Mar Rodriguez

In this video Roy Orbison singing In Dreams in the Black & White Night with his friends: Jackson Browne, T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, k.d.Lang, Bonnie Raitt, J.D. Souther, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Jennifer Warnes.

Something which come to me when a hear this song
The Nightmare

“So on his Nightmare through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder’d maid with sleep oppress’d,
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.”

From the poem by Erasmus Darwin

Nightmares were widely considered to be the work of demons and more specifically incubi, which were thought to sit on the chests of sleepers. In Old English the name for these beings was mare or mære (from a proto-Germanic *marōn, related to Old High German.)

And if you should be haunted by nightmares here is an ancient spell to fight them:
Nightmare Charm or Spell against the Mara

“De man o’ meicht
He rod a’ neicht
We nedder swird
Nor faerd nor leicht,
He socht da mare,
He fand da mare,
He band da mare
Wi’ his ain hair,
An’ made her swear
By midder’s meicht,
Dat shö wad never bide a neicht
What he had rod, dat man o’ meicht. ”

Source: County Folk-Lore, vol. 3: Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the Orkney & Shetland Islands, collected by G. F. Black and edited by Northcote W. Thomas (London: Folk-Lore Society, 1903)