We all have them — those scary bad dreams, which stay in our minds for quite a while. Sometimes we even say ‘I’m having a nightmare’ if everything seems to be going wrong! But where does the word ‘nightmare’ come from?

A. A nightmare was originally a wild black horse, believed to gallop through the night and bring bad dreams to all the sleeping people it passed.

B. The first nightmares were believed to be monsters that came out of the sea at nighttime and gobbled up the locals.

C. Over a thousand years ago, a ‘mare’ was a female evil goblin – according to legend she would lie on the chest of someone sleeping and give them terrible dreams and the feeling of being suffocated.

ANSWER. C!

Well all of the possible answers were pretty scary, but the real answer is probably the most terrifying of all. A mare was once thought to be a wicked female spirit who came out at night to lie on top of her sleeping victim until they could hardly breathe, filling their dreams with horrible images of death. The legend was so frightening that the Anglo-Saxons tried all sorts of rituals to scare the nightmares away. One of them involved tying up a knife in a cloth and swinging it three times around the body while saying a spell (don’t try that at home!), and sometimes they would hang mistletoe over their bed.

Of course, over the centuries people forgot about the goblins and applied ‘nightmare’ to the feelings of terror and suffocation instead. My remedy for a bad dream has to be the best — a chocolate biscuit!