Hi. I've been having a strange type of nightmare/mental condition for pretty much all my life (I'm 21 now, and I specifically remember having these same types of nightmares back when I was 3). I got them quite often when I was about age 5 to 10 (several times per month), but they started to occur much less often as I got older (I get them about 3 times per year now). I know that this post is really long, but I wanted to include all the info I can. Hopefully someone will have enough time to read it!

Basically what happens is that I'll get these strange nightmares about an hour after going to bed, and they'll wake me up a few minutes after they start (although I never wake up screaming). Upon waking up, I'll continue getting the same symptoms that I have while sleeping (described below) for about another 20 minutes. After that, I can usually get back to sleep no problem and I won't have the nightmare again that night.

The nightmares are extremely abstract and confusing, but I'll give my best shot of describing them.

Basically, I would describe them as a direct injection of fear. I don't usually see anything in these dreams, and I don't hear very much; instead, I just get unimaginably scared for basically no reason. These dreams seem to be, in the most literal sense, Hell. They invoke forms of fear and horror that I have never experienced in any other aspect of life, and they seem to have unprecedented control on my brain's ability to scare itself. I should point out that it's not like the fear you get when you're in a car crash or something like that; it's MUCH more intense than that, and it seems to be a fear that is completely internal to the brain (in other words, I can't imagine any real-world experience that would trigger this fear).

Another way to describe these nightmares is that they're like an information overload of the brain. It's as if my brain is trying to think about a ridiculously large number of things all at once. This often involves numbers: I think of very large numbers (dozens of digits in length), and I feel absolutely obligated to perform some kind of math function on them (add, multiply, logarithm, derivative, etc). I feel as if I'll be sent to Hell or something if I don't successfully do whatever math function is needed. Sometimes I'll visualize these numbers floating around in a black empty space. (I should point out that I've always been really fascinated with math and numbers, so dreaming about numbers makes sense for me).

Another one of the main aspects of these nightmares is that everything seems to expand and contract. If I happen to be seeing anything in the nightmare (usually those numbers), they'll expand and contract at weird rates.

Related to the last point is the size of my "thinking space". This will need a bit of explaining. You know how when you think of something (especially when you visualize something in your head), you seem to see it right in the center of your head, and it's not very big. For example, none of your thoughts seem to be occurring outside of your head; if you had to say where they are in 3D space, you'd locate them in your head. This spot is what I call the "thinking space". In these dreams, my thinking space gets extremely huge, and my thoughts seem to be happening outside of my head; it's as if I can reach out and actually touch my thoughts. When the dream starts, my thinking space suddenly expands tremendously, and it usually stays big.

Whenever there's sound in the nightmare, it's very loud. It usually starts out at a normal sound level, steadily gets louder, and then reach a maximum at some point. The best way I can describe this is that when people think of a sound in their head, it's usually at a fairly constant sound level and they can't really change how loud is seems to them. But, in these dreams the sound is several times louder than sounds that you usually hear in your head. The sounds in these dreams usually seem to be some kind of voice, but I can never make out what it's saying.

As I said above, the nightmare itself only lasts for a few minutes, after which I wake up and continue experiencing the same symptoms for about 20 minutes or more. I will be fully conscious and I'll be able to do anything that I can do at any other part in the day, but my nightmare seems to still "linger" with me. Also, now that I'm awake everything becomes more visual: my room seems to expand and contract (well, this part is kinda hard to describe because I *sense* that the room is expanding and contracting, but at the same time I visually see that, for sure, the room is not changing size; I'm not hallucinating), and the numbers that I was seeing in my dream seem to take over my room (but again, not visually; it's not a hallucination; instead, I *sense* that they're taking over the room).

Again, these nightmares are extremely hard to describe, and coming up with the above description took about 15 years to do (when I was a kid I would wake up telling my parents that I was having a nightmare, but I had no idea how to explain it to them because there's almost no visual aspect of the nightmare). And yes, I know, the above description looks kinda crazy, but I can assure you that I am a very sane person.

As for what might trigger these nightmares, it seems that fevers make them happen much more often. I don't know of any other triggers, other than being a kid (when they happened most often).

Some other background info: I'm fairly normal otherwise, I have always had regular sleeping habits, I often have regular dreams, I have normal nightmares about as often as everyone else, my IQ is quite a bit above average (140) (I don't mean to brag here, but I thought this might be relevant to the topic), and I've never had any major emotional, physical, or mental problems. Also of interest is that my mom got nightmares similar to these when she was very young (younger than 10; she never got them after that). I don't know of any other relative that gets them.

So, does anyone have any idea what these nightmares are about? Are they something to be worried about? Does anyone else get nightmares like these? It would be quite interesting to talk to someone with a similar experience.