Do you know anything about the Alp, a German mythological creature?

+4 votes
280 views
This has been on my mind for a while. To be honest I’m not sure if it qualifies as paranormal or coincidence. I’m hoping someone here can shed some light on it. When I was around 7 I had a couple of really strange dreams.

     In the first one I walked into the kitchen at night to get some water. When I flipped on the light the linoleum that normally was just orange rectangles now had a pattern of flying Supermen across the floor. Confused, I looked around and saw a strange creature crouched between the wall and the kitchen table. It looked at me and told me my grandma was going to die then I woke up.

     The second dream was at night as well. My grandma had taken me to my daycare so she could talk to one of my caretakers and she had left me outside to play on the play set. As I went to go down the slide I saw the same creature in a corner and it again told me my grandma was going to die. She passed away a couple of months later.

     More than twenty years later and one of my favorite hobbies is genealogy. Although most of my ancestors were Scottish, my grandma was descended from a pocket of German immigrants that settled in East Tennessee, most notably the Glucks, Winegars, and Wolfes. I thought it could be interesting to Google German folklore, but when I did I was shocked. The very creature that had been in my dream was staring back at me, and it had a name, the Alp.

     As I began reading I found an even stranger connection. The Alp is responsible for night terrors and that is something I have been plagued with all of my life. There was nothing about telling small children about their grandma’s impending death. So, I’m asking you guys. Do you think these things are connected? Do you have any information that might be relevant?
WikiTree profile: Rose Etta Click
in The Tree House by Nicole Skeen G2G5 (5.1k points)

2 Answers

+5 votes
The Alb/Alp has the same origins and is practically the same as the "mare". It's of old Germanic origin as far as I know. In most of the Germanic languages (but also in other languages) the word for "bad dreams" derive from it: e.g. "nightmare" and "Albtraum" (literally german for Alb-dream)
by Norbert Gitzl G2G6 Mach 2 (27.0k points)
+4 votes
I think it's mainly a Siebenbürgisch-Sächsisch (Transylvanian Saxon) thing, though the term is probably still current in some other dialects. I don't believe it's used in standard Hochdeutsch anymore.
by Living Buckner G2G6 Mach 5 (55.1k points)
Wlislocki remarked, among other things, that when he was a schoolboy in Kronstadt, "alping" was used as a euphemism.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ma_bUlTQhnsC&q=alb#v=snippet&q=alb&f=false

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