Sleep Monster Spirits, Legends, and Folklore from Around the World

On average, humans sleep 8 hours a night, which translates to 229,961 hours in a lifetime, or more simply – a third of our lives. Sleep regenerates the body and the rest it provides preserves its vitality. It is enjoyable too, like slipping softly onto a comfortable cloud to close off the day. Sleep brings solace and serenity, yet there are those who will tell us how we may not be alone every time we go to sleep!

Meet the Sleep Monsters from around the World!

Cultures around the world have had theories, folk beliefs, and conjectures about why we are sometimes interrupted in our sleep in the nighttime: sleep monsters in the dark! These supernatural and mythical creatures visit us when we sleep, and there might be some parallels in how the human imagination has depicted them across the various cultures!

The Batibat or Bangungot in the Phillipines

The Batibat is part of the Llocano folklore and known as the Bangungot in Tagalog folklore – both in the Philippines -, and refers to a mythical creature that takes the form of a grotesque, ancient, obese, female spirit that dwells in the trees. It is believed that they come forth when a tree in which they had been residing is cut down and they are made homeless. This is especially true when Batibat’s tree, or part of it, is made into a wooden support post for a house. The Batibat inhabits this remnant of the tree, or that which it has been transformed into. If a person sleeps too near it, it takes its true form and haunts the person’s dreamscape, suffocates, and paralyses them. It can even result in one having waking nightmares throughout the day. The folklore suggests wiggling one’s toes or biting one’s thumb when they know a Batibat has come for them.

Incubus and Succubus

Incubus is a male spirit demon that, as legend goes, looks for sexual encounters with women while they are asleep, sometimes producing a baby. Succubus is the female spirit demon counterpart to Incubus, who will look for sexual encounters with men. The word Incubus comes from the Latin derivatives of “incubo“, which refers to a nightmare brought on by a demon, and “incubare“, which means “to lie upon”. The word Succubus, in turn, stems from the Latin words “succuba“, which refers to a pararmour, and “succubare“, which means “to lie beneath”. The myths about Incubus and Succubus stemmed out of traditional societies, and also warned how recurrent encounters with Incubus and Succubus can lead to deterioration in physical as well as mental health, and sometimes even death. It is believed that moving the one affected to another location and conducting an exorcism can help with these attacks.

The earliest mention of Incubus and Succubus takes place in Mesopotami in around 2400 BC, where Lilu is a male spirit demon and Lilin is the female spirit demon counterpart. It is interesting to note here that this Babylonian mythological concept of Lilu (and Lilin) bears a similarity and a resonance of sorts with the Talmudic mythological concept of Lilith. Lilith was a female demon, and also the first wife of Adam. Succubus is mentioned in Talmudic mystical lore, and the story goes that it was Lilith who later turns into a succubus. There are succubi other than Lilith too, in folklore. Lilith leaves Adam and goes on to later mate with the archangel Samael. Succubi are believed to have the form of a “beautiful young maiden” with a catch though: they have some bodily deformity to go with their beauty, such as a serpentine tail or claws for fingers or toes.

Incubi and Succubi were first discussed in the Christian tradition when St. Augustine acknowledged the sheer number of attacks by these demons on many trustworthy people. Eight centuries would pass by until Thomas Aquinas – not denying such attacks – would clarify that babies at least can not come about as a result of sexual relations with a demon, for a baby is a result of humans having such relations with one another, and this would confirm that these babies have souls – for they are human babies. Some other theories followed. Another posited that Incubus and Succubus were actually the same spirit demon, which would interchange its forms, and thus collect materials from a man as a Succubus and then transfer them to a woman as an Incubus. These babies, at this point, were considered to be supernatural. To complicate the development of this myth further, it is believed that sometimes Incubi can conceive children as well, and these babies born of a demon spirit and a human are called a “cambion”. Cambions were believed to have physical deformities or proximity to the supernatural.

Baku in Japan

Baku is a supernatural being in Japanese folklore that devours dreams. Baku is known to have been part of Japanese folklore since at least the Muromachi period, which lasted from the 14th to the 15th century. It is posited that it probably stems from its counterpart in Chinese folklore: the mo. While mo had been the standard name for the Giant Panda in China from 3rd century (BCE) till the 19th century (CE), the mythological records use the name “mo” to refer to a mythological creature – a chimera with rhinoceros eyes, an elephantine trunk, tiger paws, and a tail like a cow’s. The earliest mention of this chimeric mo in Chinese written records appears in the poetry of Bai Juyi of the Tang dynasty from the 9th century. A Japanese manuscript, the Sankai Ibutsu, from the early 17th century places the baku to be a Chinese mythological chimera with rhinoceros eyes, an elephantine trunk, tiger paws, and a tail like that of an ox. The baku is described to be a shy creature that would provide humans protection against evil. In this manuscript, baku is not related to having the ability to eat dreams though. However, by the 18th century – 1791 to be specific – an illustration on a Japanese wooden block depicted a dream-devouring baku with the head, trunk, and tusks of an elephant, claws of a tiger, and horns on its head. A baku with the head, trunk, and tusks of an elephant is the characteristic depiction of a baku found in the illustrations from the pre-Meiji era (the Classical era).

Legend has it that when the gods were done creating all of the other animals, they created baku out of the leftovers. Also, according to legend, a person or a child who has been woken up from their sleep can call upon a baku to come eat their terrible dreams away. The baku does so, and the person or the child can go back to sleeping peacefully. However, one is forewarned not to call upon the baku too often, for it always runs the risk of the baku possibly staying for more. It is said that every time a baku feeds on dreams, there is a chance it will be left hungry for still more. Since it has eaten away the terrible dreams, it can then start to feed on the desires and hopes of the person, thus leaving them to live a husk-like life thereafter. It was also believed that a talisman of a baku by the bed could help make this calling upon the baku and the connection with it stronger: around the 1910s, children in Japan would keep a baku talisman by their bedside table, and sometimes even call upon the baku to protect them from nightmares even before falling asleep.

Liderc in Hungary

Liderc is a term used to refer to a set of supernatural beings in Hungary. Three of the most well known ones are the miracle chicken, the dwarf or the tiny devil, and the Satanic-lover. The miracle chicken liderc is born out of the first egg laid by a black hen coddled in the arms of a human. Out comes a chicken, and in some versions, a ghost-like snake. This liderc then takes the shape of a man or a woman to be a lover to the human owner. The liderc, though, requires the human to feed them blood off of their chest until the human eventually becomes so weak that they die. In some versions, the liderc sits on the human’s chest to feed itself. The Hungarian word for nightmares, “lidercnyomas“, which transliterally means “liderc pressure”, stems from this mythical detail. A human can rid themselves of such a liderc by persuading it to complete an impossible task, such as sieving the water in an ocean, or collecting sand by roping it up all together. The dwarf or the tiny devil-liderc can be a helpful as well as a destructive liderc. It may be born out of an egg of a black hen as well, or as is the case more often, be accidentally stumbled upon in bottles, boxes, rags, and pockets of old clothes where it likes to live. This liderc, when and if helpful, privdes help also in the form of making its human very rich by hoarding gold.

The Satanic lover, or the devil-lover, can fly as a fiery light in the night or a bird of fire. When it lands, it takes the shape of a man or woman, depending upon the human it is after, and always appears as a most lamented dead or lost lover or partner. It enters a house through a chimney or key hole, and brings sickness, heart break, and eventual death to that human. In some versions, this liderc, though it looks like a man or a woman, has the feet of a goose. In other versions, this liderc has human feet but its footprints are those of a horse’s. The Satanic lover-liderc, like the miracle chicken liderc, also causes the person terrible nightmares. The rooster’s first crow at the crack of dawn though, and this liderc is gone. If one wishes to prevent this liderc from entering their abode at night, one can burn some incense and branches from a birch tree in the nighttime.

The Scientific Lens

One can be hasty in discrediting these folk beliefs, attributing them to a time long gone by or a people not as up to par with the times. You might think these are stories far removed from the culture you grew up and live in. However, there is an acute resemblance between some of these stories and the stories of alien abductions narrated by many. Alien abduction is the phenomenon of people recounting their experience of being kidnapped by all sorts of extraterrestrial beings and then being subjected to experiments on their minds and bodies, before being returned to Earth.

If we go about looking for what science has to say about these different, yet in many ways, similar experiences and beliefs, the theories abound. As it holds for alien abductions as well, a lot of these experiences have been attributed to sleep paralysis and hallucinations. Sleep paralysis is a physical state where the person experiences an inability to speak or move, and it occurs while falling asleep or waking up. During such a state, hallucinations (auditory, visual, and tactile) are common, and these in turn induce a greater sense of fear in the person. These episodes can last from a couple to a few minutes. Some of the factors that can contribute to the onset of an episode of sleep paralysis include severe stress, sleep deprivation and abnormal cycles of our body entering into the state of being asleep and the state of being wakeful. There are some other biological and neurological conditions, such as atonic seizures and narcolepsy, that are known to cause a physical state similar to the one during sleep paralysis.

The Anthropological Lens

However, as per Karl Popper and his Law of Falsifiability from the realm of science, if you cannot prove the existence of something, it doesn’t automatically mean that it does not exist. You also have to disprove its existence. In the case of these sleep monsters, we still do have a lot of people recounting their encounters with them! So can we be sure that they do not exist? Science aside, what does Anthropology have to say about some of these sleep monsters and how we take them? Anthropology would try not to figure out whether they exist or do not, but rather the forms of each monster that have taken shape in our minds. The focus on Batibat’s figure being obese and thus grotesque, the morphing conceptions of Succubus from a terrifying demon spirit to less a destroyer and more a seductive enchantress in our modern imagination, and the likeness of a dwarf-ed body to a devil perhaps tells us how we culturally think about bodies, and the body types that we hold as ideal. The standardized beauty ideals for women ask for them to be skinny and sexy, whereas for men, the ideal holds that they be tall (not ‘dwarfed’).

Conclusion

It is interesting to note how sleep monsters have been following us in our sleep for eons! They have existed through time and through space. Various cultures around the world have a sleep monster or two. The myths about these monsters seem to bear some similarities at times, such as them bringing about nightmares, hallucinations, sickness or death. The Batibat from the Phillipines attacks when the tree it resides in has been chopped down. The Incubus and Succubus come to visit looking for sexual relations. The Baku in Japan devours bad dreams but can just as easily go on to eat the good ones too, if left hungry. And the Liderc in Hungary comes in multiple forms, and more often than not, brings with it sickness and death. These could be ways for cultures to make sense of what science terms as sleep paralysis, as well as a range of other sleep conditions. Anthropologically, though, it is also interesting to note how in each of these sleep monsters, perhaps we can see the cultural imagination pouring forth: for instance, the body types we hold “beautiful” and ideal, and the ones we equate to the “ugly”. Whatever the case may be, whether a figment or our imagination or real, what we do know is that sleep monsters exist around the world!