The History Of ‘Nightmare’

People awakening from a “nightmare” often have the sensation that they can’t breathe. Not surprising: That’s where the word “nightmare” comes from.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first used of “nightmare” in English to around 1300, as “a female spirit or monster supposed to settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal.”

Other folk etymology traces the “mare” of the night in some similar linguistic form all the way to our earliest languages as humans. We’ve always had evil spirits. 

Source: Columbia Journalism Review