Most of us will never (thank goodness!) know what it’s like to be a coma for any amount of time, but the experience is something many people are curious about – as the mom of two littles, I just want to know what it feels like to sleep for more than six hours in a row!
If you’re curious what people think, dream, and feel while they’re not fully conscious, these 14 people have been there and are sharing their thoughts!
14. Visiting another realm of reality.
I’ve tried to explain it a few times but honestly it’s life changing. It’s one of those experiences that are almost impossible to explain but you’re a different person afterwards, not just because of the brain damage (on my part) or the physical therapy you need to learn basic motor functions … It’s like visiting another realm of reality
13. One long, unpleasant dream.
I was in one for like 2weeks I would not wish it on anyone. For me I was in a long dream. I did realize I was asleep for a long time. I was still able to feel and hear, which was interpreted into my dream. Example: My hands were restrained so I would not pull out any tubes and my dream was that I was being held in a prison.
12. He woke up stuck in the past.
Not me, but my dad—he was in a coma for about a week after riding his bike head first into a telephone pole. He says that he remembers the accident itself, followed by an out of body experience. He remembers flying high above the scene of the accident and looking down at his body laying there lifeless. He remembers seeing a woman from the neighborhood rushing over to see what happened and other neighbors brought out a flat beach chair to put him on while waiting for the ambulance.
After he woke up from the coma and immediately broke down crying as the influx of stimulation and confusion poured in. His brain was stuck about 5 or 6 years in the past. He remembered his phone number, address, etc. but from years ago and he couldn’t remember the current info. It took about two weeks after coming to for his brain to catch back up to current day.
The spookiest part? He went to the house of the woman who he had seen first from “above” and asked if she had been the first to get there and other info about what he saw from outside his body and…. she confirmed all of it.
Pretty wild!
11. It was like he was a computer being reset.
10 days I don’t remember anything about. Not sure if it is a blessing or a curse. Hit by a drunk driver. My wife and I lived, our daughter didn’t.
To me that stuff on tv where the pt wakes up and everything goes back to normal is bullshit. When I woke up I was in a conversation with another pt. Air Force had sick bays, not individual rooms. I can only compare it to a computer, I had been hung in an update and then, flicker, new screen.
I had “woken up” several days earlier, but nothing stayed with me. My wife says I was paranoid that they were “putting acid in my I.V.” because I was tripping. I was hostile and aggressive. I read the medical records, they kept me restrained for a couple of days after I hit an nurse. I started acting normal so they moved me from ICU to the sick bay.
The blessing is forgetting 10 days of some pretty intense pain. I was broken in a lot of places and bruised in all the rest. Never knew you could bruise some of them. That freaked me out.
The curse was I wasn’t there when my wife needed me most. There is that tinge of guilt that she faced that grief alone for 10 days. I know, couldn’t be helped. not my fault, but live through it and tell me how it feels.
10. He could fly…but there were clowns.
A kid I went to middle school with spent 5 months in a medically induced coma waiting for a new heart. He said that in dream-time it was equivalent to several years during which he could fly and was stronger, but also had to fight clowns with chainsaws. He was aware that he was in a coma but couldn’t really do anything about it (obviously.)
Interestingly enough, there was a point in this dream where he was tasked with doing something that was literally impossible and he was somehow able to do it. In the real world, I believe medical professionals at one point said it was literally impossible for him to recover (I’m not sure what health complications were happening during this time, or if this was pre or post-transplant.)
9. A second, hallucinatory vacation.
My wife was in a coma for about a month. At first I didn’t bring the kids up because of how she looked but in the third week her color was closer to normal and there was less ‘stuff’ going on as she was pretty stable compared to the first two weeks.
Anywho….I had told the kids that while Mom wasn’t responsive there was a chance could she hear us so they should be as brave as they can and sound as happy as they can. I described to them everything I thought that might spook them from the tubes and wires to things beeping randomly and Dr’s & nurses coming and going.
They were awesome. Even in the initial shock at seeing her with a ventilator they were vocally loving, hugged and patted, held her hand etc. We sat in the room a while and just talked.
At one point I asked the kids what their favorite vacation was. Instead of our Disney and Universal Studios trips they both agreed it was the road trip we took from Vegas down to Arizona…driving all over and seeing all the incredible sights…we talked about rides & amusements in Vegas, then Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, cave dwellings, petrified forest, silly road stops, a cheap motel we stayed in Flagstaff…we laughed and cried (just a little). It was as nice as it could be. They kissed her goodbye saying “see you soon”.
My wife heard it all…but in a hallucinatory way.
She now has, to this day (near 10 years later), a vivid memory of a second Arizona vacation she went on with us. She even asked me early on after she woke up if we had gone on a vacation recently. Her mind went through every detail we talked about and even added on to it as if it all actually happened and the memories of it are as real as any.
8. A series of extremely weird dreams.
I was put in a medically induced coma after a car accident in which the driver fell asleep at the wheel, swerved off the road, and my car flipped over three times. I suffered a brain bleed and traumatic brain injury, and was operated on, with the doctors removing a piece of my skull to relieve the pressure. I was put under for three weeks, and I remember distinctly having a two week long dream. I don’t really know how I knew it was two weeks long, but I had a variety of really weird dreams.
The dreams included scenarios like: 1) I was a box of ginger ale, and I was in a race against a box of Dr. Pepper in a supermarket. We both had a shopping cart we were on, and I barely won against the Dr. Pepper. After that I wanted ginger ale for weeks. 2) something involving a bunch of ninjas and a boat and an assassination that was going to occur. 3) I was a fish stuck in some kind of enclosure that I had to escape. 4) I was in some kind of turf war with my fraternity (they were just my friends) against a rival fraternity, and we both had battleships. Gravy and mash potatoes were involved somehow. 5) I was trying to escape this hospital I was at but I was too weak to walk and could not figure out how to get out of my bed for the life of me.
When I woke up three weeks later, I was a little confused and had to piece together what happened from bits and pieces the doctors had told me. I would laugh very easily, like just from random phrases my friends who would visit me were saying to me. I had to undergo rehab for three months afterwards, learning how to walk and talk again. The doctors told me that my recovery was pretty fast. I still suffer from impaired concentration and energy levels, and I managed to get prescribed adderall for that issue. One positive out of that, I guess.
7. Well this sounds like a nightmare.
There was a kid named Martin Pistorius who fell into a coma for 12 years but his mind “woke up” 2 years into it, however he was unable to speak or move, and everyone believed he was a vegetable at best. This wasn’t the case, his mind was fully there.
For over a decade he was mistreated in facilities that played Barney repeats every single day for years without him being able to look away, true mental torture. He was also physically and sexually abused on top of that. At one point he couldn’t stop throwing up so the nurses tube fed him his own vomit.
His parents were unaware of all this and tried adapting the best they could. In some of the lowest moments he remembers his mother telling him she wishes he would just die, yet all he could feel was compassion for how she felt.
Eventually someone who cared enough realized he was responsive enough and got him the help he needed and now he has a wife & kids, talks like Stephen Hawking, and is a computer programmer!
Really shows how you can still emerge from the deepest, darkest places of life.
If anyone is wondering, it happened to him due to Cryptococcal Meningitis. Fungus covered his brain and spinal cord… the disease comes from soil with infected bird droppings being inhaled. One day he was just an innocent 12 year old playing outside, only for his life to be changed because of simply breathing in some kicked up dirt. Glad he came out on top in the end
6. Nurses have to watch out for coma patients, I guess.
I was in coma because I fell 15metre and broke nearly all of my the bones in my back and it was horrible. When I woke up I thought the nurses were torturing me and that I need to escape. I started hallucinating a lot and couldn’t even understand that I am in hospital. The biggest problem were my dreams. I thought I was a time travelor or some kind of God. I thought I was shot by the police and other shit. I still have flashbacks to this day and it is no fun. But I am getting therapy to deal with it. And I could watch porn in my dreams so yeah. It was confusing and horrible at the same time. 0/10 would not do again
5. A dream you don’t want to wake up from.
I was in a medically induced coma for 3 days during my cancer treatment. My identical twin brother died around a year prior (also to cancer) and the entire time I was in the coma, I was with him. We were in a large green field with lots of sun and my conversations with him felt real.
Other than that, I didn’t hear any of my family talking to me while I was asleep. It was just like I had gone to bed for 3 days, and I woke up feeling very tired.
I do wonder whether my interactions with my twin brother were real, or if it was just the drugs I was given causing them
4. It was just a big time skip.
I was hit by a direct bolt of lightning when I was 12. Playing catch with my best friend in a light drizzle, next thing I know I’m in an ambulance, then next thing after that it’s been six days. Apparently you can have a lot of little heart attacks/stoppages when you’ve been hit by a bolt like that, even hours or days later, until your heart muscles all re-synchronize, and a defibrillator isn’t guaranteed to fix it.
I remember absolutely nothing, including the sensation of falling (or being) asleep. It was like that episode of Futurama with the Harlem Globetrotters and the time-skips; playing catch with Steven, vwip and I’m in the ambulance with a huge black guy looming over me, vwip and I’m sitting up in a strange bed with lots of plastic on me.
Fun fact, I was hit indirectly (under a tree) by another bolt some years later, and though I never lost consciousness, I spent a week as a nervous wreck convinced my heart was going to randomly quit.
3. A giant black hole.
My brother was in a coma. He doest remember the weeks/ months leading up his accident or the months following his waking. He had a very severe TBI.
2. A whole second life.
Not my story but on a previous post asking this question there was a guy who talked about having a whole second life while in his coma. He talked about vivid memories of his family and friends. He met a woman and they had kids together, then one day he was sitting in his lounge and started staring at this lamp. There was something off about it but he couldn’t tell what. He stared at it. And kept staring all throughout the night… Then he realised the lamp wasn’t real. Suddenly he started recalling his real life and woke up from his coma. He said that to this day he still grieves the loss of his family from the coma. I believe he said he sometimes sees his coma children in his dreams.
It was really interesting and depressing. If anyone can find that comment, let me know
1. It still haunts him.
I got in a dirt bike accident during the summer between grade 8 and 9. I don’t remember much about the day or two before…just kind of flashbacks like a dream. I woke up in the hospital a day or so later. To me it was like sleeping all of a sudden I woke up. I did have some memory loss though which lasted for a couple of hours. This memory loss was different then just not remembering the day or so before. I woke up and although I knew my parents and everything I didn’t remember the previous few years of school (like graduating from grade 8). It was a full on panic attack. I though I was going to have to repeat a couple grades and then essentially I was mentally handicapped (this was in the 80’s, so I didn’t use that exact term). Everything did come back…but that hour after waking up still haunts me.
I’m super intrigued by this dreaming so many of them describe!
Have you been in a coma? If you would add anything to these, please tell us about it in the comments!
