Can you remember the last time you had a fever?
Besides extreme discomfort, high fever causes hallucinations. I recall looking at my hands and wondering why they're so small. From what I could see behind my heavy eyelids everything was warped. Distances looked off, objects looked as if they were further than they were in reality.
Now fever dreams, they're often so weird they're beyond words. There seems to be a specific type of dream (more common when feverish) that's beyond your casual nightmares. It's what the ghosts and lurking monsters wish they were. The common element in those terrifying experiences is geometry. Warped geometry straight from the last corners of hell, that is.
The following is my own experience on the subject. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
(I was 10-13 years old when I had this dream. In case Cheetah calls me out for it, the following is what I posted on Dreamviews about a year ago, with some edits for clarity (I had a habit of picking the most complicated wording I could find.))
Enter the Void
I was floating above a peaceful green plain, a light blue river flowing just below my viewpoint. The colors were extremely vivid. Suddenly I felt my body being sucked into another world. My view started turning into this white, vast void. I couldn't feel my body anymore. I think I was lucid before but I was no longer, not in it's full sense at least.
It was as if I had moved into another plane of reality. It was like I was observing that world in it's entirety yet it was infinite. The loud silence made me feel terrified. There were these shapes, possibly black. I couldn't make out what they looked like, they just felt like some incomprehensible formations of infinite amounts of energy. The shapes moved in odd motions, they were insanely slow and followed their own seemingly random tracks but I knew exactly where they'd move. As if the shapes were already in their future positions but they weren't. Laws of physics seemed to have no hold wherever I was. Nothing made sense. I had an odd bout of nostalgia, as if I'd been there before.
I was overwhelmed by a sense of despair and discomfort. The powerful shapes just kept moving in a slow, grinding motion. I felt like I was supposed to make an end to it. I didn't seem to exist but as some helpless and meaningless entity. I was assigned with an impossible task by the universe. Time felt like it spun over years. I don't mean that I felt like I actually was in the dream for that long, it's difficult to put into words. It was as if I existed at multiple points in the continuum.
I didn't feel human anymore. I didn't feel that I was in a dream anymore. It was as if my soul was being ripped out of me. If I had to make a guess at what hell is, I'd say the place I was in then.
It was never going to end. I'd be trapped there, in an unruly geometric hell, for an eternity. It was like the shapes had an endpoint but as they approached it it kept being just there, beyond grasp forever. And as the shapes kept moving my sense of dread kept getting worse and worse. I felt like I was slowly dying but there was no end in sight. I'd be dying forever. For all I knew I was dead. There was nothing I could do but keep observing those transcendent things endlessly move towards something they'd never reach.
I woke up, my head ejecting upwards as I grasped for breath. I burst out crying hysterically. I couldn't believe I was awake. I believe I had a similar dream three or so times in my life. From what I've read these seem to often be recurring.
Imagine floating in an empty space. Empty except for a perfectly shaped sphere. A sphere so large you can not even comprehend it anymore. You can't tell how far it is. You can't tell where you are or what you are. All you can hear is loud soul-wrenching silence. The sphere is moving but extremely slowly. You're nothing in comparison, you're incomprehensibly small. The only thing you feel is horror as you watch the sphere moving slowly for an eternity, being pushed by a force so incredible your small mind can't understand it.
What are they then?
There are many common elements to these geometric nightmares.
- "perfect" geometric shapes present in different forms, some see platonic solids, some wheels or lines
- unimaginably large, unreachable objects moving in odd or grinding motions
- "formations of energy"
- infinite space, a void, a dark abyss
- loud silence or buzzing noise
- extreme, overwhelming feelings of dread, helplessness and horror
- a feeling of slowness or warped time
- a feeling of your "soul being ripped out"
- impossible task that you must carry out
- size perception, teleopsia
- reoccuring
- similar to bad trips in nature
Essentially, they're nightmares on steroids.
The horror of the moving objects seems to come from mind's inability to process it. Despite of relative speed they must be moved by an inconceivable amount of force due to their "infinite" size.
Some say they've had similar dreams but they've involved normal objects (albeit warped) like rocks, desks or insects. Maybe the more feverish or restless you are the worse it gets, in the end it all becomes an unintelligible mess of twisted perception. It's interesting how many have reported very similar dreams. They're all quite Lovecraftian. Perhaps the guy got his inspiration from these hellish nightmares.
If you'd wish to read more stories you can visit the thread on Dreamviews! 8 pages of horror for your pleasure.
Have you had a geometric nightmare? If not, what's the worst one you've experienced? Leave a reply below!
Pictures in order:
Nicola Samori - L'Occhio Accidentale
Gustave Doré - Dante et Vergil dans le neuvième cercle de l'enfer
Nicola Samori - Guarigione dell'ossesso Salt
Some picture of H.P. Lovecraft holding a cat
(If you haven't noticed I really, really like Samori's work!)
My reaction reading this. Good job.
wow! you PERFECTLY described the horror i had in my childhood, i used to have dreams like that when i was badly sick (which was quite often)...
Same here. I can't remember any shapes though. I think they were just rocks or something. Really big rocks.
I can relate this this. I had such a fewer 3 weeks ago. I experienced high fever and my dream was symmetrical and geometrical.
I had just returned from a trip in Asia and got a really bad infection just after returning. My fever was high and I was bathing in perspiration during the night. I had a terrible and painful night.
So my dream was that I was captured by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and couldn't go back to my home country. I was captured with thousands of other people and we were all laying in our floating coffins in Bosphorus strait. I could see this pattern with thousands of thousands of floating coffins aligned in a perfect symmetrical pattern. I was trapped there forever and I would never get away from it.
Luckily I was brought to hospital the next morning and got hydrated and given some antibiotics.
Not sure if I want to experience such a night again and I'm so happy that we live in the times of antibiotics. Imagine the painful dreams of the humans that live in a time without working antibiotics or access to good hospitals. and need to stay in the void for a long time.
Interesting! Fever truly can be hellish, good thing we do have working medication (some don't which is awful though).
Fascinating. It sounds like a bad DMT trip! Weird that dreams and drug states can have so many similarities.