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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

> That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing.

When I was 8 or 9 I had a night terror that involved some sort of life-sized game of Tetris that was moving terribly fast. My brain wholly adopted the belief that if I were to lose, everyone I loved would die horribly. I was trapped in this night terror for what felt like forever. Afterwards I refused to sleep voluntarily for weeks.

To this date, nothing has come close. I would describe the feeling as “dread.” Just complete, pure dread.

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I think I know the feeling exactly. I had recurrent dreams like that as a kid, that somehow always involved a large yellow sphere / ball. For some unknown reason I HAD to move that sphere, but I also knew it was impossible. It evoked this odd and terrible sensation emerging from two opposing mental forces: there was something I HAD to do at all costs but I also knew it was entirely impossible at the same time.

My “bad trips” brought back that same feeling, but magnified by a thousand.

Yeah, “HAD to” is how it felt, yet those words, and any other words, always feel insufficient.

Fascinating. When I had fever dreams as a kid, I would have a sensation that was similar. It was the need to do find/choose something infinitesimally unlikely. Like finding a single coin dropped anywhere in the Pacific ocean. And if I failed the universe would cease to exist.

Yes! This is the feeling. And I've also experienced while sick. It happened sometimes while I was not sick as a kid though. Then I didn't feel it for decades until I tried certain drugs.

Fascinating. I experienced something very similar as a kid, with huge grey spheres in a black void. They felt implacable, indifferent, yet malicious. And I had a sense of futility and utter insufficiency.

I also experienced these feelings later on psychedelics and in some other circumstances of adult duress.

I really do wonder what to make of the similarities.

There’s a very reassuring feeling I’m having right now seeing so many people write about the same kinds of sensation.

Insufficiency. Futility. Infinitesimally unlikely. HAD to. Indifferent, malicious. Having to move things in a way that conflicted with the established physics of the situation.

Count me in the camp of people experiencing this, I associate it with childhood fever dreams. And much later, I encountered the exact same feeling through psychedelic experimenting. Never knew it was such a common experience either, and as you say it's very reassuring.

Also count me in. Excited to see others with the same experience.

I got to the point of rationalizing this as actually being some kind of memory of being born / memory of that trauma. The lack of all proportion to the sensation, along with the incredible stakes, feeling of pressure (literal and figurative) etc…

I've also wondered before if it was somehow related to the trauma of childbirth...not a memory per se, but a trauma imprint. But who knows...

So interesting reading all these reports of the same type of thing!

I’m incredibly skeptical of psychology nutty stuff like this but I’ll add that my brain immediately considered some sort of common trauma like being born.

I wonder if this is a universal feeling that everyone experiences at some point. I feel like it's most common as a child (from reading other's experiences) and may have something to do with the developing brain.

I remember lying in bed with fever, as a kid, and there was a big CRT TV in the room.

The TV looked huge to me, and for some reason, it looked as if it would never be able to fit through the door again. Thinking that the TV was stuck in this room forever gave me the deepest sense of dread. Something had gone really wrong with the world. What would my family do when they realized that the TV was stuck? Would they cry desperately? Would they run away and leave me there? I just felt like life would never be the same again.

Something like that kept happening when I was 8-9 years old. The closest I can explain is with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome . I kept feeling like Gulliver as either in Lilliput land or in giant land. It filled me with dread and I felt that I couldn't talk. When opening my mouth I felt the motions really slow and it took forever to create words.

Rarely, now in my adulthood I start feeling similar but I realize what is happening and I can control how the objects turn big /small.

I've had this as a kid when I had a fever, and also get it reliably as an adult when I'm exhausted and too warm and trying to sleep. I have to get up and cool down and do something calming like staring out the window for a while, which usually does the trick.

Yellow/beige/brown spheres for me as well. Other commenter had spheres also. I never even thought that this might be something others experienced. Sadly, trying to find more information on this only delivers "dream interpretation" BS content.

For me, the feeling of dread did not come from me "having to move spheres but not being able to" however. It came from "knowing that these spheres will be moving no matter what I do", but they would be moving "infinitely slowly", like one of those optical illusions [1] where things seem to move but they're not actually.

[1] https://twitter.com/sebjwallace/status/1384773017717420034

That optical illusion gave me a hint of the original feeling. On my drug trips it was also highly correlated with a spinning or vibrating sensation, which also seems somewhat present in that illusion.

There's something really interesting here about this shared type of experience that many people are reporting. All a bit different, but a very similar feeling.

I feel like others online must have discussed this type of thing before, but I've also come up short when searching it. How do you even describe it or name it in such a way that is searchable? Has anyone come up with a name for it?

Now I kind of want to post this on Reddit or something to find more people with this experience, and maybe see if anyone has a name for it.

I've never done Salvia, but the descriptions I read about it from people remind me of this feeling as well. They often talk about a wheel and spinning movement and dread.

I was a lucid dreamer. Many things mentioned in this thread overlap with my experience, especially hypnagogia [0] (tingling, vibrations, spinning etc.) while attempting to lucid dream with a WILD (Wake-Induced Lucid Dream) technique.

Lucid dreaming is totally learnable but internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend reliable sources to learn if anyone wants.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Similar to others, mine was moving incredibly slowly trying to escape a monster in childhood fever dreams.

I've experienced this unique "dread" twice. Once when I was around the same age as in your story, but I had a fever. I saw a dot moving from one corner of the ceiling to the opposite corner, and somehow I knew that if it got there, the world would end. Not in a dreamy way - I knew.

The second time I experienced it was during a weed "overdose". I will never do edibles again, nor will I ever do any stronger psychedelics. These two times were among the worst of my life.

This is also why I have a strong reaction when people are kind of dismissive of bad drug experiences. It was very much like a kind of torture.

I had a similar experience.

I was around ten years old, and experiencing sleep walking mixed with nightmares once every few weeks.

My bedroom was on the attic floor, as was my brothers room and a play area by the stair case.

There was a gray and white “queen of solar mathematics” who was like a ghost, following me. She would not let me go back to sleep or leave me alone unless I could trace the floor plan of the attic into squares. I had to walk on the perimeters of the squares only, and if I messed up I had to start over from the corner. It felt like forever, I was more and more tired and making mistakes. I could see my body from above at the same time as being in it, like it was a video game.

Eventually I think I collapsed and woke up at a random spot early in the morning. My brother asked me what the hell I was doing.

This is basically OCD distilled, from an obsession and the intense dread it causes like nothing else can, that might be able to be temporarily relieved via compulsion/avoidance/etc.

Not saying you have it, I'm just drawing parallels between the way people's brains seem to suffer.

it seems like the worst kind of terror is an impersonal, rapid, universal, automated death/loss of control. This opposed to some kind of a personal boogie man.

I think this is the “uncanny”. Cormac McCarthy is a writer I’ve always appreciated for revealing this terror under the thin veneer of civilization.

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