"nightmare"

[David L. White]

        Forgive me if my mind is, as usual since the sudden onset of
testosterone poisoning many years ago, languishing in the gutter (all the
best stuff is down there), or if we have covered this during my absence, but
is not the expression being "ridden by the nightmare" what is known as
sexual reference, to succubus dreams with "woman on top" and all that stuff?
In the middle ages of Northwestern Europe, apart from the feeling that sex
was evil, and if it felt good did so in roughly the same sense that "bodily
functions" might be said to,  there was also the feeling that for a man to
be the passive partner was inherently effeminate and therefore shameful.  We
see this for example in Norse attitudes toward homosexuality.  With both
these syndromes operating, it is small wonder that dreams of this sort where
a man feels himself "ridden" by a spirit could be regarded as traumatizing,
which is to say as nightmares.   From there the more general meaning is
(duh) a generalization, no?
        Things like "priest-ridden" are, I have always thought, by analogy
with things like "flea-ridden" and "tick-ridden", where the creatures in
question could most certainly by said to be literally riding their
unfortunate hosts.  The semantic leap from "ridden" to "infested" under such
circumstances is surely not a great one.

                                                            DLW