Saturday Oct. 28, 2023 –
The famous film “Nightmare On Elm Street”, well it is just a movie. But for Filipinos and Laotian Hmongs, it’s real. Discovered among Laotian-Hmong refugees after the fall of Saigon, “Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome or “bangungot” in Tagalog (Filipino); pok-kuri in Japanese For the Hmong people of Vietnam and Laos, it is the tsob tsuang seems to victimize only MALE Filipinos and Laotian Hmongs. A fellow Filipino friend of mine told me that he had three (3) nightmares just last June-July 2023 when he stopped doing whatever it is he was doing to prevent this kind of nightmares. He used to have the other kind of nightmare more like PTSD wherein he would wake-up in the middle of the night drenched in his own sweat and sometimes he’d be screaming.
“In 1960, Dr. Gonzalo Aponte was called to the US NAVAL HOSPITAL IN GUAM TO INVESTIGATE THE DEATHS OF ELEVEN (11) FILIPINO SAILORS who all seemed to have died inexplicably in their sleep after days of complaining about nightmares. Though the autopsies turned up few concrete details, Aponte looked into the case further and found reports regarding Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death (SUND) dating back as far as 1917.”
“In the early 20th century an American anthropologist wrote about the Bontoc’s belief in the li-mum, or “fiendish nightmares…[caused] by sitting on the sleeping individual’s breast and stomach.” Similarly, the English word nightmare originally referred to a “mare”, a female spirit, who was believed to suffocate sleeping victims.
Everything from pancreatis and nutritional deficiencies to congenital problems in the heart’s anatomical structure have been blamed. But the end result is always the same. A seemingly healthy person, with no adverse medical history, dies from very sudden cardiac arrythmia.
How to pronounce “Mababangong Bangungot” https://youtu.be/caW5muMxQyI
