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Mare

Supernatural
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A night spirit believed to sit on sleepers and cause nightmares. The word is historically linked with the idea of the nightmare.

Detailed Definition
The mare is a nocturnal being from Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, imagined as pressing upon a sleeper's chest and filling the mind with fearful visions. It offers poets a compact figure for dream terror and the helplessness of the body at rest. A mare may arrive through a keyhole, settle like fog, or ride the breath of a sleeping speaker. In lyric poetry, it can turn insomnia, trauma, or recurring memory into a creature with hooves, hair, and deliberate malice.
Example
Example in poetry:
A mare, the night spirit associated with nightmares in Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, can embody sleep paralysis and nocturnal dread; The mare rides the sleeper's ribs until the room fills with the sound of hooves; A poet may reveal the mare only gradually, first as pressure, then as a shadow, then as a rider at the bed's edge; In a recovery poem, the speaker wakes and finds the mare shrinking into an ordinary tangle of blankets
Additional Notes
The supernatural “mare” is an old Germanic and northern European tradition explaining the nightmare as the work of a being that presses upon or rides a sleeper. The modern word “nightmare” preserves this history: its second element originally referred to the oppressive spirit rather than a female horse. Poets can exploit this forgotten meaning when personifying dreams, suffocation, terror, or nocturnal paralysis. Historical belief also overlaps suggestively with experiences now called sleep paralysis. Compare incubus, nightmare, sleep paralysis, dream demon, nocturnal visitation, oppression, folklore, and etymology.
Other Meanings of “Mare”
Also Known As
Mara Nightmare Spirit
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