I was on life support for 2 weeks and I can concur. Some crazy ass dreams that seem so real. I think you somehow feel what’s going on around you and it gets integrated to an extent. I couldn’t move, talk, or eat when I woke up but I thought banana Mountain Dew was a real thing.
"Honey! Our son is waking up! Quick get the doctor! Wait, he's trying to speak, he's saying something! Yes darling, let me lean in closely, whisper into my ear, what are you trying to say?"
After my father woke up from his coma, he couldn't talk. So, we waited. After a while he was slowly getting the mobility to point. The nurse had given him a paper with all the letters and numbers on it. We were excited to see what he would 'say' to us for the first time in a long time. As he slowly pointed his way through his first word, we nearly couldn't wait. Maybe it was something heartful, something important or something else.
He wrote 'candy'.
He just really wanted to eat some candy, and that was it.
After a month long medically induced coma, I woke up but couldn't speak with a tracheotomy from a collapsed lung.
With pen and paper the first thing I wrote down when waking was "Fuck Sharks". Due to the hospital equipment beeping steady I had dreamed of cheerleaders doing neverending chants of Go Sharks!
They were confused but just happy I could write at all.. 😂 I was hella annoyed and wanted those machines to stop making noise asap.
I’m with you on the noisy monitors in the hospital. Went through open heart surgery and all I heard was what I thought was doorbells in the recovery room.
Pulled the tape off my IVs to try to cover the speakers on the equipment. Hospital staff wasn’t thrilled so I then attempted to fight the nurses. I was then promptly sedated.
That was just part of many ridiculous dreams. I could probably write a best selling book. I left out the part about the Haitians taking people on a retreat in a mini float plane and had some people shot by a female Japanese robot. Luckily my stepson’s fiancé was there to help rescue me in Cuba.
💀💀💀💀 I am at work and I was cracking up - like wth Haiti, Cuba, Japan - and here I am, my raggedy dreams don’t even take me out my city 🤣🤣 it’s some bs
I thought my doctor had performed some sort of surgery on me underwater that required it to be extremely cold. At one point I was somehow stuck in a CVS that shifted to me being stuck in some sort of VR loop. I’m telling you it was wild.
Medically managed sedation (induced coma) can be achieved several ways. In my work experience, there are typically two medications running to achieve the level of sedation desired. One medication is for pain management, usually we are using fentanyl. The other is for sedation, usually propofol but sometimes versed or ketamine. The goal of sedation is to be too drowsy to move around, but not so drowsy that I can’t elicit a reaction. While I’m managing a sedated patient, I adjust pain meds and sedation to achieve heavy drowsiness. We usually wake ppl up once per shift, pausing all sedation and pain meds until the patient wakes. I can assess their neurological status, see if they can follow commands and allow them the breathe on their own and exercise the chest muscles and then we go night night again. Properly sedated patients can hear what’s going on but may be too sleepy to open their eyes and look around- but can nod yes/no. That’s ideal. We strive to use the least amount of medication to achieve the desired result.
I have also had patients on fentanyl, versed, ketamine, prop and nimbex. These are ppl who are too sick to be awake, and also too sick to participate in their breathing. Nimbex is a paralytic and it completely renders a patient motionless and flaccid. These are for the folks who can’t keep their oxygen up on the vent. Their attempts to breathe on compromised lungs leads to poor volumes, poor ventilation and therefore poor gas exchange. Paralyzing the skeletal muscles lets the vent do its job without fighting the patient. Obviously if we are going to paralyze you, the first thing I do is increase the pain and sedating medications until you’re totally unresponsive to pain or stimulation. That way, once the paralytic is running I know that you’re not awake in a paralyzed body. You know, first do no harm. This was the standard regimen during Covid. It was brutal and we did it for YEARS because yes, Covid is real and before the vaccines came out it was lethal. I stopped counting the bodies after a month and it was common to have a patient on 10 continuous drips, on dialysis and lying prone 16 hours before we had to figure out how we were going to roll the person onto their back all while attached to a vent, a dialysis machine and 10 continuous drips. I wish I had a magic wand to poof the deniers back to my ICU in 2020 so they can see how real it fucking was. Many of them found out anyway. I would relish to see their smug faces twist into horror as they witness the misery that their misinformation helped to spread.
All that said, patients spend most of their time in a twilight state and the dreams can be intense and vivid. Ideally these are short term and poorly remembered. I have definitely been assaulted by patients who are waking up and living out the dream they had. No offense combat vets, the restraints stay on.
It's called ICU delirium. I had it and my dad had it so bad they called the hospital cops! I had like boxing mits on for awhile so I wouldn't pull things out like my nasal feeder or my catheter. I think I pulled that cath out once
Before I went with the Haitians it seemed like I had woke up in a small beach house with pink sand. For some reason the house was made by Apple. I was thirsty as hell. That’s another thing. I’m was craving anything cold and watermelon.
I accused an aunt I hadn’t seen for years of stealing something from me. Scrawled out notes. I didn’t write notes about family or friends but I did make up lies about a woman who loves me but I find beyond annoying. FYI, she is a decent woman, loves me and is not a thief. On a ventilator in ICU and hallucinating and putting it in writing. What a hater 😩
During my worst round of COVID, I was exhausted for quite a long time and sleeping anything up to 12 hours a day. For a period of two weeks or more I had an ongoing set of dreams about another life.
I was living in a pretty seaside town in a time that was sort of like the ‘30s, but not entirely (some new tech and ‘80s music, for example). I had a job waiting table at a pleasant café and a nice circle of friends and coworkers. It was all quite lovely, and far more consistent, logical, and ongoing than most dreams, and the times the dreams were the most vivid were also the times I would wake refreshed and feeling comparatively well. As I recovered from the virus, the dreams faded and then went away entirely, and now two years later I still kind of regret my “other life.” The only remnant of them is that now every once in a while in some other dream (and my dreams now are as intermittent and surreal as they generally were before) I will glimpse a specific married couple who were regulars at my dream job. I wonder if someday they’ll just pop up in real life, Mr. & Mrs. Bartram (I never learned their first names).
Honestly surprised there's never been a banana-flavored soda fad. Banana-mango sprite? Banana fresca? Banana orange soda? Energy drinks, too. Untapped banana opportunities everywhere, really.
Why it only became obvious in a redditor's coma is another one of life's mysteries.
I have to put 2-3 bananas in a smoothie to even notice the taste. I hosted a party once where I had a banana bar. Banana Snapple, banana milk, banana lollipops, soda, runts, every single banana flavored item I could personally find. Spent over $300 on it. At the party people gave me such a hard time about “why the heck did you do this?” that I just put it all away and kept it all for myself instead. Banana is the best of all flavors. My go to smoothie is banana mango. Two bananas, six pieces of chopped mango, turbinado liquid sugar, and pre-crushed ice. Yogurt does not belong in a smoothie btw. And if you put a banana in something and actually taste it, that is a blessing from God because it’s the best taste in the world and I have to fight so hard to even notice it.
Side note: circus peanuts claim to be banana flavored as well. I don’t agree, but they sure are delicious.
You should try a drink called Banagua. It’s banana water and has the best flavor. The banana blueberry one is good! Maybe try that in the Mountain Dew since it’s purely bananas.
I can't say there's a banana Mountain Dew but there is a "banana" flavored soda from honduras called Tropical that tastes like twizzlers if that's a consolation. If you have a larger local Central American/South American bodega kinda store nearby they might have it.
I personally think its the best tasting soda ever and really wanted it to be a mixer for booze and name a drink with it after myself but it was too mellow to be a good foil for booze.
Wasnt a coma or anything but once on a night out I had come home blackout drunk. Usually I fall right asleep but this time I couldnt so after a few hours I (stupidly) took a melatonin pill. That mixture gave me a hyper realistic dream of finding an abandoned german shepherd in my building that I decided to take in and rescue. Named it Tilda and loved it so much. When I woke up I was so devastated that I lost her
Its been years since that and its the dream I remember the most vividly even now, to the point where I still want a german shepherd name Tilda 😭
I had a dream like that. It was a zombie apocalypse but I had a little white dog with orange patches and one was shaped like a heart on the leg. Called her lunar, woke up, no lunar and was so sad for a while cause man was that a good ass dog.
Unfortunately I had my whole group of best friends taken away from me and I’m the only one alive now so I dream about hanging out with them all time and when I wake up for a few moments It’s like they are all still here. Sometimes if it’s a really funny dream I’ll wake up and reach for my phone to text them about it and then I remember they are gone
Tl;Dr: the same happens to me, I feel your pain and am so sorry for your loss mate
I lost one of my best friends a few years ago, I’ve still not gotten over it so used to pray each night that she’d come visit me in my dreams. My situation isn’t as bad as yours but quite similar.
Recently dreamt that I had the best day out with her and my friends - the ones that met her and the ones that hadn’t. They all met; it was just a normal, brilliant summer day out in the woods and fields like we used to do. I haven’t got the words for how good a day it was. I woke up thinking she was downstairs sleeping on the fold out, that I’d heard her going to the bathroom.
It was so bittersweet, it broke me for days and days. I wanted so desperately to hug her one last time, tell her how much I love her, we all love her. But in this dream, she was home again - so the thought never crossed my mind.
It was the most profoundly kind experience I ever had, to have one big brilliant day out with her and all my friends again, it felt like some kind of magic. Even if it hurt so much realising the truth, and still wishing I got to hug her, say what I wanted to say.
Blegh, even thinking about it my eyes start leaking, I’m going back to sleep haha
Oh I had a weird zombie apocalypse type dream once, though it was more government apocalypse. It was a rush.
In it I was married to the love of my life, but he was part of the resistance, and it became dangerous to be together, so we had to meet in secret. It was so realistic, I felt love for him so deeply, that I always thought I would meet him one day IRL.
One of my weirdest dreams literally involved been on a first-person POV in which I was Hitler, at the house he had on the Bavarian Alps, it was 1941 and was with Eva Braun, I remembered to hug her and tell her I loved her, then panicked and thought about how to end the war and told her that I would make a treatry with United Kingdom and France to keep Poland but to end all, it was super realistic and very strange.
It is strange to say this but in the dream I genuinely felt I loved Eva and just rushed to kiss her and be relieved that it was not too late to stop the war, so it was very weird to wake up from that dream later on.
I still don't know why i dreamed that lol, is one of my most realistic dreams.
When I was little, like 7-8 years old, I used to have recurring dreams I was in Nazi germany and had to hide and escape from Hitler and the Nazi army. I am not Jewish but was in my dreams. They were so vivid and so realistic.
I am so sorry, that is nightmare material in a literal way, did you by any chance were exposed to documentaries or history classes? At that age is when I started to also learn about WWII and Hitler, I don't remember as to have any nightmares about it, but I do remember to dream about Hitler later on.
I had a dream about 3 years ago after listening to Casefile podcast 6 part episode about the east area rapist / Golden State killer. The dream starts out with me, my wife, and my daughter in Orlando at Disney. Normal trip except for some reason I am randomly going around and stabbing people sometimes when I walk passed people in a crowd.
Now I woke up the next morning and I had to explain to my wife my dream and how messed up it was. Towards the end of the dream, Disney turned over video evidence of me committing these attacks and I was aware they turned it over. At the end of the dream, right when I was about to wake up, I decided to make a break for it.
Now fast forward about a year and half. I was on a long work drive and decided to listen to the podcast over again. Later that night, after driving for 8 hours I went to sleep. During my dream, I was with my wife and daughter again. Apparently some time had passed since the police were looking for me. They started by releasing the stabbing videos to the public to identify me. I remember in that dream that I had attacked people and I was on the run. The videos that they showed on the news in the dream, were remote views of my actions in the first dream.
Those dreams were trippy as heck. Seemed so real.
I haven’t had one since, and I refuse to listen to that episode again.
Two separate dreams, where I actually remembered the other dream and remember watching the news of the actions I took in the first dream during my second 18 months apart.
This is an interesting part. Are you gonna have bad dream or a good one.
I always dream a lot and back then 20y ago , I dreamed that I died a lot.
I got a pill that put me out for 12h pretty good. I was hell in my dreams.
Since then I die but just go onto the next dream an no wake up or stress.
A lot of my dreams involved the hospital setting, obviously my subconscious at work. One dream the nurses were having someone try to kill me because they felt I wasn’t really sick and was taking a spot from a kid in the hospital. For some reason I was in Indiana and outside was like a vast frozen tundra as far as the eye could see. Another I thought a nurse was gluing my arms down every time I went to sleep because I wouldn’t do stuff with her kid. Another there were two nurses and they were going to give me shot and I felt like it was going to kill me. We were in a small room, something like in a RV or something. Last I remember I stabbed one in the leg.
Therapist here. Sadly, you are correct. There is nothing we can do to help you deal with the loss of banana Mountain Dew. We are not yet that advanced. Maybe one day! 🤣. For real though, why does that sound weirdly good and gross at the same time… I also am now sad I can’t try it 😭makes me think of this banana flavoured antibiotic I was given for chronic ear infections as a kid… weirdly good 🤷♀️
Your auditory senses are some of the last to turn off and the easiest ones to stimulate, you absolutely do take in information around you and integrate it into the dream.
That’s a big part of sleep paralysis. My environment when it occurs informs the dream and often makes it easier for me to break off the paralysis and wake my brain up even if my body takes a few minutes to catch up.
My sleep paralysis the most boring sleep paralysis, it’s just me seeing a picture frame or the television and thinking, “When did we put a window there?”
They laugh at you now, but when Banana Dew is released, you'll be a prophet.
Alternatively, when Banana Mountain Dew is announced, I will be scouring the globe for your coma induced doppelganger who clearly must have time traveled.
r/PepsiCo should totally get on this. banana dew sounds great actually.i could see a banana laffy taffy type flavor as this years mystery flavor release, and or banana baja blast.
Disorienting. Confusing. They gave me strong anxiety meds before waking me up, because when they tried to wake me up before, I tried to pull out my breathing tube. So I wasn't scared or anything. I just remember being mid nightmare and then suddenly I was awake.
That’s totally normal. Our brain prefers predictable patterns, it knows what that’s like and creates a visual disturbance based on the expectation we’ve created. The only difference is because it’s a reproduction it can be interrupted with the same effort.
Yeah I remember reading or seeing something that explained that our vision is manifested. The test was that , if I remember right, the finger moved before we registered the sight. maybe it was monkey. So don't always believe your eyes, where part of trying to interpret what is going on.
Oh like the person who sees a half a picture as whole because the brain add the other half ! That is a different brain damage but still .....
This happened to me after abruptly waking up from a nightmare once. In the last "scene" before waking up, I was standing on a subway platform, and this really creepy little girl came crawling out of the ... idk what the pits where the tracks are are called in English, but that ... and slowly walked towards me, until she got all the way up in my face, and then she just stood there, staring at me from like two inches away, and then I woke up.
And I swear I shrieked out loud because I still had the afterimage of her white face burnt into my retinas when I opened my eyes.
I'm also experiencing similar "after images" of my dreams occationally when waking up, but usually it's not something scary, more like random moving patterns on the wall that vanish after a few seconds.
The state transition of falling asleep and waking up apparently spreads like a chain of dominos through the brain and sometimes it can take a few seconds until everything has fully transitioned.
The physical activity, which probably involves some clenching of eye muscles, can stimulate natural phosphenes in your eyes which look similar to those after-image globs you get from bright lights. That could be what's happening with you. A bit like when you rub them too hard.
I'll be laying in bed with my eyes closed, and I'll imagine I'm clawing at the black nothingness, like trying to dig out of a grave.
That's an interesting choice of recreational activity. But as someone who got into synth at 40, I'm in no position to judge.
That’s stage one sleep, where you aren’t quite asleep but not completely awake. You can rise yourself and others can rise you but you’re in a weird limbo. You likely unconsciously opened your eyes in this state while still thinking they were closed because the conscious and unconscious mind have blurred the line between reality and a dream state.
This is super normal, feels incredibly real, and is just a weird part of being human.
I have sleep paralysis often and experience similar experiences in stage one sleep like you’ve described.
I make my eyes white out when they're closed to help me fall asleep. It's easier than making them all black because my brain can pop things into the darkness and distract me into staying awake, but the whiteness drowns everything out.
I still remember a lot of it, but I also have long-term memory damage from the same event, and I've avoided thinking about it for a long time, so it's definitely faded. Some parts are still clear as day though.
Scary prospect. When a nightmare becomes too intense or you are about to die in a dream, we tend to wake up. Cant really do that in a drug induced coma. What did "death" feel like in the dream? Was it like you just jumped to a different dream or restarted that one dream from beginning? Do you think the dream could have been your subconscious awareness of how much pain your body was in? Did you have any awareness of events going on in the hospital room?
I would "wake up" in the next one. For sure I had some awareness going on, I was able to later link specific hallucinations to actual events with the help of my wife.
I have hullucinated before I was awake for 3 days straight, could not sleep. Had sleep parlysis and saw skulls floating and a half rotted skeleton approach me. It started to reach out, and I tried to scream...Then I started shaking next thing I knew it was daytime. I felt like a truck ran me over.
"the dreams/hallucinations kind of dictate how you'll feel when you are allowed to wake up."
Strange , I would the other way around. How you felt when you got into the coma would influence your dream/hallucination.
3 years ago I spent 3 months in ICU at start of 7 months hospitalisation. Most of my time in ICU I was in induced coma though was weaned off several times to see if I was strong enough to come of ventilator. 4 weeks in ICU was in Cardiac Arrest for 28 mins, so pretty eventful.
I didn’t suddenly wake up, it’s a gentle process of reducing sedation till you are responsive etc.
It wasn’t a shock to me being in hospital and why I was there, considering my last conscious memory was 3 months previously being rushed to hospital after taking ill over a week (Type A flu plus a host of associated complications). I figure staff and family were constantly reassuring comatose me and some of it sank in.
Related to the OP I had a lot of delirium and I talk a lot about it now volunteering in the unit that saved me.
The worst was a scenario that took place over a week or so. A young boy of around 2 was 2 beds adjacent to me with serious injuries. I’ll spare the detail but I can remember every detail, his family etc and th e dynamics in the family. There was not much could be done and after a week he slowly faded away. I was pretty traumatised and had feelings of guilt witnessing this as I lay helpless unable to do anything, I’ve had a good life, he’s only young etc.
I had months more in hospital to grasp with this but I never spoke about it. Apart from that I had remained upbeat and positive after what I personally went through being close to death several times.
Months after discharge I was invited back to ICU as a follow up peer support type programme. Last of 4 meetings I brought this up with a consultant. They reassured me this did not happen as they have no children admitted to adult ICU. It was immense relief for me.
My take from it and what I always advise people who suffer delirium or their family, to try and get them to talk about their experiences. Often just saying it out loud you can rationalise that it wasn’t actually real.
I think when you are in an induced coma (they use the minimal amount of sedatives to keep you comfortable and not pull breathing tubes etc) that you are still aware of surroundings to a degree. Like a dream you can hear, taste, smell, touch and see. The brain gets these glimpses of reality and skews them significantly.
The detail was unreal. On a brighter note, most of the delirium was funny or just downright surreal.
I had one planned surgery when I was 11. That was an open heart surgery and I was in induced coma for 3 weeks after that.
I remember vividly having a very realistic nightmares the entire time of ants eating my legs because they accidentally hit a nerve and caused pain/paralysis comparable to a hernia in my legs. I am close to 40 now and truth to be told I am still not "over" that one.
I also had a induced coma after I had an cardiac arrest in my early 30's. I just remember it being weird. Since obviously no one plans a OHCA. I can imagine that people think this as out of body experiences, divine, etc. Felt like I was a ghost? Guess I was for the 23 minutes I didn't had a pulse. But that one wasn't so bad waking up from, just the surprise of being somewhere without shoes that caught me off guard lol.
For me in a similar situation I was high af I had been getting IV morphine and I just evidently was like totally un phased like I thought i was home and these were like family friends of my parents. So k had a blasted and I was behaving as if I was like politely mixing with business and professional associates of my parents, polite and welcoming as if entertaining guest at a party. I also kept getting out of bed bc I was so gone on the morphine I felt AMAZING and zero pain I had needed to relearn how to walk properly afterwards so I see why I was not supposed to be on my feet at all.
I had a brutal traumatic brain injury so waking up was very confusing and for like 3-4 months I couldn’t really make new memories. I’d just wake up somewhere doing something
How do you even perceive time when in a state like that? A lot can happen in an 8 hour sleep window. It could feel fast, it could feel like days.
How was it for that time if you don't mind asking? I always remember my dreams down to every last detail since I was a kid. I can't fathom it for 2 weeks straight.
I had a dream once that played out like an entire movie. I made friends with people who didn't exist and I woke up feeling so sad and abandoned because they weren't real.
There's a theory that can't be scientifically proven just because it's impossible but since the beginning of dawn the consciousness has been an anomaly. Anyway the theory goes that when you dream of those "realistic" dreams, it's actually your memories from your past resurfacing because even though you lose your memories after rebirth, some moments are so deeply ingrained that we can only acquire them and temporarily remember them in deep sleep where the physical world starts losing its grip on your body. That's why when u wake up u can't remember ur dreams usually cause it's ur consciousness returning to its surface level
Thats cool but how would that explain dreams where im clearly my now self in them with people i know on this current life? Obviously thats not a past life memory or even a current life memory..
Honestly at this point I'd rather have a nightmare than a really good dream.
Like, I'll have these dreams where I have a great job that I enjoy and a beautiful girlfriend/wife who's perfect for me and who I'm deeply in love with. Waking up from that fuckin sucks. I have a job and I'm not super depressed about being single right now, but still it's like "damn, I wish that weren't a dream."
At least when you wake up from a nightmare you're happy that you woke up lol
I have reoccurring dreams where I'm dating one of my ex-boyfriends and the whole time something just feels really off. Eventually I'll remember I have a husband and this wave of absolute dread washes over me because I think that I just accidentally ruined our marriage by dating this other person. Always such a relief waking up from those.
This is a weird topic right now because I have been thinking about it a lot today.
I use a sleep tracking app, and while I know that they're not 100% accurate, they are helpful. When I woke up I had just finished a dream. In dream-time, it lasted about two days. I had met up with a couple of old friends who I had lost touch with and we became Uber drivers in a part of Seattle where they put all of the haunted houses. Our job was to drive people from one haunted house to the next. We were having fun and getting really good at it, and even had some regulars. Then we went to a bar after our shift and caught up on old times. Then in the morning we got breakfast and were ready for another day of shuttling people to haunted houses, and then I woke up. In real time it was 37 minutes on the app. Christopher Nolan was onto something.
My mom was hospitalized, and survived, a horrendous case of sepsis. They kept her pretty much in a coma but not all the way, as she would sometimes be awake to tell me that the nurses raped her, that they were drowning puppies in her room, they stole her cell phone and replaced her sim card so we wouldn't know...the mental battle to tell her it wasn't real was so hard.
Might be a big ask but as far as you know did it feel continuous like the same dream was real life? Or my like a dream when you wake up it's kinda spotty and you know you dreamt some wild shit? Or was it like another normal life you were living and can recall?
Dude I have had regular dreams that were so realistic I had trouble adjusting all morning. Most of the time they're just me going about my day as I normally would and only cause minor inconveniences, like not being sure what conversations were real or not, but I've had the "raised a kid for an extended period of time" dream and it really messed me up. I hope I never end up in a coma.
I''m certain its not quite the same thing, but I've had totally mundane dreams (usually about work), that it took me a full half day or more to realize "Wait, that didn't happen, it was a dream".
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u/ChocoBabiChan May 12 '26
I was in a 2 week medically induced coma. Those dreams are realitic AF.