I think I have experienced something similar, where I have to find the right configuration for some pattern, sometimes grounded in like how my sheets and blanket wrap around my body in order to create or fix some dream machine. It's not a fully formed concept, but I'm trying to fix it and arrange the pattern in my mostly-sleeping state - it's always impossible and I have to recognize what I'm doing, fully wake myself up, and then try to go back to sleep to get out of it.

Yes. I get this. It's kind of a problem some time. My brain gets trapped in a loop of trying to solve some puzzle or system of constraints, but none of it is based on anything. I couldn't even describe it. It's more like patterns of faux-logical systems.

When I recognize it happening, I can usually snap out of it.

I experience exactly the same thing, with me it happens when I am very tired. When I was younger (<10 yr) it made me really afraid. I can remember a new years eve that I was so tired and scared that I was literally terrified and hid in the corner of the room and my parents did not know what was happening to me.

Now I know what is happening and I just take it as a sign that I'm very tired. It's comforting to see someone else describing the same thing that is happening to me.

My "logic puzzle" is moving endless amounts of large, heavy cubes in holes that keep on appearing when I fill them. The visual aspect is only a part of it, the emotional feeling of the endless task is another.

For what it's worth, I instantly see very complex patterns in the visual test.

Yes, this happens to me when I'm very tired. The worst is when I'm about to fall asleep, but this thought pattern keeps my brain just active enough to prevent sleep.

Loop is the right word for me. I’ll suddenly get stuck in a loop of subdividing a cube into smaller cubes over and over, or squaring a number over over. Never accurately, just…visually? It’s happened to me twice, both times when I was quite sick. It’s absolutely terrifying and feels like my mind is broken beyond repair. I’m getting upset just thinking about it.

Agreed, doing matrix multiplication of Star and Pyramid makes no sense. Tho usually I do not wake up enough to stop.

I'm so glad I'm not alone in this. My fever dreams are distinctly different from regular dreams, but it is pretty impossible to explain. Sometimes my fever dreams involve innate objects that dwarf me in size, and I gradually seem to feel smaller. That statement doesn't quite catch it though.

But yes, I get the fever dreams.

I actually get these when I'm over stimulated before bed. I used to take add meddicine in college but would fall asleep after 6 surges and some adderall. And then my brain would just be wheeling away on nonsense. Rarely do I dream like this when I have a fever, usually I'm just out.

I can relate with a very bad dream I had when I was maybe 7 or 8, it involved not a maze but fractal patterns of eggs and gears (although at the time I didn't know what fractal was, so I perceived it as "growing and growing to no end"). This happened once in my life, and it was 40 years ago, but I still remember how terrified I was, and I also remember how I have been scared for literally years after this episode to have this bad dream again.

Over the more recent years, whenever I'd get sick and experience fever dreams, JavaScript paradigms would be what I'd get lost in i.e. asynchronous calls, callbacks, single-threaded nature, etc.

This comes from someone who enjoys the language, too. Weird stuff...

I had episodes like this when I was younger. And had them flare up when I was taking Buspirone for anxiety as an adult. They'd last about 10-20 minutes and I always described them as "pure chaos of the internal geometric space."

Never did find any kind of label for the symptoms. I kept a journal of the episodes for a while. They seemed to come up monthly when I was around 16.

At the very least it's validating to encounter others who had had similar experiences.

It's been decades since I had fever dreams. But my memories include strange shapes and motions and things being somehow upside down or otherwise inverted. Most of all, I remember an absolutely overpowering sense of dread over how everything was impossible. What was happening should not be happening. It could not be happening. The terror only grew as the impossibility continued.

I had those dreams from time to time, it looks equally disturbing like those AI memory images: https://imgur.com/ocplHAy

Sometimes it is very fast morphing shape of objects and events, morphing into other shapes and events ...

But what is most disturbing is that during the dream everything looks logical and known, it is feeling like tapping to some higher source of knowledge, but as soon as I wake up, it seems my brain shrank to regular size and cannot read from the same book, so "symbols"/"letters"/"words"/"sentences" which were understandable there I cannot read anymore. Forgive my lack of words, it is like in those movies where protagonist gets turn to a cat or dog, so he at that point his cat/dog brain cannot understand humans and human talking/thinking anymore...

Annoying part is that, attempting to explain people how does it feel and look like sounds worse than when teen boy trying to talk to a girl he has crush into...

This reminds me of people's reaction to this image: https://twitter.com/melip0ne/status/1120503955526750208

Wow, exactly, and at the same time looking at it braking my brain, I hope it will clear up in my dream :D

Something like the Tetris Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

> No home was sweet without a Game Boy in 1990. That year, I stayed "for a week" with a friend in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.

Yes! I had those as a kid. It was like mazes that kept getting harder, like I had to find a solution but can’t. Very unpleasant in a way that’s hard to describe.

My fever dreams involve some kind of impossibly large scale task that can seemingly only be completed by infinite tedium. The task is always very abstract such that I could never say what it was my mind was trying to accomplish, other than that it required this focused tedious repetition.

I wonder if it is the experience of a mechanism the brain uses to prevent damage from the high body temperature?

Right, that seems to be the common thread for fever dreams: something that feels intellectually taxing somehow. For me, it's usually some form of problem solving that can be more or less sensible (from solving chess puzzles to nonsense math to kafkaesque administrative processes).

It happened to me once. The world around me was turning into swiss-cheese holed lego bricks, which was ok. However, it was also 'folding' into some kind of lower dimension (2.5d?), and I couldn't understand the fold, so it became very unpleasant.

Yes, for me I usually get trapped in a fractal maze of whatever media I consumed last. Video games, tv shows, etc. after my second Moderna dose I binged ‘The Circle’ on Netflix, that was a mistake when I dipped into the fever dreams...

I used to have a similar dream all the time. Always felt a passage through time and space with a terrible sense of dread and confusion. Turns out I have sleep apnea and as soon as I got a cpap the dreams went away.

I both dream a lot and have great control over my dreams in general, but when I get sick it falls off the bus.

Once I tried to somehow fit a ball into blue. The two concepts were so different that I just kept on trying and failing.

Recently (also with quite a fever) I had a stack of dominoes that would fall over as I ran my hand over them. But then when I got to the end they were all upright again and I just kept going forward and back with no resolve.

It's extremely frustrating.

Not quite, but I experience very bad logic and logical inconsistencies in dreams. For example:

- Can't even do basic math, or I solve it wrong (e.g. 2 + 3 = 7) - Impossible (non-euclidian) spatial arrangement - Leave out big gaps of details, which I have to fill in if I remember the dream. Not that I'm forgetting stuff, I just never thought of it in the first place - Misremember stuff from the past

Yes, can somewhat explain it like grinding over something over and over again. Trying senseless combinations of something to solve something yada yada. Sometimes related to what I'm working on at that particular time. I always think it is my brain's way of consolidating new information. Nonetheless it is very unpleasant.

What you're asking is quite specific. Do you desire only to comprehend, or to comprehend in order to solve? For me it tends to be a loop of complex problem which I feel I comprehend, which upon solving turns out to not be solved, because it was incomprehensible, followed by comprehending, goto 10

It seems like you've got a lot of people expressing a similar experience. You're not alone!

But I have to say no, never in my life have I ever experienced something like that. So it's not a human universal.

Yes absolutely, it feels like the brain is in problem-solving mode without a concrete problem to solve. It's maddening. I often experience those "dreams" when under stress.

Amazing, never heard of it :) never had anything like this. Sounds like something from a book or a movie.