, it is possible that the concept of the haunted house emerged as a result of a family with the genes for chronic sleep atonia moving in and passing the home along to other family members who also carried the genes for chronic sleep atonia. Ironically, if this were true, it was not houses that were cursed but the families dwelling in them who were cursed with bad genes.

  All hauntings and modern ghost stories aside, there are few recent monsters that are more true to the demonic history of mixing fears of uncontrolled sleep behaviors and sexual activity than Freddy Krueger from the 1984 film Nightmare on Elm Street.

  In Wes Craven’s film, a group of sexually inquisitive teenagers begin experiencing terrible dreams. They find themselves in a boiler room being chased by a disfigured man whose right hand is covered in a glove with wicked blades attached to every finger. Dreams and reality merge as the teenagers begin to find five-fingered blade marks in their clothes and sheets when they wake up, hinting that they could die from their dreams. This ultimately happens when one girl, Tina, is slashed to death in the night after sleeping with her young boyfriend.

  Tina’s murder, while entirely spectral in nature, carries sexual overtones. Later in the film, when Krueger’s bladed glove appears in the bathtub between another teenage girl’s legs, it is hard to not think of some sort of deadly phallus. The horrifying combination of the vulnerability of sleep and sexual violation links Krueger to the fears of the incubus.

  Yet the film backs away from presenting Freddy Krueger as anything more than a deformed killer. Even after being disfigured by fire, he is still recognizable as having once been human. This is likely the result of the film’s creators not wanting to stray too far from reality. If Krueger had been an utterly inhuman demon, he would have been less real, less believable, and, in the end, less scary.

  And if Krueger is an evolved form of the incubus, so too are the many aliens that “abduct” humans. Charles Stewart convincingly argues that people who claim to have been abducted and sexually assaulted by aliens during their sleep are really just doing their best to rationalize experiences of sleep atonia, hallucinations, and sexual dreams. This makes perfect sense, particularly if people suffering from these sleep disorders no longer find demons believable but do consider the existence of extraterrestrials a possibility. The monster is being created by the same core fear, but believability is forcing the form of the monster to change.

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  53 The horse in the background is thought to be a visual pun on the word “nightmare” and was not part of the original chalk sketch of the work.

  54 This is where the concept of wizards having familiars comes from and why Harry Potter has an owl, Hermione a cat, Ron a rat, and Neville a toad.

  55 This is actually remarkably similar to behavior seen in numerous primates where there is a dramatic surge in sexual activity shortly after securing a major food source.

  56 A good thing for people whose partners have particularly vivid imaginations.

  57 Suffer from insomnia? Try reading the ASDA Diagnostic and Coding Manual; it’ll knock you out faster than Ambien.

  58 The title of this film is a terrible misnomer. The demon Zuul is the creature that possesses the body of Dana Barrett; the doglike demon Vinz Clortho takes over the body of Dana’s neighbor Lewis Tully; and Gozer is the shape-shifting demon that initially appears as a red-eyed human and later transforms into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that the heroes do battle with during the climax of the film. While it probably would have driven away audience members by the thousands, Demonbusters would have been a more accurate title.

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  7

  Cursed by a Bite—Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves

  “You’re intoxicated by my very presence.”

  —Edward Cullen, Twilight

  Slinking through the shadows of night, they come to feed on the innocent. Seemingly human in appearance, the threat that they pose becomes apparent only as needle-sharp fangs pierce the thr
oat of their intended victim and blood is sucked away. When every last drop of this precious life essence is consumed, prey becomes predator, seeking out blood to fuel its own newly acquired supernatural hunger. Vampires are among the world’s most celebrated and popular monsters, and they have an extremely complex history and biology surrounding them, supported by a long line of books and movies featuring them as both villains and heroes. Yet working out exactly which fears drove the rise of vampires is a tricky question to answer because they are such multifaceted monsters with no clear point of origin.

  On the face of it, they are predators like lions and play upon the terror of being killed by a nocturnal hunter. With such a basic fear, one would expect vampires to be present during ancient times when fears of beasts lurking in the night were at their height, yet vampires as we know them today arrived on the scene only in the eighteenth century. Even so, earlier reports of creatures resembling these monsters do exist.

  In the Odyssey, Odysseus is forced to travel to the land of the dead and confront the ghosts of people he once knew in order to gain information to aid him on his quest. The witch Circe advises that he must allow the ghosts to feed on blood freshly spilled from the body of an animal to gain their trust and knowledge. At first he is highly protective of the pool of blood that he spills on the ground, allowing only the ghost of the wise man, Teiresias, to feed and answer his questions. But then the ghost of Odysseus’s mother appears and fails to recognize him as her own son. Odysseus turns to Teiresias for answers: “Tell me and tell me true, I see my poor mother’s ghost close by us; she is sitting by the blood without saying a word, and though I am her own son she does not remember me and speak to me; tell me, Sir, how I can make her know me.” Teiresias replies, “Any ghost that you let taste of the blood will talk with you like a reasonable being, but if you do not let them have any blood they will go away again.” Odysseus then allows the ghost of his mother to feed on the blood, and her memories of him come flooding back.