Demon

In the interpretation of dreams, Demon is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as inner fears, temptation, guilt, and destructive impulses.

Common readings

A demon is generally read not as an external being but as an image of the dreamer's own fears, temptations, guilt or destructive impulses.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

The sleep researcher David J. Hufford, in The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), documents sleep paralysis, a real, well-studied neurological phenomenon in which REM-sleep muscle atonia briefly persists into waking consciousness, as the likely physiological basis behind a strikingly consistent set of folk traditions across unrelated cultures describing a malevolent nocturnal visitor, an "Old Hag," an incubus, a demon, sitting on or pressing the sleeper's chest. This is a genuinely documented convergence between a specific, verifiable physiological event and widespread, independently arising cultural interpretation, distinct from the vaguer, unattributed claim that dreaming of "a demon" in the ordinary, non-paralysis sense carries any single fixed symbolic meaning.

One dream experience has collected demon names in every language: the sleeper wakes unable to move, feels a weight on the chest and a presence in the room, and is certain something is there. Latin named the crusher incubus; Germanic folklore the mara, the crushing spirit hiding inside the word nightmare; Newfoundland calls it the Old Hag and being ridden by her hagging. Sleep science knows the experience as sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucination, common, benign and cross culturally stable, which explains the universality of the demon reports without explaining away how convincing they are. Any entry on dream demons owes the reader that fact first.

The interpretive traditions handled the rest. Late antique and medieval dream theory, following Macrobius, sorted dreams into ranks and set the phantasm and the nightmare among the false and bodily kinds, while the church read demonic dreams as temptation requiring discernment rather than fear. Islamic interpretation similarly ranked the bad dream as from the adversary, to be left untold and not acted on.

The psychological schools brought the demon indoors: the Freudian line read demonic figures as the repressed returning in costume, and the Jungian as the shadow personified, the dreamer's own disowned material given horns precisely so it cannot be recognised as their own. Popular dictionaries compress to inner fears and guilt. The readings are the traditions'; the paralysed visitor at the bed's foot, at least, now has a physiology.