"Some Truly Horrifying Dreams": People Who Woke Up From A Coma Describe What It Was Actually Like (30 Answers)

After being in a really bad accident that left one of my good friends (the driver) brain dead, they put me into a chemically induced coma for under a week to prevent brain damage due to swelling.

When I first woke up, my memory was much better than it was as it gradually faded in the days to come. I have a journal my mother recorded things in, and I recalled many things I shouldn’t have been able to immediately after waking up. Today, I have very little memory of it all, but I can definitely say that having positive people around you definitely helps when you’re in a situation like that.

If you have a friend in this situation, don’t disregard them. Even though your life has moved on, they may wake up one day, and in their mind, not a day has passed since the last conversation they had with you.

3 month coma here. I did know I was in a coma, but had no sense of time. I had some minor awareness of what was going on around me, sort of the inverse of a dream. Speaking of dreaming, I learned lucid dreaming. I remember using Legos to build walls against the pain. I remember alternating between feeling like I was freezing and on fire and used my newfound lucid dreaming powers to try to mitigate those feelings. I remember writing a book in my mind, and visualising it like a movie as I wrote it. I remember feeling the tears of my wife and hearing her cry, and talking about how she was running out of strength. I remember wanting to comfort her, I remember wanting to tell her about the book I was working on.

When I came out of it the next 6 months were hell. I had no appetite but somehow gained 40 pounds pretty quickly. I felt like my whole nervous system was off by a millimeter and had to relearn touch typing. I've never recovered the energy I had before. I lost the ability to lucid dream. It'll happen sometimes, but very rarely. I held onto to the details of the book in my mind for about two days, which wasn't nearly long enough to write it all down, especially since I had to relearn touch typing. There were times in that first six months I wished I was back in the coma.

That was three years ago but I only have about $30k of debt left. I'll never be able to buy a house. Due to the debt I lost my security clearance, which cut off my entire career track. I still feel bad for my family having to go through that but I think it made us closer. I'm happier with what I have, and grateful for the small things in life, which is fortunate because beforehand I was very driven and ambitious. Now I'm more cautious and reserved. Me of three years ago wouldn't like me now. He'd think I gave up and should work harder for more tangible success. Current me is happy with the love and loyalty of my family.

Sometimes though I miss the ability to create fully fleshed out worlds in my mind.

I was in a coma for a few weeks. It. Was. S**t. It was like being in a nightmare. A lot of darkness, voices, flashes of images. No real cohesion or comprehension, but a bad feeling and confusion hung over the 'consciousness' I had. The transition to being awake was similarly disturbing and very difficult for me to distinguish from the comatose state. I needed a lot of feedback about where I was, what was happening, how much time had passed. My family weren't there so I assumed I was still unconscious and that this was part of the bad dream. Took me almost a week to see a familiar face and put it all together. It took years to come back from that, mentally. The sense of dark uncanniness stuck with me for a long time. Probably only a year to recover physically.

I was in a coma for three days after an emergency C-Section (thanks eclampsia). They actually lost me for a couple of minutes after they delivered my twin boys. I remember hearing the sound of my dad crying close by. I could hear people talking around me, but any time I would try to focus on what I thought I was seeing it was like looking in a kaleidoscope.

I was in a coma for three days after a car accident where I hit my head. Pretty much, I was driving then I saw the color purple, and then I woke up three days later. There really was nothing. It's not even like sleeping because when you wake up from sleeping, you know you were asleep. It is like blinking; one second you are doing something, then the next something totally different. I do have a vague memory of being on a table with a cute guy wiping my nose and it hurting really bad. I remember saying, 'You are super cute,' but that's all.

I believe that was before I went into the coma after the accident. I had a brain bruise or something like that, and it caused speech problems for about six months after.

I was in a coma for 3 weeks, from September 2nd to September 26th, 2001.

I was driving through Pennsylvania on my way to Ithica NY to meet with the head of marketing for the company I worked with at the time. I'm making this trip on September 2nd, 2001 and I don't exactly remember much of what happened except what was told to me by EMTs and hospital staff but the gist of it is, I was hit or forced off the road by a drunk driver trying to cut across 3 lanes to get to an exit I was in the furthest right lane. Basically I was in his blind spot at the wrong time, on top of him being drunk as shit. pretty much everyone on here can guess the thing that would happen on September 11th, 2001. It feels like I teleported or traveled through time because one minute I'm driving, the next I'm broken and bloody, I'm in a hospital bed with a back and neck brace, burns from the gas of my airbags deploying, an IV in my hand and a few other minor injuries.

When I woke up I was in an entirely different world from the one I left. Before I went to sleep... the economy was doing alright I guess, it SEEMED like America had her shit together for the most part under Bush. Generally things were cool in the world.

And then I woke up.

Chaos.. That is all for now..

I was in a coma for about two weeks following a cardiac arrest as a teen. I was technically dead for over an hour, in fact. People often ask me if I could hear my family talking to me or if I was dreaming. The answer is "No."

There is a huge hole in my memory beginning about two weeks before the coma through a week after "waking up." And waking up is in quotes because I would wake up, ask a bunch of semi-incoherent questions, fall back under, then wake up again and ask the *exact* same questions, in the exact same order. Repeat six or seven times.

The coma was not even blackness. It just does not exist. I remember having the hardest time believing it was actually mid-October when the last day I remembered was late-September.

When I was considered medically "dead" I couldn't hear anyone, I was in a huge white room with no walls, just a floor. The floor would occasionally sparkle far off. I could not move, I could just look around, it was completely empty. I could still feel emotions, I had a heavy feeling of being nervous/worried. It felt like I was sneaking into a place where I did not belong, like a part of the house that was off limits to me as a kid. Time went by so slowly, I felt every second of it. It was only for 4ish minutes but it definitely felt that long. I could not think, I just felt. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I felt helpless, everything was out of my control, I felt trapped. I dont remember but when I was revived I screamed for minutes, I just screamed and cried.

I was in a coma for 5 weeks due to Meningococcal. I had A LOT of "dreams", most that I can still remember pretty clearly.

You can definitely take in what is being said from the people around you. I was 12 at the time (22 now), and my mother was reading Lord of the Rings to me while I was out. I had some pretty vivid LotR related dreams. Like eating some ice cubes under a bridge with Bilbo Baggins.

When I woke up, it felt like I'd been gone a long time, but without knowing how long.

I was in a medically induced coma for several months after a car accident. I don't remember much. But i do recall coming out of the coma briefly a few times. The first time i started flailing around and had to be tired back down to the bed till i was put back to sleep. A second time i woke to see some of my organs out on trays sitting on my body (still attached, but just being held out of the way) i also had a dream about being "locked" to a couch in cuba and could only watch tv in Spanish (i think it was). I say "locked" because i was able to get up and move, but only to a certain distance. Like after 10ft id hit an imaginary wall. Like when in a video game and you reach the end of the map.