Young woman lives 7 years of alternate life in coma.
A 19-year-old French woman, Clélia Verdier, attempted suicide, after which doctors had to place her in a medically induced coma to stabilize her condition and save her life. She remained in that state for about three weeks.
When the girl woke up, the first thing she asked was: “Where are my children?”
Doctors explained that she had never had any children and that she had been unconscious in intensive care the entire time. But for Clélia herself, it had not been three weeks, it had been seven full years of life, during which she met a man, got married, and gave birth to three children.
According to her, the childbirths felt completely real: fear, tension, physical pain, panic, exhaustion, as if everything were truly happening.
The girl even experienced the loss of one child, which became the greatest trauma of her inner life. Clélia recalled feeling overwhelming guilt, grief, and emptiness.
The other two children continued living beside her in that reality. She remembered their personalities, habits, walks together, conversations, and family evenings. She said she loved them “with all her heart.” It felt to her as though she had genuinely spent years with them. Her brain created an entire biography: the children growing up, family life, routines, and emotional memories.
That world felt so real to her that after waking up, she struggled for a long time to accept that none of it had ever existed. Seven years of life disappeared in just a few seconds. And the hardest part was that the memories did not disappear. She continued missing her children even after rationally understanding that they had been part of a hallucination.
According to doctors, during a medically induced coma the brain does not shut down completely. A person may experience fragments of consciousness, moments of partial perception mixed with deep sleep, hallucinations, and confusion. Because of this, time can seem stretched, dreams become hyper-realistic, and emotions are remembered as real events.
Psychologists are currently working with the girl, she still finds it difficult to separate the memories of that life from reality.
