연락처 : PN 이메일 : stewarthall@bigpond.com

For centuries, humans have turned to dreams to make sense of the unknown. In many cultures, dreams were not seen as random firings of the brain but as messages from spirits. These visions often carried glimpses into hidden truths. It is no surprise that many of the fears we still carry today—fear of being chased—have roots in ancient folklore and were reinforced through generational sleep memories.

Folklore is filled with creatures and scenarios that mirror common nightmare themes. The night stalker, the mirror twin, the dark silhouette, the weeping short ghost stories—all of these appear not only in stories told around campfires but also in the dreams of people across cultures. These figures rarely have identifiable eyes. They move like smoke, appear out of nowhere, and vanish without explanation. This vagueness is intentional. It allows the fear to be projected onto the unknown, making it more enduring.

In medieval Europe, people believed dreams could be whispered by fallen angels to corrupt the soul. In East Asian traditions, nightmares were sometimes attributed to hungry ghosts. Native American tribes saw dreams as thresholds to other dimensions, where hungry wraiths could cross over if the dreamer was spiritually vulnerable. These beliefs did not disappear with the rise of science. Instead, they merged with modern psychology, creating a collective subconscious that still lingers in our sleep.

Even today, when someone reports a dream of being cornered in a hallway with a pale form watching from the corner, they are echoing a story told for thousands of years. The brain, in its attempt to process unresolved trauma, draws from the shared human folklore. The fear is not just personal—it is transmitted. We are afraid of the dark not only because we cannot see, but because our ancestors were imprinted that something waits there.

Modern science explains nightmares as the result of neurochemical imbalance. But science does not erase the meaning. The fact that these dreams are so universally recurring suggests that they are tapping into something older than the mind itself. They are part of a universal nocturnal code, shaped by rituals of fear and echoed in the subconscious.

Perhaps the connection between dreams and folklore fear is not about what is real, but about what echoes in the soul. The creatures of folklore live on because they speak to the parts of us that still feel the presence of the ancient. They remind us that fear is not always irrational—it is often spiritually encoded and intertwined with the foundation of how we understand the world. When we dream of being stalked, we are not just processing stress. We are activating an ancient survival script, a story that tells us to never turn around.

In this way, folklore does not just influence our dreams. It becomes our dreams. And in our dreams, it awaits our next sleep.