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My Sleep Terrors During High Fever


(Denmark)

When I was about eight years old (I'm 14 now) I had a high fever at 41 degrees celsius. Before I fell asleep I noticed that my pillow felt like a bag of potatoes when I laid my head on it. The morning after my mother told me I had been screaming in the night and that she had talked to me, trying to make me calm.


She told me that I had replied to her questions but had been unable to tell what I saw, except that I was scared and yelled at my father, who was out working at the time, and I remembered nothing about being awake.

I only remember a vague dream where I was caught between two walls of iron, slowly pushing together, and that someone in a room beyond the moving walls threw a spear towards me. Everything else than the walls and the iron spear tip was unclear. At the moment the spear touched me, it stopped and it all happened again and so on. Remote from that part, in what I think was soon after the potato pillow, I was looking at something in a vast, yellow void. I was only my eyes, and I was staring at a shitbrown, brainformed thing that pulsated slowly in tact to my aching head, like a beating heart.

I came closer to it and at some point I came into it, and I was in a mist of colors. In that mist I saw myself staring at me, becoming younger until I looked like a six-year-old me. Then the mist took shape of a landscape, and I detailed dreamt of a vacation I was on at the age of six years. It felt like a long time but when it was over I dreamt of the walls and the spear.

Later I have felt the potato pillow and seen the brown brain, but I have always woken up before I got into it. It only happens in fever, but it's been couple of years since the last time. When I felt the pillow while having a fever I have never been able to sleep.

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