Mora Mora

Maria B. Olujic

Word Count 746

I didn’t know what sleep paralysis was when I was a child. But I knew the way the men in my Dalmatian hinterland village spoke about sleep—quietly, fearfully, as if it were something that could reach out and grab you. They called it mora.

We lived at the border between empires—the Venetian to the west, the Ottoman to the east. Our village sat on a fault line of history, where folklore and epic poetry braided together across centuries. Stories weren’t just stories. They were how we explained the shadows.

 In this region, sleep wasn’t just rest. It was a door. A risk. And for the men, especially the young and unmarried, it was something else entirely.

They’d tell stories after the fields were watered, after the shot glasses were rinsed. A man would fall asleep and, sometime in the middle of the night, feel something pressing down on his chest. He couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out. His body was a slab of weight. And something was sitting on him.

That something was mora.

She was never seen clearly—but always described. Voluptuous. Powerful. A woman who could slip through a keyhole or the thin seam beneath a door. Sometimes her hair would fall like a veil over the man's face. She'd slide across his body like breath, or fog, or oil. Her limbs flowed, unbound. She was mist and flesh and danger.

The women did not speak of mora. Only the men. And only in half-laughed tones that didn’t quite reach their eyes. I didn’t have the words back then, but now I know what it was: a mix of longing, shame, and something they didn’t know how to name. Their telling became a kind of performance, a sanctioned vulnerability. Women were not afforded that same permission. We kept our stories closer to the body.

But I remember listening. I’d wander in and out of their gatherings, the way kids do—half noticed, half invisible. The men would sit outside my grandfather’s blacksmith shop, beneath the prancijok, the shade of the linden tree. I’d hear the creak of wood, the clink of cups, and their voices braiding into the dusk.

I remember feeling the heat rise to my face. They were speaking about bodies, desire, and something forbidden. And though I was young, the tension in the air was tangible. I didn’t understand it fully, but I could feel it tightening across my shoulders like a thread pulled too tight. Now, looking back, I know: the stories were erotic.

Not overtly. But deeply.

The shape-shifting woman. The visit that came at night, in sleep. The inability to move. A man lying still, overcome. There was no language for sexual hunger in the daylight. But at night? The body spoke.  

And maybe mora gave them cover. Maybe speaking of the “attack” allowed them to talk about arousal without admitting it. She became the perfect screen—a supernatural scapegoat for very human heat.

Later, in my anthropology studies, I would learn about culture-bound syndromes. The Old Hag in Newfoundland. The night spirit in Japan. The incubus and succubus from medieval texts. In every place, it seems, the body remembers what the culture tries to forget.

In our village, sex before marriage was forbidden. Desire was policed with glances and gossip. The men who spoke of mora never admitted who she looked like—but everyone seemed to know. It was always a woman slightly outside the fold. Too beautiful. Too poor. Too wild. Not marriage material. But not easily dismissed either.

Mora was how the village managed that tension.

Now, in the West, my doctor asks, "How's your sleep?" I tell her my back makes it hard to turn, and she suggests a sleep study. Electrodes. Data. REM cycles. It's all so clinical. I want to tell her about the stories. About how, once, sleep was a place of myth. Of reckoning. Of the unspoken rising up through the chest.

I never saw a mora. But I saw the way the men looked when they talked about her. I heard their breath catch. I felt the hush that came after. And I understood: sleep is where we are most alone with ourselves.

And maybe that’s why it still unnerves us. Not because of dreams. But because of what presses down when we’re too still to look away.

Sometimes it has a name. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it slips under the door in the shape of a woman.

And sometimes it just sits there—waiting. 

Maria, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and writer who served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology in wartime Croatia during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her work appears in Brevity, 100 Word Story, The Panorama, Catamaran, Sky Island Journal, Beyond Words Magazine, and Penstricken. She explores memory and gendered violence, bridging personal and political histories shaped by diaspora, dislocation, and survival. Her memoir, Fields of Lavender, Rivers of Fire: A Memoir of War, Womanhood, and Bearing Witness, is currently under editorial review. She divides her time between California and Croatia.