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Foi só uma alucinação, mas eu continuei a tremer de medo.

Foi só uma alucinação, mas eu continuei a tremer de medo.
It was just a hallucination, but I kept trembling with fear.
From Lesson 322:Unreal past comparisons (como se)·Portuguese (Portugal)

Questions & Answers about Foi só uma alucinação, mas eu continuei a tremer de medo.

Why use continuei a tremer instead of a gerund like continuei tremendo?
In European Portuguese, continuous or repeated actions are almost always expressed with the preposition a followed by the infinitive. Therefore, the standard way to say "kept doing something" is continuar a + infinitive. The gerund (tremendo) is much more common in Brazilian Portuguese.
Why do we say tremer de medo instead of tremer com medo for "trembling with fear"?
In Portuguese, physical reactions triggered by an emotion or sensation usually take the preposition de to indicate the underlying cause. You are essentially trembling from the fear. You will see this same pattern in other phrases like tremer de frio (shiver with cold), suar de calor (sweat from the heat), or chorar de alegria (cry with joy).
Trembling is an ongoing action, so why is the verb continuar conjugated in the Pretérito Perfeito (continuei) rather than the Imperfeito?
The continuous nature of the trembling is already handled by the infinitive phrase a tremer. The verb continuar itself is in the Pretérito Perfeito because the speaker is treating the decision or fact of continuing as a specific, bounded event in their narrative timeline: first the hallucination happened and concluded, and then the subject's immediate next reaction was to carry on trembling.
Why does the sentence use Foi (from the verb ser) instead of a temporary verb like estar to describe the hallucination?
Even though a hallucination doesn't last forever, it is treated as a distinct event or occurrence in this context. Whenever you are defining or identifying what an incident was, you use the verb ser. It functions just like saying "The event that just happened was a hallucination."

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