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the term "Timaeus Dream" was coined by a poster named The Cusp on the dreamviews forum in 2006. it refers to Plato's dialogue Timaeus in which he defines the platonic solids. some speculate that "Timaeus encountered his inspiration of the platonic solids from an encounter with the akkadian noumens of inspired delirium." The Cusp gives a clear description of these dreams in their opening post:
"I've had several dreams that I can't describe, they are just too "alien". [...] There were shapes, I'm pretty sure they were the platonic solids. There was either a deafening vibrational noise or a thundering silence, and a feeling of movement, but so agonizingly slow. The slowness was awful, felt like your soul being ripped out.
The common elements for these type of dream are as follows:
-Occur with some frequency throughout early childhood, through natural dreaming or are fever induced. They usually come back briefly in your teens.
-Leave you terrified upon waking, and it still gives you goosebumps to this day just to think about it. Wake with cold sweats, much like a fever.
-There is a feeling of awfull SLOWNESS, which is just horrifing. Feels like you soul being ripped out, or just sheer insanity.
-There are geometric shapes present, possibly the platonic solids."
The common elements for these type of dream are as follows:
-Occur with some frequency throughout early childhood, through natural dreaming or are fever induced. They usually come back briefly in your teens.
-Leave you terrified upon waking, and it still gives you goosebumps to this day just to think about it. Wake with cold sweats, much like a fever.
-There is a feeling of awfull SLOWNESS, which is just horrifing. Feels like you soul being ripped out, or just sheer insanity.
-There are geometric shapes present, possibly the platonic solids."
the thread became popular as users began to share their own experiences with these dreams. i have highlighted some examples below. another theme that emerges from these descriptions is a 'deafening silence' or incessant droning sound.
I have no idea where I am, and am too freaked out to even wonder. I dont think I have a body, because there doesnt seem to be anywhere for my body to be. There is a constant, terrible, overwhelming sound. Or perhaps it is the roar of a deafening silence. Maybe it's a vibration? Whatever the case, it is completely overwhelming.
There are shapes. Very distinct geometric shapes. 5 of them I think,They are different colors, but i wouldnt say they were solid. And they were absolutely horrifying.
But the worst thing was that they moved, or SOMETHING was moving, agonizingly slow. It was almost like sleep paralisis, only it was slowness. Now it may have been slow, but it was so powerfull, so relentless, it seemed to tear at my sanity.
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The sound I hear is an overwhelming silence that is deafining - Like a ringing. Sometimes there is simply blackness and the image of two solid, black, solid, spheres juxtaposed in an overwhelming contrast (One very large, one very small). The material is metal-like, with an INFINITE mass. As if it's the most dense material known.
Almost always, these dreams seem to have some time-related theme, as if I (my life) was moving extremely slow, almost to no measurable degree, and that I would be doing this forever. That's a VERY scary feeling by the way.
Sometimes the bad ones show a white dot traveling back and forth though black space and when it reaches a certain point, or line, something bad will happen.
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I remember being sick in bed, or on the couch, with the flu. And I'd close my eyes and see total blackness. Then the wheel would appear - it was moving agonizingly slow, so slow I wanted to vomit. It's so hard to describe the feeling. Everything was silent - deafeningly silent and slow. But the wheel turned and moved toward my vision, growing larger, and the larger it got, the sicker I felt. I wanted it to stop but everytime I closed my eyes, the whole thing would start over again, making me sicker and sicker, and dizzy - like spinning, like laying facedown on the rocking floor of a pitching shipdeck. I remember trying to stay awake and trying not to close my eyes to avoid that godawful feeling. Then the vision would creep at the corners of my vision and overtake my senses, going through another cycle.
another theme in some of these dreams is the feeling that one must complete an impossible task, and a notion of infinity, of never-ending, of boundless size...
I go to sleep and then I wake up. I wake up to this horrible feeling that I have to finish a TASK that I know is IMPOSSIBLE... but yet, I have no idea what the task is. I just have the feeling in my body that I have to do something... (i dont know what) but something that is VERY VERY VERY IMPOSSIBLE.
I know it sounds crazy, but thats the best way I can explain it. It usually last for about 5 minutes, but if I'm really sick it can last for a lot longer.. say, 15 mins.
Sometimes when this happens I see weird shapes. I can't remember is I'm seeing it while sleeping or right after I wake up. Usually its simple square shapes or something of that nature.
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The descriptions I've read here are freakily familiar - i used to be in this black void where i had no sense of who i was but knew somehow that there was some great big thing that needed to be done but it was like counting infinity or something - i would see (i think...more like sense, or be aware of) a long long fence that i had to count all the posts in, or some other impossibly large or intangible thing. The most frightening thing was waking up i would feel like i wasnt entirely back in my body and i would have to get my mum to talk to me back into reality.
==
The freaking SLOWNESS came back to me first. Then the round object. I don't remember platonic solids, but there was something round. A wheel, sphere, circle, something. I think it was on a background of graph paper. It was enormous. Absolutely huge. And it was moving so slow, with deafeningly loud complete silence in the background. It made me feel like puking my guts out forever without stopping. It felt like it signified eternity because of its slowness. If I push, I can bring back little flashbacks of the slowness at will, but I don't like to because with it come flashbacks of the horror I felt during the dream. I'm pretty glad I managed to repress this one.
Also, the feeling of contrast that someone else mentioned. Like there was something that was infinitely big. As in, it was everything. Literally infinite. But then something that was the opposite. Infinitely small. Nothing, yet still there. Same feeling of horror.
this steemit post gives an excellent description of the horrors of infinity, the shapes and the impossible task:
"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. "
the author goes on to list the characteristics of these dreams:
" "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"
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"
a poster on dreamviews theorized that "somehow the 'math/numbers & shapes/sizes' part of peoples' brains is particularly susceptible to fever dreams in young minds and gets overstimulated or something and manifests this in the crazy dreams described in this thread." one variant of the Timaeus Dream involves arithmetic rather than geometry:
Vladimir Nabokov described similar experiences in his autobiography Speak, Memory:edit: I just remembered, I once had a horrible, horrible dream involving mathematics and algebra. I don't remember anything about the dream or how long it was or felt, but when I woke up I swear I was thinking in numbers. For 10-15 minutes I was terrified of going outside of my room because the variables involved would equal something, like in an equation, although I don't know what the something in question might have been. It wore off, but man... creepy.
==
Numbers came up once (the only time i had one in my 20's) the number 74 had gone, and the number 76 had slotted into its place. - it made horrific sense at the time. the whole fabric of the universe tore up around me, and bang, i woke up screaming, and my housemate came running in thinking i was being murdered.
==
Then, in the realllly bad ones, there are numbers. Horrible numbers. they start and one and go up, slowly, forever. and i feel like i missed the one i needed and i have to wait an eternity for it to come again. These are the worst. They last all night. And it's not a regular dream, where you are aware for a while, then drift out. It is an all night struggle pushing against the darkness, waiting for my number to come again, horrible agony.
"As a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics, which I completely lost in my singularly talentless youth. This gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain.... I had read ... about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say, 3529471145760275132301897342055866171392 (I am not sure I have got this right; anyway the root was 212). Such were the monsters that thrived on my delirium, and the only way to prevent them from crowding me out of myself was to kill them by extracting their hearts. But they were far too strong, and I would sit up and laboriously form garbled sentences as I tried to explain things to my mother. Beneath my delirium she recognized sensations she had known herself, and her understanding would bring my expanding universe back to a Newtonian norm."
finally, there is often a notion of contradiction: of the impossibly large juxtaposed with the impossibly small, or a discrete object that contains the fullness of infinity.
I haven't read this entire thread, but I've had dreams like that as a kid too, also when I had a fever.
Mine involved feelings of something huge in something tiny... like an elephant squeezed onto a pinhead.
Disturbing as hell. Literally.
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I am a sphere, infinitely small, and infinitely large. At the same time! It's impossible to describe the feeling. I'm not human.
I am everything. And nothing. But conscious. I can see another one sometimes, just like me; but that's where I am unable to tell if it's infinitely small or large. But then I am both at the same time. Oscillating back and forth between small and large.It's impossible to describe the feeling. And I would probably sound like a madman if I tried explaining this to anyone.
This dream comes back often, rarer nowadays. But it happened a lot when I was younger.
==
I remember seeing the pieces on the board was so increadibly HUGE and moving at a terribly slow speed and it was just too huge to be moving that slow. It was just terrible, and I couldn`t get away from the objects because they were so HUGE. Also it was this terrifying experience of seeing something that huge moving, it was almost impossible to grasp. For people who haven`t had this experience; pricture if you could be able to see the entire universe (the whole known universe) into an object. Moving towards you. It`s terrifying.
==
Once I had a vision of a massive massive massive cube on top of a hillside. I can best describe it as the borg ship from startrek, but made out of shanty rusty creaking cogs and wheels. The whole thing was just creaking away and somehow i knew it was the inner workings of everything. Something happened, i dont remember what, but i think a cog came out, and suddenly it stopped, and it was my fault, end of time, end of everything etc. I felt what can only be described as the weight of total responsibility, and having screwed everything up. EVERYTHING.
the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich wrote a book titled Revelations of Divine Love in which she recounted visions of God that appeared to her while she was seriously ill. she describes a familiar notion of the tiny thing which contains infinity - although it is accompanied by divine love rather than terror:
"And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus: 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.'"
what causes these dreams? what do they mean? it is easy to rationalize typical nightmares as a trauma response or a mechanism to help people adapt to stressful situations. but what could be the purpose of a nightmare that is purely abstract - whose very nature is that it is beyond human understanding?
some other mental states can result in similar experiences. the preoccupation with size and shape in the Timaeus Dream has drawn comparisons to Alice in Wonderland Syndrome - a phenomenon experienced mostly by children, often during fevers, in which objects appear to change in shape and size. AIWS differs from Timaeus Dreams in that the episodes generally are not accompanied by fear.
abstract geometric terrors similar to those of the Timaeus Dream occur in some accounts of salvia trips. a poster on dreamviews stated that "I don't remember ever having a dream like this but when I tripped out on Salvia I had an experience that sounds pretty similar. I entered this horrific flat world where I realized my whole life had just been a pleasant dream and now I was back in the real world of being nothing more than an inanimate object in an infinite universe of objects that only exist to twist and pull and shape the fabric of the universe. it was honestly the scariest experience i've ever had in my life." this salvia experience on erowid touches on many of the themes of the Timaeus Dream, including spatial relationships, infinity and eternity, and an incessant droning sound.
ever since i learned that others experience these dreams, i have been fascinated by them. if you have ever had the Timaeus Dream, or if you have theories about them, please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences here.
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