Thread: Geometric Night Terrors @ Fever Dreams

You might Google Richard Hoagland if your inderested; Saturn's moon Iapetus looks like the death star from star wars, he talks alot about a sphinx and surrounding pyramids. Mercury has hexagonal craters (as does iapetus), and the synodic periods of Venus map out a pentacle @ leap years in relation to earth. The geomettric centers of all the landmasses are marked my massive mountain ranges in 120 degree arcs. At coordinates cooresponding to light speed(if I remember correctly), considered north of a geodisic dome of ley lines to sacred sites,also at the general center of all landmass. It is aligned to true north, and the sides are even concave in a way that may possibly show the curvature of earth. Assuming it is a model of the planet (and the other greats aspects of others; mercury venus and mars) many have looked for(and claimed to find) mathmatical constants, such as the AU, gravity, and even a time scale marking major events throughout history. Since it's just blocks in a desert you can run away with your lucidity and imagine all the ways they could have built it, although there is really only one simplest, yet they likely made mistakes and covered them up leaving a spiffy pyramid. The subterranean chamber; once thought to be unfinished has been shown on a model scale to be useable in the form of a ram pump. In fact the simplest construction theory I've yet heard involved Hydraulic water llifts. Joe Parr has been doing alot of research into how shape interacts with our astrological environment. I research alot of this while between plans i've made, and could really continue, the visualization can very possibly help overcome night terrors. If you have questions or want more rambling I'd be delighted.

Alright, after having gone through each page of the thread and over every
post, there is something I need to know. These shapes, while in a
nightmare, what attributes would you give them? Do they move purposefully, as
if driven by some unfathomable, terrible will? I want to apply the word
'conscious' here, but I don't think it applies the way I'd like it to. The things,
these shapes, entities, whatever they are, possess some kind of being that is
not entirely unconscious, but not conscious in the way we are. I am developing
a theory on the nature of these things at the moment and would like further
input from those who have experienced either these shapes OR any other
monolithic thing that has made itself present for some reason paramount to the
manifestation of a super-potent nightmare.

Get out of my dream vader!

Originally Posted by Placebo

I haven't read this entire thread, but I've had dreams like that as a kid too, also when I had a fever.
Mine involved feelings of something huge in something tiny... like an elephant squeezed onto a pinhead.

Disturbing as hell. Literally.

that's a good explanation, mine were like that, only the sizes were always changing. Things would get disturbingly small and expand to amazingly huge. My brother said he had the same dream when he was feverish.

I've only had one dream with the geometric shapes, except it was a whole city and was all in primary colors. There was a constant noise accompanied by a feeling of terror and madness. This was all part of a classical night terror.

Wow, I just discovered this thread and it is amazing. Reading over these pages I have gotten so many chills just seeing how accurate some people have described what I have also experienced. I used to get these geometric night terrors every so often when I was a kid and a young adolescent - mostly when i had a fever, but also sometimes randomly when in good health. I haven't had one in at least a few years now.

Some things I can distinctly remember from my own are: very contrastingly coloured shapes - an image that has been burned into my memory from reoccuring in these nightmares is: a strong green Octahedron sitting above a gigantic Tetrahedron made of really thick lines; an overwhelming feeling of crushing slowness and silence; a despairingly horrible feeling of dampness and heavyness (when I would recover from these often hours later I would find that I have been lying in a pool of my own sweat!). Often when people have tried to wake me up from these, I have kept hallucinating the nightmare being unable to actually wake up, and sometimes in the process of recovering I have started rambling complete nonesense when people have tried talking to me to calm me. I can easily distinguish these certain experiences from normal nightmares and dreams, as they seem to entail a completely different kind of reality, that I can only describe as the experience of pure fear and terror.

I have read so many numerous descriptions on these pages that I feel accuretly describe other aspects of these horrible nightmares. I'm very curious about what causes these experiences.

Oh my gosh you guys are so lucky. 4 or 5 times ever? Try 3 or 4 tomes a WEEK. I would get them almost every night be fore i fell aslepp when i was a kid. Now i get them about once a week. They are Horrific. I'm still a teenager so that might be why I'm still having them.I sometimes get them when I'm sick but not exclusively.
I can always tell when I'm about to have one because something will happen to my eyes. It's like everything is really far and small but I'm small also. Even when I close my eyes I'm still away of the sensation of feeling very small.
Then when it actually starts everything is dark. I don't really think there are any shapes floating about but I'm only focused on the feeling that i could be wrong. The feeling. Its horrible. Slow i guess is the best way to put it. Or i know the way that everything that ever will be will happen and it's horrible and i have no way to stop it. I feel pinned down. Sprawled out. Exposed.

Then, in the realllly bad ones, there are numbers. Horrible numbers. they start and one and go up, slowly, forever. and i feel like i missed the one i needed and i have to wait an eternity for it to come again. These are the worst. They last all night. And it's not a regular dream, where you are aware for a while, then drift out. It is an all night struggle pushing against the darkness, waiting for my number to come again, horrible agony.

Then when i wake up one of two things will happen. One, the worst by far, is a sort of thinking in numbers.its like calculating the possibility of everything before you make the slightest move. After a while my brain clicks back into regular thinking but the numbers are really weird.
Another is like my eyes hurt. I cant see light. I usually go back to bed. It isn't exactly painful, my eyes just cants stand the light.

I'm kind of sick right now so i will probably have another one then. I'll post my experiences then. I hope this helps people!
(I apologize for my horrid spelling and typing, i just really wanted to get this out...)

Oh, wow. Fevers must commonly induce dreams of such nature, because I've had similar experiences I can recall. The sound is what I remember most vividly. For me, it's a loud sound, similar to nothing. There's a feeling that overcame me like I was being yelled at by someone furious at me- and the "yelling" didn't let up. I wouldn't say my head felt pressured, but it was a really odd feeling. As for the shapes, I can't remember the specifics, but I do remember they were there; albeit playing a lesser role than the sound.

Originally Posted by Placebo

I haven't read this entire thread, but I've had dreams like that as a kid too, also when I had a fever.
Mine involved feelings of something huge in something tiny... like an elephant squeezed onto a pinhead.

Disturbing as hell. Literally.

Oh MY! mee too@!!!! for me, I had a fever when I was little-

The background was like the "visualization" of the tingling sensation when you get when your foot is asleep. (like a broken TV or something, but in the third dimention..)
and there was a GIANT ugly boot that is either sitting on top of a slither of a fishing wire-like thing or something and it made me really nervous and I was waiting for them to meet with each other (the GIANT and the tiny) but it was moving EVER SO slightly but I knew it was going to happen but not soon enough!!!! AGH!!!! It was jarring! and agonizing! a terrible feeling..

You know what guys?
I think the geometric shapes are related to this link:
Oliver Sacks at TED: What hallucination reveals about our brain

I know it's not really a hallucination, but it might be!

According to Wikipedia:
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The "ideas" or "cognitions" in question may include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one's behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people's ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they are categorized as irrelevant to each other and do not lead to dissonance.




Many of the descriptions of these types of dreams contain painful contradictions. Things growing without moving, an elephant squeezed into the size of a pinhead, a roaring silence.

Since most people experience these dreams at an early age, it may just be a form of cognitive dissonance, as our young minds learn to cope with contradicting ideas. Even the geometric elements contain this dissonance. The platonic solids each have their opposites that are actually the same shape.

I know the feeling of horrifying slowness, but not the geometric shapes. To me it's a grid.

Originally Posted by LRT

I know the feeling of horrifying slowness, but not the geometric shapes. To me it's a grid.

A grid is still geometric in nature.

Am I the only one that hasn't had one of these? At least I think I haven't. I still don't really understand what these night terrors are other than slow-moving shapes. Or is that all they are?

And yet, it's so horrifying. For me, I see a grid, and feel like A, this grid is the most horrible, degenerate thing ever to happen to the world, and, B, I somehow created it. It just laughs at me with its horrifying slowness.

FASCINATING.

When i was 6 i suffered from meningits. It was pretty bad. I was close to death it seems (doctors gave me 50% to live). i had a 42 or 43 degrees celsius fever. They took me to hospital, gave me a injection with i suppose antibiotics in my spine, and put me on isolation. I was very, very ill.

That night i had this terryfying dream/hallucination. I was in some sort of crater/landscape. The ground seems like formed from a fluid and had bright yellow and purple colors, as if plastics of those colors had been melted together. I was in some crater, and i could not escape. The sky was black/reddish.

There was this HUGE THING hovering above me. I could not see it, and yet i could. It was pitchblack, and it was approx 10 kilometres high, and 1 kilometre wide. Like some sort of alien shaped cylinder or pencil. I felt very very very small, and all the time i had the feeling that thing was going to fall, and squash me, thus erasing me from existance. This vision kept with me for several hours. I still remember it vividly (its more then 35 years ago now), as well as awakening from it and looking outside the window to the city lights realizing i escaped something horrible. I also can remember and incredible slowness, and a silence so silent it was deafening.

On another note: Going over these dreams i cannot help notice the simularities with some of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. When i started reading his work it really spooked me out, because of some simularities. Lovecraft had night terrors as well. I highly recommend his works, should any of you not be familiar with it. Though i guess most will, given a lot of his work centre on dreams.

Some of the things have rang some bells for me, some of it has not. It's been fascinating to read.

Fever-induced dreams, for example, I remember them and some of what has been said here sounds similar. I don't remember much in ways of geometric shapes - they showed up from time to time. Everything would be in angles and maths in those kinds of dreams, sometimes with things getting bigger or smaller, or me getting bigger or smaller at alarming rates. There wasn't so much a slowness, rather it was painstakingly repetitive to the point of being nauseating, even making me feel delirious.

In some other dreams, everything would be feverish and frantic, but very slow at the same time. Like I wanted it to end so quick because it was so uncomfortable it was painful and just because of that it would slow down to make it even more unbearable. It would sound like whispering and arguing, like two entities or divisions in my mind were arguing with one another, and it would get louder and more aggressive until I burst awake. But I could never remember what it was about.

Another thing was this awful texture in my mouth. It would feel like my mouth was filled with a soft fibrous lighter-than-cotton substance, almost like a fluffy ball of spider silk. The way it felt on my teeth and mouth was awful, especially the way it rubbed on my teeth. It was like that icky feeling people sometimes get from rubbing two bits of polystyrene together.

When I was in this feverish state when I was little, and mum was watching the television, I used to get immense deja vu with every little thing that was said on the television, and I'd be dreaming but still hearing it. Like I knew what was going to be said seconds before it was said, and the dream would have already taken the path it was going to in accordance to what was being said on the television before it was said on the television.

Originally Posted by Amoeba

Some of the things have rang some bells for me, some of it has not. It's been fascinating to read.

Fever-induced dreams, for example, I remember them and some of what has been said here sounds similar. I don't remember much in ways of geometric shapes - they showed up from time to time. Everything would be in angles and maths in those kinds of dreams, sometimes with things getting bigger or smaller, or me getting bigger or smaller at alarming rates. There wasn't so much a slowness, rather it was painstakingly repetitive to the point of being nauseating, even making me feel delirious.

In some other dreams, everything would be feverish and frantic, but very slow at the same time. Like I wanted it to end so quick because it was so uncomfortable it was painful and just because of that it would slow down to make it even more unbearable. It would sound like whispering and arguing, like two entities or divisions in my mind were arguing with one another, and it would get louder and more aggressive until I burst awake. But I could never remember what it was about.

Another thing was this awful texture in my mouth. It would feel like my mouth was filled with a soft fibrous lighter-than-cotton substance, almost like a fluffy ball of spider silk. The way it felt on my teeth and mouth was awful, especially the way it rubbed on my teeth. It was like that icky feeling people sometimes get from rubbing two bits of polystyrene together.

When I was in this feverish state when I was little, and mum was watching the television, I used to get immense deja vu with every little thing that was said on the television, and I'd be dreaming but still hearing it. Like I knew what was going to be said seconds before it was said, and the dream would have already taken the path it was going to in accordance to what was being said on the television before it was said on the television.

Same here with just about everything. With me, though, the voice(s) seemed to be yelling at me. I got the fabric feeling in my mouth also, but my mouth felt like it was stuffed full, taste and all, with tissues.

And yeah I know what tissues taste like but that's a different childhood story.

I haven't read the whole thread but I recognized the first thing that was described; when I was little (about, um, 9?) when I closed my eyes to go to sleep (not always, but quite often) I saw weird coloured shapes kinda... floating towards me reaaaaaaaally slowly. It really scared me.
I also remember that I was sick once (headache) and I just watched Spider-Man because I was at a sleepover, and I saw tiny spiders crawling everywhere, but I knew it was because I didn't feel well.
Anyway, a while ago when I closed my eyes, lying in bed, I saw those weird shapes again, and I remembered then from when I was little. Instead of being scared I tried to let them float towards me for as long as possible, but at some point I just couldn't any more for some reason and I opened my eyes.
I vaguely remember that everything seemed very 3D and that it all seemed to come from a certain point in the middle.
I'm so glad I found this site because I'm recognizing all those things I never understood o.O

Interesting to say the least, but, I don't ever recall having any of these dreams even as a kid, hmm, maybe bad dream recall?

Although not entirely similar, one of the first reasons I avoided sleep was that whenever I closed by eyes, these...images would come to mind, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't block them or get rid of them - or even change them. The first one I remember was the "elephant on the head of a pin", the second was of a fat man becoming thin, then becoming fat, but next to a thin man becoming fat, then becoming thin, and agonizingly slowly. The third was of two men fighting with swords and (I'm going to skim over this, because if I think to hard about it, it *will* come back) and when I would think "okay, 1 swings his sword to block 2" he...would try to, but would miss, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make my imagined situation play through.

It was terrifying and...well, sticky. Hard to get rid of. The same mental/psychological effect of terror, though.

Oh no, it's a terrible... MOVING SHAPE!
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! These moving shapes scar my mind! They are so terrifying!


Ah okay, sorry, I'm done joking at your expenses.

Wait... oh no, what is that, over there? MY MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND IT!
It is a SMALL ELEPHANT! Such things, how could they exist? So terrifying!



Sorry guys, couldn't resist. I know I'm being inconsiderate, but if you look at it from an outsider's perspective, it's quite humorous.
I know it must be terrible for you however.

Really though... moving shapes? You get fevers because of moving shapes, and small things that are supposed to be big...
I'm going out on a limb here, and don't ban me for this, but... aren't you worried that your brains haven't developed properly?

Difficulty accepting things such as big objects being small, or small objects being big, and having nightmares about shapes - maybe that's your brain's way of comprehending different shapes and sizes.

Maybe it's a natural childhood stage, designed to help children understand shapes and sizes. I await more research!

Also, Cusp, is your avatar 5 shapes on purpose?

Originally Posted by MythicDreams

Really though... moving shapes? You get fevers because of moving shapes, and small things that are supposed to be big...

No, strange dreams during fever, not fever because of strange dreams. Wrong order there mate. :3

Besides, what's more terrifying that when something that shouldn't exist...does? And in your own mind, no less? It's the basis for most horror tropes, actually - and there's another example in the uncanny valley, which seems to the unevolved bit of your brain to literally be a dead man...walking.

True, true.

Originally Posted by MythicDreams

[s]Also, Cusp, is your avatar 5 shapes on purpose?

Sure is. THem's the Platonic Solids.

Originally Posted by koschei

No, strange dreams during fever, not fever because of strange dreams. Wrong order there mate. :3

Actually for me it was fever because of strange dreams. Those dreams would induce fever like symptoms, even though I never actually had a fever.