The "Night-Mare" in Culture, History, and Biomedicine

描述(由申请人提供)： 这个为期一年的手稿写作项目的目标是批判性地分析文化、历史和生物是如何塑造传统的超自然袭击的，在一个特定的背景下，导致夜间猝死。“夜马”这个词有一个连字符，在它最初的外延中被用来表示一个邪恶生物的夜间来访，它威胁着要把它惊恐的受害者的生命赶走。(这个词的这种形式有别于当代普遍使用的“噩梦”，意为更普遍的焦虑梦。)噩梦“有一个奇怪的区别，那就是它可能是工业化社会中人们最常见的‘未知’经历。” 拟议的学术、书籍长度的手稿有五个具体目标：(1)通过对历史和文化背景下第一人称记述的丰富详细的概述和人种志分析，将稳定、普遍的噩梦现象联系起来；(2)通过审查实验室睡眠研究的最新结果，从生物医学的角度提供对传统噩梦症状的看法；(3)描述和评估关于黑夜现象的研究突破(更新和取代了“伏都教死亡”的概念)的贡献；(4)分析一个罕见的案例(来自我自己的田野调查)--在创伤性文化错位的背景下，噩梦是苗族人突然夜间死亡的触发点；以及(5)探索噩梦遭遇的后果，因为它们现在在美国是普遍经历的-缺乏传统的文化解释模型。 这些方法包括：对有关梦魇的文化、历史和生物医学文献进行批判性的审查；纳入以前收集和分析的对梦魇患者和睡眠研究人员的人种学访谈；以及从网络公告栏和为睡眠瘫痪患者收集的在线支持小组收集的当代描述的定性内容分析。 因此，拟议的手稿旨在通过收集和分析理解一种极其常见但知之甚少的健康相关现象所需的信息，来填补当前医疗保健、人类学和医学史文献中的空白。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this one year manuscript-writing project is to analyze critically the ways in which culture, history, and biology shape a traditional supernatural assault, leading, in one specific context, to sudden nocturnal death. The term "night-mare," with a hyphen, is used in its original denotation as the nocturnal visit of an evil being that threatens to press the very life out of its terrified victim. (This form of the term is distinct from the common contemporary usage of "nightmare" to indicate a more general anxiety dream.) The nightmare "has the odd distinction of possibly being the commonest 'unknown' experience for people in industrialized societies." The proposed scholarly, book-length manuscript has five specific aims: (1) to contextualize the stable, universal night-mare phenomenon through a richly detailed overview and ethnographic analysis of first-person accounts in historical and cultural context; (2) to provide a biomedical perspective on traditional night-mare symptomatology through the examination of recent findings in laboratory sleep research; (3) to describe and assess the contribution of research breakthroughs on the nocebo phenomenon (which update and replace the notion of "voodoo death"); (4) to analyze a rare case (from my own fieldwork) of an extreme form of nocebo effect--the night-mare as a trigger for Hmong sudden nocturnal deaths in the context of traumatic cultural dislocation; and (5) to explore the consequences of night-mare encounters as they are now commonly experienced in the United States---devoid of traditional cultural explanatory models. The methods include: a critical review of the cultural, historical, and biomedical literature on the night-mare; the incorporation of previously collected and analyzed ethnographic interviews with night-mare sufferers and sleep researchers; and the qualitative content analysis of contemporary accounts collected from Web bulletin boards and online support groups for people who suffer from sleep paralysis. The proposed manuscript thus aims to fill a gap in the current healthcare, anthropological, and medical historical literature by collecting and analyzing the information necessary to comprehend an extremely common, but poorly understood, health-related phenomenon.