Introduction
Modern medicine distinguishes between several sleep disturbances and disorders, which may be primary conditions or may be secondary to other physiological or psychiatric disorders.
At least once in a lifetime, a person experiences a sleep disorder, such as night terror, insomnia, hypersomnia, bruxism, and suffers a certain level of discomfort caused by the alteration of his/her regular sleeping and dreaming faculties. Depending on their frequency, duration and recurrence, even common sleep disorders might result in severe daytime impairments and may require pharmaceutical, somatic or behavioral- psychotherapeutic treatment. Similarly, chronic sleep disorders and sleep disturbances, that are secondary to physical or mental pathologies, are treated or managed in different manners by modern sleep medicine.[308] [309]Sleep disorders are not exclusive to the modern world, but clearly affected our ancestors as well. Nevertheless, recognizing references to sleep impairments in ancient writings is often quite challenging. In most cases, the terminology used in ancient textual corpora to refer to sleep disorders hardly finds intelligible parallels in contemporary medical science.[310] Often, in antiquity, sleep disturbances were not perceived as a phenomenon pertaining to the biological and medical sphere, but were related to archaic conceptions of dreams, according to which the oneiric experience represented the bridge between the human and extra-human domains.[311] [312] Ancient cultures generally understood sleep disorders in the context of magical and demonic traditions and developed magical rituals either to protect themselves from a particular sleep ailment or to affect the regular sleep of a certain victim, as is proved by several sources from the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. In the present article, I discuss a selection of late antiqueJewish sources that attest to the existence of magical rituals relating to sleep disorders within late antique Judaism. After a brief introduction to oneiric aggressive magic, I present some passages referring to magical practices relating to insomnia and nightmares, respectively from Sefer ha-Razim, Harba de-Moshe, and the corpus of Babylonian magic bowls. These sources demonstrate that, at least since Late Antiquity, Jews were well aware of the distress caused by sleep disorders. They attempted to treat or to manage such disturbances with magical aids and, in certain instances, attempted to cause sleep impairment in their victims.