It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep.
I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a very good job.
When I recognize it happening, I can usually snap out of it.
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.
But yes, I get the fever dreams.
This comes from someone who enjoys the language, too. Weird stuff...
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.
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...
> 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.
I wonder if it is the experience of a mechanism the brain uses to prevent damage from the high body temperature?
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.
- 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
But I have to say no, never in my life have I ever experienced something like that. So it's not a human universal.