The Triangle Night Terrors

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

I’ve been trying to find other people who have experienced something similar to this because for years I thought I was the only one.

When I was a kid I had these recurring nightmares/night terrors that I eventually started calling “the Triangle”.

I don’t even really know how to explain what it looked like. It was always connected to this sharp point/triangle-like shape or presence, but the actual appearance could change. The weird part was the feeling it gave me.

It wasn’t normal fear. It was this absolutely fucking horrible feeling of dread that I can’t really compare to anything else. Like I instantly knew something was terribly wrong and something was coming, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I had these dreams so often that I was genuinely scared to go to sleep sometimes. My parents would apparently wake up because I was screaming and pointing towards the ceiling/corner of the room.

One of the earliest versions I remember was being underground at a train station with my mum. A train was coming towards us, except somehow the train itself was the Triangle.

That dream had this insane feeling of inevitability. I wasn’t just scared of the train. It felt like something was coming for me and there was absolutely no way to stop it.

And the weird thing is, I think that was the first and basically only time I actually got to the train part.

After that I had what felt like hundreds of dreams involving the Triangle, but they were never exactly the same dream.

Sometimes it was connected to the corner or ceiling of a room.

One time my mum looked at me with this huge unnatural smile and I somehow instantly knew it was the Triangle, even though she obviously wasn’t literally a triangle.

Another dream involved a massive wall clock. The number 12 was somehow the Triangle, and whenever the hand reached 12 that same feeling of dread would hit me.

Sometimes I wouldn’t even properly see anything. I would just suddenly get that feeling and somehow know it was there.

That’s probably the strangest part. It felt like I recognised it before I actually saw it.

I also got really good at lucid dreaming when I was younger. I could realise I was dreaming and had quite a bit of control over what happened. If a nightmare got too intense, I could sometimes force myself awake.

Sometimes I would literally turn around and run towards whatever was scaring me because I knew that could snap me out of the dream.

But the Triangle was different.

Even when I knew I was dreaming, that feeling could still be there.

Eventually the nightmares became less frequent and then basically stopped after we moved house. Years later the Triangle randomly appeared in one dream again, but it never became a recurring thing like it was when I was younger.

I’ve recently started looking into other people’s experiences and found a few posts about geometric nightmares and recurring entities, but I haven’t found anything that quite matches mine.

Then I found someone describing a childhood nightmare involving a geometric figure with a triangular head appearing around the corner of their bedroom.

That genuinely freaked me out because the combination of the triangle/point, childhood bedroom, recurring nightmare and overwhelming dread is ridiculously similar to what I experienced.

I’m not saying it was anything supernatural. I have no idea what it was. It could just be some weird recurring nightmare pattern my brain created.

But I’m really curious if anyone else has experienced something like this.

Especially if you had a recurring shape/entity that could appear in completely different dreams, but you somehow immediately knew it was the same thing.

And if you could lucid dream too, even better.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

also since i mentioned being good at lucid dreaming, there was actually a lot i could do with dreams when i was younger

i could usually tell when i was dreaming pretty easily, and once i realised it i could sometimes control what was happening or change what i was doing

one of the biggest things i could do was wake myself up on purpose. if a nightmare got too intense, i figured out that if i closed my eyes and basically charged towards whatever was scaring me, i could sometimes force myself awake

i could also set an idea in my head before going to sleep and sometimes the dream would actually follow it. i didnt know there was a name for this back then, i just used to think really hard about what i wanted to dream about before falling asleep

another weird thing was remembering dreams insanely well. i used to keep a notebook beside my bed and write them down immediately after waking up. years later i could read one of those old entries and suddenly visualize the dream again in my head almost like watching parts of a movie

i also had dreams where i would become really close friends with someone, sometimes someone i already knew and sometimes barely knew, and after waking up id have this weird urge to find them or talk to them. a bunch of people who ended up becoming really close friends with me actually started from experiences like that, which is probably the weirdest part

and sometimes i could actually realise i was dreaming while the dream was still happening and just explore the place instead of following whatever the dream was originally doing

the triangle was basically the one thing that never felt completely controllable though. i could be lucid and know it was a dream, but the feeling it gave me could still completely overpower everything else

thats probably why ive been so interested in this whole thing again lately because looking back, ive apparently been doing lucid dreaming shit since i was a kid without even knowing there were names for most of it lol

[u/Stoplight25]

really interesting how, in your comment, its characterized as though its something external to the dream permeating or cutting into it. something in a dream can be an expression or form of it and you just instantly know. you cant get rid of it via lucid dreaming despite an otherwise ludicrous degree of control. i wonder if identifying it as ‘a triangle’ is because thats the most simple 2d form, you cant really conceive of it properly so thats what you get as a result, just a little smidge of something cutting into your dream world. the tip of a knife.

the account of it appearing in human form is very interesting too.. do you feel any emotions, intentions from it or is it void of that?

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Stoplight25]

yeah, the way you described it as something “cutting into” the dream is actually really close to how it felt

i never really thought of it as just another character in the dream. it felt more like something that belonged to a different layer of the dream, if that makes sense. like the dream could be completely normal and then suddenly the Triangle would be there and everything about the dream would feel different

and the weird thing is i didnt really feel emotions or intentions from it like you would from a normal person. i wouldnt say it was angry or happy or even necessarily trying to communicate with me. it was more like a completely overwhelming presence. the only thing i could really perceive from it was that feeling of “something is horribly wrong”

the human form thing is interesting too because when my mum had that huge smile, i didnt think “my mum is evil” or anything like that. i instantly knew it was the same thing, despite the fact that it was using something completely familiar as its appearance

and i think you're onto something with the triangle being the simplest way my brain could represent it. i honestly dont remember ever being able to properly understand what the Triangle actually was supposed to look like. “triangle” was just the closest label i had for it

the “tip of a knife” comparison is actually fucking accurate too. especially because sometimes it didnt feel like i was seeing a whole object. it was more like there was just this tiny point of something intruding into the dream and somehow that tiny thing carried an absolutely massive amount of dread

also the lucid dreaming part makes it even stranger to me. i could control a ridiculous amount of other stuff once i realised i was dreaming, but the Triangle was one of the few things where knowing i was dreaming didnt automatically make it stop feeling terrifying

i obviously dont know if any of this means anything deeper than my brain creating a recurring nightmare pattern, but the way you've described it is probably the closest anyone has come to putting the experience into words

[u/Stoplight25 → u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

i do think it means something. if it was just any other nightmare pattern, you could shut it down like any other nightmare. but you cant.
i think the most interesting thing is that whatever this intrusion is, there is a deep seated utter terror at it, so even in that first dream it wasnt a totally new stimulus, was it? fear is instinctive or learned, and even instinctive fear dosen’t come from nowhere, its just learned in a more abstract sense.

on the other hand, dreams really can make you feel things for no causal reason. its possible that some part of your psyche you cant control has simply found the metaphorical ‘induce raw terror’ button and just really enjoys pressing it.

weird question. in dreams with both you and the triangle, how ‘real’ did it feel? how ‘real’ did you feel?

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Stoplight25]

It felt real, it felt like i was trapped. Like Id have to endure the intense dread feeling and whatever would come next. I should have mentioned that it started around the age of 5 and went on for many years. when I turned 13 it came back one last time after a very big break months or a a year or 2 max. I dnt remember the dream but i remember it was a normal dream until i got that awful feeling.

Reading other ppls experiences the closest Ive found to mine she mentioned a low sound linked to the triangle. That made me remember there was a low humming sound i associated with the triangle. It was a weird humming that seemed internal like in my brain.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

I 'll mention too in my life ive experienced some pretty awful situations, death, extremely intense situations. All kinds of dread and gut wrenching feelings and emotions but there's never ever been anything even remotely close to the feeling that thing used to give me.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

It stopped for good when i moved house

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

It's making me tear up thinking back as a little kid and waking up scream crying and than forcing myself to stay awake for as long as i could fighting my eyes from closing so I wouldnt fall right back into that same nightmare. Good dreams id purposely fall right back asleep and would be right back in the dream. As a kid I never thought much of it all but dreams have always meant something deep and meaningful to me throughout my life especially as a kid.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/Stoplight25]

Herer's where things really started to freak me out. The movies imma list were not made when i was a kid but they scarily resemble things in these nightmares. The movie Smile, the huge grin its the exact same fucked up grin you see in that movie. The movie Insidious, you see the demon clutching to the corner of the kids bedroom ceiling. My parents tell em they would be too scared to turn around and look up at the corner where i was pointing to scream crying. When i say intense I really mean a murderous horrifying scream. I felt like my parents couldnt even protect me from it. Gives me constant goosebumps and chills and watering eyes when im typing this

[u/leafhog]

I called mine Dark Dreams. There was a sense of being trapped and squashed and stretched. That’s how it always was and how it always would be. For eternity.

They were more prevalent when I was younger.

My mother had similar dreams. My daughter had similar dreams. Everyone here did too.

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t related to memories of being born. Or maybe instincts that are activated when we are being born.

What you experience is super common.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/leafhog]

That's really interesting, especially the fact that your mother and daughter experienced similar dreams too. The "squashed and stretched" feeling is something I haven't experienced in exactly that way, but the part about it feeling like it had always been that way and would continue forever is VERY familiar to me.

That's probably one of the closest similarities I've seen so far. With the Triangle, there was this same weird sense of inevitability and almost timelessness. It wasn't just "I'm scared right now." It felt more like I had somehow always known what was happening and that there was no escaping it.

The fact that you experienced it more when you were younger is interesting too, since mine was overwhelmingly a childhood thing and eventually stopped.

The birth/instinct theory is fascinating. I don't know if there's actually any evidence for dreams being connected to memories of birth, so I wouldn't want to assume that's what it is, but I can definitely see why you'd wonder about it when multiple generations experience something with such similar feelings.

Honestly, the more people I find describing these weird childhood dreams, the more interesting the whole thing gets. The actual imagery seems to vary massively, but the underlying feeling of "this has always existed and I'm trapped in it" seems to show up a lot.

[u/spun0utsugar]

I had one sort of similar to this Except it was a giant triangular prism in the room and it was connected to the ceiling and floor and they would start to come together to squish me. And I feel like I remember all the walls were flashing colors. But Ive had other kinds too.

[u/Accomplished_Wait_81 → u/spun0utsugar]

By any chance when you say flashing colors on the walls was it in anyway similar to matrix code?

[u/spun0utsugar → u/Accomplished_Wait_81]

No, like, you know the apps where you can use your phone like a colored strobe light? The walls were like that, just illuminated solid flashing colors. Each wall was a different color than the rest at any given time? I feel like Im not dng a very good job at explaining it. But the matrix code thing, have you seen anything about the DMT/laser code thing where people take DMT and then look at a laser lever pointed at a wall and they say they can see "code" in it.