The Bakhtak: The Persian Nightmare That Pays Its Ransom in Treasure
This chronicle has lain awake under the world's night-pressers — the Alp of the German bedrooms with his precious cap , the Albasty of the steppe birth-beds , the lidérc pressing Hungarian into its very word for nightmare — and Persia's entry in the great smothering brotherhood begins identically: the sleeper half-wakes in the dead hours, pinned; a weight is seated on the chest — small, dense, hairy, gnome-like in the tellings, gray as dust or dark as the room's own corners; breath shortens, limbs are stone, and the bakhtak rides its hour. Iranian folk tradition knows the visitor everywhere, and modern Persian keeps him embedded in the language exactly as German keeps the Alp: bakhtak remains a living word for nightmare and for the crushing dead-of-night dread, and the experience he personifies — the paralysis, the pressure, the presence — is the same human universal this chronicle has now met on five continents. But Persia, alone among all the nations of the pressed ch...