I was in an induced coma for a month after my accident. It was a horrific experience that traumatized me severely. Tons of nightmares I could feel. Constantly shifting from one to another without sense or reason. No consistency, no mercy, lucid but unable to make change. No escape. I feared I wasn’t actually in reality when I truly woke up at first. I kept fearing another shift. I died countless horrific deaths and lost my mind in there.
In researching coma dreams and nightmares in others, I see similar themes. Not always terrible, but always shifty ridiculous dream logic. The dreaming mind is not a realm of coherency telling a long story with a super clear thread. It is an ocean of ideas, fears, thoughts and needs that crash and clang together. In a single night you can have a fragment of a dream you remember that kinda sorta makes sense, but stuck in there for extended times? Chaos reigns.
Sounds horrible, sorry to hear that. Heard similar things through my friend circle: she was put in induced coma after serious food poisoning for I think 2 weeks. Horrible dreams of her or family members dying, being sexually assaulted, getting pregnant and losing a baby. I’m wondering what is it with comas that fuck up dreams this much.
Dreams are always fucked up like this, only we don’t remember most of it. Have you ever nearly ended a day when suddenly you catch a glimpse of something that triggers a memory of a dream you had the night before? I have. It can be a silly little thing, like the time I was standing outside at work and seen a girl strike a lighter. I suddenly had an entire story open up in my memory, and fortunately it was pleasant.
Have you ever woke up in complete horror and knew you had a nightmare, but you didn’t know what it was? It had to be really, really bad, you just can’t remember it.
It’s something to do with being in a coma, probably the duration or that the supply of chemicals that keep us asleep are exhausted. Take that with a grain of salt. I’m just an idiot. I don’t even remotely know.
I believe that dreams that I don’t remember directly contribute to my daily moods. If I wake up feeling wonderful, I must have had decent dreams. If I wake up angry, I must have had nightmares. This is consistent when I remember them.
Those little glimpses of memory. It’s even worse than remembering the dream when I wake up, because in the latter scenario, I at least know for sure it’s a dream. Sometimes, for the little glimpses of memory, I don’t know if they are from the reality or from a dream. They do get very vivid occasionally.
I want to know more.
How long has it been since your coma?
When you say you were lucid, do you mean you were always aware you were dreaming?
You say there was no escape, but you must have become fully unconscious at times?
Did you ever have pleasant dreams?
How much of your life experience do you think shaped your nightmares?
Did you have any epiphanies due to the clashing ideas?
Been a decade now.
I doubt I was always aware, but from my memory, I usually was. It was like being trapped in a puppet body, unable to change a single thing. I tried to wrest control over and over. I went crazy fighting to gain any manner of control. Eventually I just tried to get my heart to stop so I could die a true death and escape that way.
My assumption is that what I was feeling was surgeries as anesthesia started to wear off and before they could safely dose me down into dreamless black again. From my perspective, this meant shifting from one nightmare to the next. Sometimes I would get ripped apart over and over. Other times I would drown for hours or die of thirst and hunger on a loop.
I had a few pleasant dreams. The one I remember most was where I was lying on a slab and Robin Williams was singing songs from his movies to comfort me. I had this sense I was about to actually die, and by that time I was very comfortable with that. It was peaceful and I was ready. Turns out my body wasn’t. I got about as close to death as you can get without my heart stopping. Many of my organs shut down, but never my heart.
Lots of imagery from games and movies cobbled together to shape the horrors that assaulted me. The ape things that ripped me apart in some nightmares were more or less a combo between the grey apes from congo and goro from mortal combat with a shovel shaped head. Laughable sounding in the waking world. Terrifying beyond words when I knew what they could do to me.
The main epiphany I came away with is that true death is not as scary as you might think. Fates worse than death are a thing and I have a living will to prevent going through one ever again. My relationship with death is much more cordial these days. I do not rush to embrace it, but when my time comes, I will go at ease because I never forgot the peace I felt during the Robin Williams dream. At the very end, the only thing waiting is rest eternal.
Not to trivialize your experience, but Deloused the the Comatorium by The Mars Volta is a true story about a guy that tried to kill himself by drinking rat poison, going into a coma, coming out of it, and realizing that the coma world was more preferable/he couldn’t cope with the waking world and jumps off of a building to get back. He died.
It’s an interesting album that might help? There’s a lot of disconnected, out there nonsense in his dreams that they express in the songs.
I’m sure it’s not nearly as intense as being in a dreaming coma, but I found music that touches upon a traumatic situation helps me sort it out.
I knew it was a dream when he mentioned he brought a house…
Guy sued her for whiplash, but it turns out the girl’s dad is the mayor of a nearby medium-sized city and they settled the lawsuit to keep the whole thing quiet. They spent the money on a house and still had a modest safety net leftover. In the dream, I mean.
In real life, the mayor cashed in on a favor from the DA and the police faked the accident reports. Guy is facing a manslaughter charge and prison time.
The driver of a car died after hitting a motorcycle? These greentexts are so low effort.
She was already injured and was drunk driving to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance because drunk.
Better plot than most movies these days
Basically the plot of The Inner Light, one of the best episodes of television ever made. (That was sadly undermined by the need for a complete reset per the usual rules of episodic television of the time.)
That episode makes me cry every time. Even the callback when he plays that flute in a later episode makes me teary eyed.
Was this before or after the Redd*t “The Lamp” story?
