TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains information about suicide, which may be triggering to some.
I have always been an extremely vivid dreamer. Most nights when I close my eyes, I fall into an entirely different world where the stakes feel very real. I can say I have woken up numerous times disoriented, wondering whether everything I had dreamed actually happened. Sometimes the feeling sticks with me until mid-afternoon, like I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a really jarring feeling, even if it only lasts until midday.
I can’t imagine what it would feel like for it to last weeks, if not months, like what one 19-year-old girl from Lyon, France, experienced after waking up from a medically-induced coma.
Clélia Verdier tried to take her own life by ingesting a large amount of medication in June 2025.
As a result, she told the Daily Mail, she had to be placed into a medically-induced coma that lasted for three weeks. But in Verdier’s mind, it was actually seven years filled with love, marriage, birth, and day-to-day life. In her sedated state, Verdier claims the family and life she built felt intensely real.
“I could feel so many things. When I dreamed about giving birth, I felt the stress. I also felt a lot of pain,” she recalled to the outlet. “In this dream, I gave birth to triplets, which I named Mila, Miles, and Maïlée. Maïlée died shortly after birth. I felt so awful — overwhelmed with sadness and guilt.”
We Got This Covered reported that Verdier even claimed to remember each of her daughters’ personalities, had fond memories of walks with them, and even recalled telling them bedtime stories.
When Verdier awoke from her coma, the first thing she asked the medical staff about was her ‘children.’
“That’s when they told me they didn’t exist. It was a shock,” she told the Daily Mail. “I was so convinced it was real that the first time I saw my parents again, I told them they were grandparents.”
Coming to grips with the reality of life has been tough on her. A year later, she is in grief counseling, mourning a life she never really even had.
“Now I feel very disconnected from others,” she told the outlet. “I still miss [my daughters] today. I lived as a mother – even if it was ‘just a dream,’ with everything I felt and experienced, I will always be their mother. It was my only reality for a while.”
In 2021, Caroline Leavitt shared that she had a similar experience.
According to an essay she wrote for Psychology Today, she detailed what it was like being put into a medically-induced coma with memory blockers after developing a blood-clotting issue following the birth of her son. When she awoke, she explained to her husband and friends that while out, she had been living a full life.
“I had been living in this imaginary town, and that it had been, well, incredible,” she wrote. “It had all these stores, and my apartment was hard to get to, but it was big and beautiful, and I knew the streets, the people, and I knew it was real.”
Now, Verdier says she hopes to have her own children one day, but acknowledges that she will never fully let go of her first kids.
“They will have a different place in my heart, but one just as important,” she said.
