When Dreams Kill: The True Story Behind A Nightmare on Elm Street

Everyone who knows me knows I'm a huge horror movie fan, with the 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' series being my favourite. If you haven't seen them, they center around Freddy Krueger. Freddy was a child killer who, after evading jail due to a technicality, was killed by the parents of his victims and other citizens of the town of Springwood, who burned him to death in his boiler room hideout in an attempt to get justice. Freddy returns to haunt the children of those responsible for his death, invading their sleep. He finds some very creative ways to kill them in their dreams, which leads to their deaths in both their dream state and the waking world. But could this really happen? Can you really be killed by your dreams? The answer could be yes.

Laos, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, is centrally located on the Indochinese Peninsula. Bordered by Myanmar, China, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, its proximity to these nations made it a key ally for the United States during conflicts in the region. After the conflicts ended, many locals who had fought alongside the U.S. were labeled as traitors and became targets of persecution. This led many to flee their homes and seek refuge in the U.S. It was in their new home that mysterious tales of people dying in their sleep began to surface.

It was soon after the war ended in 1975 that refugees began to arrive in the United States, and almost immediately, tales of young people mysteriously dying in their sleep emerged. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, there were many reported deaths of mostly young men who died mysteriously during their sleep. While it is not uncommon for people to die in their sleep, a cause of death is usually identifiable; however, this was not the case with these young refugees. A series of reports in the Los Angeles Times in 1981 highlighted these strange unexplained deaths and brought them to the attention of one of the masters of the horror genre and the creator of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, Wes Craven.

47-year-old Yong Lang Thao, along with members of his family, relocated to the U.S. after spending time in a refugee camp in Thailand. After spending the evening with his family, he retired to bed, seemingly happy and healthy. Tragically, when his wife awoke the next morning and turned to face him, she discovered that he had not survived the night. While Thao had shown no signs of worry or premonition about his death, others did report having terrible nightmares, with some even becoming terrified of falling asleep. This was the case for another family of refugees. The young son in this family told his parents he was having very disturbing dreams and feared something was trying to kill him. His parents thought these were just bad dreams stemming from traumatic memories of a childhood spent in war-torn Cambodia. They did their best to help him cope with these night terrors, and after several days with very little sleep, he finally fell into a deep sleep. Late that night, horrific screams from the boy's bedroom startled his parents, but by the time they reached his bedside, he was dead. These are just a few of the cases reported in a short period of time. With over 100 cases reported, all sharing almost identical details—the nightmares, the fear of sleeping, and the eventual death while asleep—these elements became the cornerstones of the deaths in 'The Nightmare On Elm Street' movies.

Such a large number of seemingly identical deaths, confined to a very specific group of people within a short span of time, prompted an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which named the seemingly linked occurrences 'Asian Death Syndrome.' Several theories were explored, leading to multiple hypotheses about what was responsible for the deaths. These included mental trauma from living through horrific wartime experiences, exposure to chemical agents such as mustard gas, and the stress of moving from their homeland to a new and unfamiliar environment, leaving everything and everyone behind. While any one of these theories could partially explain the cause, none completely accounted for the deaths. After no conclusive cause of death could be identified, the CDC reclassified the incidents as Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS). Even today, the large number of deaths among Asians, particularly those from the Indochinese Peninsula, remains medically unexplained. But could there be another cause, perhaps of a supernatural nature?

All over the world, on every continent, there are supernatural beings said to terrorise you as you sleep. Some instill fear in their victims, while others feed spiritually or physically, and some are even said to kill. In many cultures, the names translate to 'Sleep Paralysis' or something similar, although others attribute these phenomena to supernatural beings, which will be our focus. In Asian cultures, there are creatures that kill their victims while they sleep, and although they go by different names, they are similar in nature. In Nepal, the Kayak is a ghost-like figure that lurks in the darkness under the stairs, coming to you as you sleep. Iran is home to Bakhtak, another ghost-like creature that sits on the dreamer’s chest, making it hard for them to breathe. The Kurdish people refer to it as Motakka, believed to be a spirit that attacks, particularly targeting the young, and steals their breath. In Philippine culture, the Batibat is a hideous, obese woman who sits on her victims' chests, suffocating them. Many of the refugees who entered the United States were Hmong, an indigenous people from East and Southeast Asia, who believe in the Dab Tsog, a creature that sits on the chests of people as they sleep and strangles them.

In the realm of nightmares and the creatures that inhabit them, the line between folklore and cinematic horror often blurs. Freddy Krueger, an iconic figure in horror cinema, embodies the amalgamation of various cultural spectres—each embodying deep-seated fears of the unknown and the unseen forces that can invade our most vulnerable state: sleep. From the Southeast Asian Dab Tsog to the enigmatic Hat Man of shadow people lore, these entities reflect the universal human experience of fear that transcends cultural boundaries, reminding us that sometimes the scariest stories are those that tap into our collective unconscious.