Nightmares in Hats

One of the most well-known, modern nightmare monsters is the Hat Man, a popular internet legend since the early 2000s. The Hat Man is a shadow person known for wearing a wide-brimmed hat like a fedora, and sometimes a trench coat, who stands menacingly in the corner of the room alarming paralyzed sleepers. While the image of the Hat Man seems distinctively modern, reminiscent of the hat-wearing horror movie villain Freddy Krueger from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the image of nightmares wearing hats is actually a common motif in many folklore accounts of nightmares, and can even be traced back to the first century!

Ever since the connection was made between the Newfoundland nightmare monster of the “Old Hag” and “Hag attacks” to the physiological experience of waking sleep paralysis, a tremendous amount of research has discovered that, cross-culturally, many nightmare monsters and demons from mares to incubi share certain features that can be attributed to sleep paralysis. Nightmares typically crush the sleeper, causing a sense of overwhelming dread and to be unable to move or breathe. This universality of nightmare representations only highlights the oddness of the often-repeated folklore motif in which the nightmare wears a hat, which at first glance does not seem traceable back to the oneiric or parasomnia experience.

To give some examples from around the world: the German alp wears a tarnkappe, a “cap of concealment” from which it draws its power, and which, if lost, the alp will offer a reward for the cap’s return. The Sardinian s’ammutadori wears seven red caps, and if the sleeper can steal one, they will soon find a hidden treasure. The Turkish karabasan wears a wide hat that if the sleeper takes it the djinn becomes their slave. The Turkish kamos wears a traditional leather börk hat which if stolen the hat turns into gold. The Brazilian pesadeira wears a red cap that if stolen the nightmare will lose her strength and grant the sleeper a wish for the cap’s return. The Polish viek will bring the sleeper lots of money if its cap is stolen. The Albanian mokthi wears a golden fez that if stolen the sleeper will be granted a wish. And various Italian nightmare elves wear hats that, once again, if stolen the nightmare will reveal the hiding place of a treasure.

 

The Pesadeira in her red cap, not the Hat Man but a Hat Hag

This theme of nightmares in hats who give the dreamer treasure is so old that it was even mentioned in the first century in Roman novelist Gaius Petronius’s Satyricon, where dinner guests discussing a friend’s recent, sudden wealth suggest that: “quom Incuboni pilleum rapuisset, et thesaurum invenit” (When he had stolen the hat of the Incubus, he found the treasure). In his folklore reporting on the alp, Jacob Grimm speculated that the Alp’s tarnkappe may be connected to magic hats of invisibility and power worn by mythological figures such as Hermes, Odin, and Hades, but this doesn’t explain the association of hats with nightmares.

On a symbolic level, a nightmare wearing a hat draws on the association of the head to dreams. This metaphor is likewise found in subpulvinar or under-the-pillow magic, where the pillow’s closeness to the head allows an object placed under it to influence one’s dreams. In the case of nightmares, there seems to be a collective, unconscious awareness that the power of nightmares extends from our own heads, and that by taking the nightmare’s hat, we can relocate the dream back into our own minds.

However, I think this connection runs deeper than just a symbol, and the inclusion of the mytheme of stealing the nightmare’s hat to find a treasure is actually a folkloric attempt at encouraging lucid dreaming as a remedy for nightmares. A number of the other nightmare cures involve the sleeper attempting wiggle their fingers or toes, or to touch the nightmare or their bed, acts that would encourage one to attempt to move and thus break the sleep paralysis. Reaching for the nightmare’s hat would also accomplish this kind of paralysis-breaking maneuver. But when you add the idea that stealing the hat leads to treasure, this may have seeded the idea of exerting control of the dream and in order to redirect it toward more positive imagery.

If stealing a nightmare’s hat can lead to the treasure of a better dream, this raises the question of whether anyone has ever tried or successfully been able to steal the Hat Man’s hat?