I came across a reference to some Cambodian refugees experiencing such terrifying nightmares that they died...
from https://visupview.blogspot.ae/2010/1...loody-elm.html[Wes] Craven apparently got the idea for Nightmare [on Elm Street] after reading a series of articles describing a group of Cambodian men that were terrified of sleeping after fleeing from Pol Pot's regime. These men suffered severe nightmares to the point that several died shortly after falling asleep.
Here is a press article from the Orlando Sentinal about this:
So - I looked for further information on this strange phenomenon...Nightmare Death: When Dreams Kill
January 11, 1987|By Larry Doyle , United Press International
CHICAGO — Since April 1983 at least 130 Southeast Asian refugees have died in essentially the same way: They cried out in their sleep and then died.
Medical authorities call this Asian death syndrome. The refugees have various names for it, one of them being night terror.
As a deputy Cook County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Kirschner has investigated five night terror deaths, which also is called nightmare death.
Kirschner, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Chicago, undertook a systematic study of the problem. His results, based on data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and autopsies of 18 night terror victims, were recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The victims had much in common, Kirschner found, first and foremost that nothing seemed to be wrong with them before they died suddenly. The average age of the victims was 33, and the deaths occurred only in men and only during sleep.
Standard autopsies revealed little about the deaths, other than they were caused by a sudden heart stoppage. ...
But detailed examinations of the victims' hearts turned up something strange: All of the 18 hearts were slightly enlarged, and 17 showed defects in their conduction systems, the array of fibers that carries electronic impulses from the brain to the heart. The fibers were frayed and curled as if, Kirschner said, ''their hearts just shorted out.''
Kirschner theorizes that something at night, perhaps a random electronic discharge, and yes, perhaps a nightmare, overloaded these defective hearts, causing the sudden deaths.
...
From Wikipedia, where it's called Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome:
There is some detail given about it in the context of society, which seems to indicate that some cultures view it as a SPIRITUAL phenomenon:Sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS), also known as sudden adult death syndrome or sudden unexpected death syndrome (SUDS), is sudden unexpected death of adolescents and adults, mainly during sleep.[1][2] Sudden unexpected death syndrome is rare in most areas around the world. ... Sudden unexplained death syndrome was first noted in 1977 among Hmong refugees in the US.[3][4] The disease was again noted in Singapore, when a retrospective survey of records showed that 230 otherwise healthy Thai men died suddenly of unexplained causes between 1982 and 1990:[5] ...
A Tokyo Medical Examiner reported that every year several hundred evidently healthy men are found dead in their beds in the Tokyo District alone. These observations indicate that the recent sudden deaths of Southeast Asian refugees are not a new occurrence, but rather an ongoing pattern of sudden deaths that appears in mainland Southeast Asia. Sudden unexpected death syndrome once caused more deaths among males than car accidents in Southeast Asia.[6] Most of those affected are young males.[7] ...
The Wikipedia article includes a helpful list of the names referring to it in different languages:Some say that the Hmong who died were killed by their own beliefs in the spiritual world, otherwise known as, “Nocturnal Pressing Spirit Attacks”. In Indonesia it is called digeuton, which translates to “pressed on” in English.[9] In China it is called bei gui ya which translates to “crushed by a ghost” in English.[9] The Dutch call the presence a nachtmerrie, the night-mare.[9] The “merrie” comes from the Middle Dutch mare, an incubus who “lies on people`s chests, suffocating them”. This phenomenon is well known among the Hmong people of Laos,[19] who ascribe these deaths to a malign spirit, dab tsuam (pronounced "da cho"), said to take the form of a jealous woman. Hmong men may even go to sleep dressed as women so as to avoid the attentions of this spirit.
During the 1970`s and 1980`s when an outbreak of this syndrome began, many of the Southeast Asian`s were not able to worship properly due to the guerrilla war against the government of Laos with the United States. When the Hmong people do not worship properly, do not perform religious ritual properly or forget to sacrifice, the ancestor spirits or the village spirits do not protect them, thus allowing the evil spirit to reach them. These attacks induce a nightmare that leads to sleep paralysis when the victim is conscious and experiencing pressure on the chest.[9] It is also common to have a REM state that is out of sequence where there is a mix of brain states that are normally held separate.[9] ...Once these nightmare visitations began, a shaman was recommended for psychic protection from the spirits of their sleep.[9] ...
Hmong people believed that rejecting the role of becoming a shaman, they are taken into the spirit world.
Bangungot is depicted in the Philippines as a mythological creature called batibat or bangungot. This hag-like creature sits on the victim's face or chest so as to immobilize and suffocate him. When this occurs, the victim usually experiences paralysis. It's said that one should bite their tongue and wiggle their toes to try to get out of this paralysis or they may die from suffocation.
- bangungot or urom - Filipino - The term originated from the Tagalog word meaning "to rise and moan in sleep". It is also the Tagalog word for nightmare.
- dab tsog - Hmong
- lai tai - Thai (Thai: ใหลตาย; meaning "sleep and die")
- dolyeonsa - Korean
- pokkuri disease - Japanese
- ya thoom - Arabic
- albarsty (Kyrgyz: албарсты) - Kyrgyz
I have very vivid dreams and sometimes terrifying presences visit me at night. (Things have gotten better since I started putting up protection around myself and my husband before I go to sleep at night - I mostly use pyramids of white light). So, naturally, I am interested and curious to find out more about this.
Have any Avalon members come across this "nightmare death" phenomenon?
Perhaps someone from South East Asia has some more cultural context and information about it that they could share?
I have seen the phenomena of night time "hag attacks" mentioned in a couple of different places (and in fact it is mentioned in the Wikipedia article above) but I have never looked into or investigated this.
Is this the same thing?
What do you think of this phenomenon? The spiritual aspect of it seems very real to me as an experiencer of vivid dreams and night terrors.